October, 12, 2003 archives

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.)

my current thinking is to ditch some of my current furniture when moving (or more precisely, donate it to a thrift store or something like that). a breakdown:

• office chair: i’m thinking of getting an aeron or mirra.
• couch: i need a good, solid, comfy couch.
• loveseat: i might replace this with some sort of recliner.
• kitchen table and chairs: a keeper. maybe i’ll even start using it.
• bed: a keeper (although i need new bedding).
• desk: a keeper.
• entertainment unit: a keeper, although i may stain it.
• coffee table and end table: undecided. i may move it and toss it if i find something better.
• chest of drawers: also undecided, but probably not a keeper.
• filing cabinets: keepers.

there’s a bunch of other stuff i plan to get rid of, too: books, old clothes, some kitchen stuff, old computer junk, etc. there’s some things i’ll end up moving that i should really unload, but don’t have time to deal with unloading right now.

of course, this all hinges on having someplace to move into. i’m close to having that solved.

a slight tangent. there appears to be two groups of people in the world: those that put their couch and television in close proximity (often in some sort of alcove), and those who put the couch and television on opposite walls.