October 31, 2025
A couple of my coding toys go back quite a way, even if they weren't publicly accessible. I'm pretty sure the stardates page goes back to something like 2006. It was just hidden in the site's admin area where only I could see it, because I never bothered making it look like anything. Just a bunch of black text on a white page.
And since some of the toys are so old, they were written in PHP and require a new page load to refresh themselves. In addition to the stardates, the Martian calendar is also an ancient PHP monstrosity from the same era. The site search is also PHP but that one makes a bit more sense. I'd have to use JSON to write that client-side, and JSON is kind of a pain in PHP.
Everything else, thankfully, was done later on and is already in Javascript. The Egyptian fractions, "Byzantine Era" calendar, mini-calendars, Y2k38 page and Swatch Beats pages started life in JS. Which is the way I want all of them (except search) to be.
So I made a JS conversion of the stardates earlier in the month. I even made an update to the JS code that I'd been kicking around for a while: Originally I picked the actual length of a sidereal year (I think that's what it was) which meant that it would go every-so-slightly out of sync with the real calendar over time. When I did the conversion I changed it so 1000 stardates would be equal to 365.2425 days, which is the average length of the year in the Gregorian calendar. It still doesn't (can't) sync perfectly with calendar years over any length of time less that four centuries, and it'll wander a bit since the Gregorian calendar isn't perfectly accurate either, but I'll be dust long before that's a problem.
Which left the Martian calendar. It wasn't too difficult, just tedious. The only way I could originally find to make it work properly was to start from zero and just count up until I hit the date I want. Not great, but running a few thousand iterations of a loop was a Moore's Law problem, and we're well past the point of it being an issue. So once I had the time I sat down and banged it out, now it's pure JS on the toys.
It's just be a matter of time before something else strikes my fancy. Maybe some of the original things I wrote as proofs of concept back in the Brady days will be up for a conversion... I wrote a bug tracker inspired by Bugzilla back in the day and it's been collecting dust for almost a quarter century now. I know for a fact that the SQL in there is terrible, I can't imagine the classic ASP code is much better.
In a similar vein, I made a digital version of the project board, which was a wall-sized board hanging in the break room. Nowadays we'd call it a Kanban board. Same basic idea, just twenty years before I ever heard of Jira.
Like I said... maybe. It's kinda hard to convince myself to rewrite quarter-century-old code in the best of times, and it's not like I'm ever going to look at a bug tracker just to watch time tick away like I do with the 2038 page. But we'll see. Maybe one of these days I'll get really bored.
