April, 26, 2004 archives

the los angeles times decided to write about fiesta broadway after the fact, and after spending a half-hour or so down there, i can understand why they didn’t pay it much attention. it really was little more than a bunch of tacky booths where they were handing out junk. (via l.a. observed.)

here’s another study that alleges some correlation between the prevalence of high-fructose corn syrup and type-2 diabetes. good thing we’re paying so much to giant companies to grow so much corn. it would be a shame for products containing corn syrup to actually reflect the real cost of corn. (via boing boing.)

the big con: the story of the confidence man by david maurer was a book that mark fraunfelder recommended over at mad professor. the book inspired the sting (which i have either never seen, or have not seen for a very long time), and is a fun non-fiction account of how the big con games operate (along with a few of the short con games).

i wonder if any of the big con games are still operated, or if the cons have simply come up with better ways of getting the same effect through legitimate corporations, churches, and government.

i’m a little undecided as to whether i really, really hate trying to track down problems with character encodings, or really enjoy it. there’s something about groveling through hex dumps trying to figure out which bytes are missing, incorrect, or shouldn’t be there in some EUC-JP encoded text, causing it to render funny little chinese characters instead of the correct funny little japanese characters.

i think it is a little surprising that there only two talks at the o’reilly open source conference that touch on internationalization and localization.

at least i’m getting some practical experience getting stuff like this to render correctly. or so i’m told. i may actually know what i’m talking about by the time i have to give the talk.

sam ruby has been writing various interesting things on this topic recently.

it’s a shame in particular that there’s no perl talk dealing with unicode issues. i’m still foggy what magic it is that perl does under the hood with regards to that.