March, 25, 2004 archives

no one is happy who does not think himself so.

some notes on character encoding issues. this is the sort of stuff i plan on covering in my talk at the o’reilly open source conference, with a focus on the practical issues of dealing with it from php and mysql. (via simon willison.)

i have to say i was pretty disappointed by eastern standard tribe by cory doctorow (author’s website, including free electronic versions).

the story didn’t really seem to get moving until half way through the book, and ultimately the world he creates just isn’t as interesting as in his first novel, down and out in the magic kingdom.

i think another problem i had with the book is that i just didn’t find the central idea very well developed, or all that intriguing. and you might think i would, considering that i work with people in far-flung timezones, many of whom work schedules that are warped to sync up with non-local timezones. and i regularly use irc to coordinate and socialize with coworkers.

mark pilgrim’s article on determining the character encoding of a feed touches on more stuff related to my practical i18n talk.

here’s another essay on UTF from tim bray.

(don’t mind me, i’m just making sure i’ve marked some of these articles for future reference when i actually start to write said talk.)

how to be a programmer: a short, comprehensive, and personal summary looks like it has various bits of interesting and potentially useful information. (via simon willison.)

the definition of lingua franca in the glossary is misleading, though. the franca is not a reference to french. the original lingua franca was A mixture of Italian with Provençal, French, Spanish, Arabic, Greek, and Turkish, formerly spoken on the eastern Mediterranean coast.