week 26, 2004 archives
well, that took longer than expected
mysql> alter table blogs type=innodb; Query OK, 2027382 rows affected (1 hour 32 min 41.49 sec) Records: 2027382 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0
i did catch an out-of-control blog notification bot that may have been chewing up memory and otherwise getting in the way for most of that period.
php’s dumb xml parsing behavior
steve minutillo, author of feed on feeds, runs headlong into the execrable character encoding behavior of php’s xml parsing functions. hey, i was complaining about that just last year... (via phil ringnalda.)
and a related link, this article from the w3c explains how to deal with encoding issues in forms and has a nice regex that verifies whether a string is valid utf-8.
here’s some links culled from an i18n discussion on the twiki site:
Now that I've looked a bit more, there are many algorithms out there for charset detection, but most are aimed at HTML page auto-detection, and may well not work well for URLs:
- Frank Tang's charset detection links - includes simple Perl UTF-8 detector based on legal codings
- Excellent paper on Mozilla's 3-part algorithm using coding legality, character frequencies and two-character frequencies - detects the language as well as the encoding. Too complex for use on URLs, but looks very good.
- Discussion on IRC auto-detection of charsets
- Simple UTF-8 detector in C
- CPAN:Unicode::Japanese - includes auto-detection for various Japanese charsets
- CPAN:Encode::Guess - auto-detection from suitably dissimilar charsets (needs Perl 5.8)
- Browser detection for forms input datatypes including useful undocumented JavaScript to check IE's current charset (try this out now if you are using IE - see Sandbox.TestCharset).
- TextCat, tool for language detection - in Perl, OpenSource
i really need to write the slides for my talk at oscon, which will cover exactly this sort of thing.
perspective
it popped into my head to check something recently. the number of blogs added to blo.gs, per day, since june 15:
+------------+-----------+ | added | new blogs | +------------+-----------+ | 2004-06-15 | 8118 | | 2004-06-16 | 8170 | | 2004-06-17 | 7362 | | 2004-06-18 | 2512 | | 2004-06-19 | 4299 | | 2004-06-20 | 7802 | | 2004-06-21 | 9264 | +------------+-----------+
i like the character used on the metro not-allowed signs. (i tried to post a similar image weeks ago, but my phone didn't like it. maybe it will take this time.)
they call it deflation
hotmail is increasing their mail quota to 250MB. it was nice of google to come along and shake up the webmail industry, which had apparently gotten quite complacent about how much disk space they offered. (as a side-note, i’ve received 771MB of email since march 12, excluding mailing lists.)
one of the great things about pair networks is that they have periodically increased the storage and bandwidth for each account level without increasing prices.
i’ve decided one way to cause problems for someone you didn’t like would be to publish their email address as a place to contact for free gmail invites. (i wonder how many requests for gmail invites just the mere mention of them will attract?)
black is the new silver
the wall street journal introduces sony’s new black projection screen technology. sounds like exactly the sort of thing i’d want for a projector-based home theater setup, although hanging a big black screen on the wall doesn’t have a whole lot of appeal. but if sony prices it at $500, as the article supposes, it will apply downward pressure on the not-quite-black screens. (via nelson minar.)
but it’s missing...
here’s the new york times list of “the 1,000 best movies ever made”. there’s a few surprises in there, and they left off any of the monty python films. my quick count is that i had seen about 150 of these. and although i’m sure the decalogue is great (the netflix discs are on top of my television), it’s not a movie. it is a miniseries produced for polish television. (via jason kottke.)
speaking of giant monkeys
american cinematheque will be showing baraka in 70MM at the egyptian theatre on july 8-11, 2004. it’s worth seeing on the big screen if you haven’t seen it before.
apachecon cfp
the apachecon 2004 call for participation is out. submission deadline is 23 july 2004, right before oscon. perhaps i’ll submit the follow-up to my oscon talk. (which would be talking about the i18n features of mysql 4.1 and php5, which i plan on only mentioning briefly in my oscon talk.)
decisions suck
attending home entertainment 2004 (the video industry trade show) would cost about $1000. ($500 for the show, $300 for the air and hotel, and $200 for incidentals, more or less.)
i’ve certainly spent similar amounts of money on more frivolous things but i’d still give the likelihood of me ever going through with this video store idea pretty long odds.
blogging-related business seeks stupid money
jeremy pointed out the spurt in investments of RSS-related companies lately (although i think blogging-related would be a better data set). if i can just convince some venture capital that opening a video store is part of the overall strategy for blo.gs, maybe i’ve solved the start-up capital problem.
a of m
age of miracles by john brunner is probably the weakest of his books i’ve read so far, which still puts in the category of pretty good. it starts slowly, but the idea of an indifferent alien presence appearing on earth and causing chaos is strong enough for a good story to gel.
lamb: the gospel according to biff, christ’s childhood pal by christopher moore is a modern-day apocrypha: a (very) humorous story about the life of christ from the point-of-view of biff, his best friend. it’s a new gospel, through the lens of a coming-of-age road-trip buddy story. (and with a hearty disclaimer that it’s just a story. make of it what you will.)
