October, 11, 2003 archives

it’s great when local news can find a local hook for a national story. from a television station in stamford: rush limbaugh reportedly addicted to drug manufactured in stamford. (noticed on google news.)

i finally booked my travel and hotel plans for php{con west 2003. it will be a short trip: flying in on wednesday (missing the morning tutorials and the code sprint), and then back home on friday evening. (if my plans come together, i might start moving on the sunday after the conference.)

i won’t miss the closing keynote by thies and sterling about php & parrot, which should be interesting.

booking my hotel room via the web was cheaper than the advertised conference rates ($119/night instead of $129/night).

today i need to finish updating my talk for the conference, and turn it into the handout that is required for apachecon. (which was due on friday.)

i had planned on doing a more extensive overhaul of the talk for this round of conferences, but the clock ran out. there’s still the small matter of the new talk i have to write for the international php conference 2003.

why do i keep signing up for these things?

i need a way to detect when a string has been double-encoded into utf-8. that is, a string of utf-8 bytes that was basically treated to an iso-8859-1 to utf-8 conversion.

this will help blo.gs deal with the encoding bugs in blogger.com's changes feed. (which, unfortunately, is not consistently broken: sometimes the encoding is right, sometimes the encoding is wrong. at least, i think sometimes the encoding is right, although i can’t find any examples right now.

what would be even better, of course, would be for blogger to fix the bug. i reported it, and got a we know, we hope to resolve the problem soon response.

looks like they could take a lesson from joel spolsky's mini-tutorial on unicode. (i’ll admit to being surprised that blogger gets it wrong: i was under the impression that they used java, which i believe has pretty solid unicode support.)