Vampire Gathering Sets New Record For 125th Anniversary of Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Credit: English Heritage 

1,369 “vampires” have set a new world record to mark the 125th anniversary of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

The successful attempt, recognized by Guinness World Records, beat out the previous record of 1,039 in Doswell, Virginia set in 2011.

Appropriately enough, the crown now belongs to Whitby in the United Kingdom. It’s home to a 7th century abbey whose ruins are said to have inspired Stoker to write Dracula and are mentioned in the book.

The record attempt was the work of English Heritage, an organization that manages historic buildings including Whitby Abbey.

Participants had to be gathered in the same place for five minutes to count towards the total. Official adjudicator Jack Brookbank told the BBC they also had to comply to a strict dress code: “It must include black shoes, black trousers or dress, waistcoat, shirt, black cape or collared overcoat and fangs on the top set of teeth.”





Star Wars: ANDOR [Teaser Trailer]

The “Andor” series will explore a new perspective from the Star Wars galaxy, focusing on Cassian Andor’s journey to discover the difference he can make. The series brings forward the tale of the burgeoning rebellion against the Empire and how people and planets became involved. It’s an era filled with danger, deception and intrigue where Cassian will embark on the path that is destined to turn him into a rebel hero.

ANDOR will start streaming on Disney Plus on August 31, 2022.

[Star Wars]

Lotus 1-2-3 On Linux Is A Thing Now

“Running X on Y” and using spreadsheets are two common geek tropes, so congratulations to Tavis Ormandy who has combined both: running Lotus 1-2-3 on Linux.

You may recognise Ormandy’s name: he’s part of Google’s Project Zero, which hunts for security vulnerabilities, often in software from other companies.

He’s a big fan of Lotus 1-2-3, which was one of the most successful programs of the early IBM-PC era. Ormandy explains that while he still uses it for fun thanks to a custom driver, he couldn’t take advantage of its support for add-ins (ie plug-ins) without the compiler and software development kit for the language to write add-ins.

That led to a lengthy search for the SDK, which eventually tracked it down thanks to a tape backup of an old bulletin board system where (whisper it) some users may have shared files without the relevant permissions.

While that satisfied Ormandy’s initial curiosity, he discovered the same backup included a copy of the relatively unsuccessful UNIX edition of Lotus 1-2-3. That led to another lengthy exploration, the full details of which will be exciting to anyone turned on by sentences like:

All I have to do is rename those symbols with objcopy, then mark them undefined with coffsyrup. Now I can write a little wrapper that translates a Linux struct stat to a UNIX struct stat and it should work!

The upshot is that Ormandy eventually got the software running on Linux, despite the fact Linux didn’t actually exist when the software was created.