April, 27, 2004 archives

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.

marillion has hit the top 10 with their latest single in the UK, for the first time since the 80s. the register has the details. (i’m one of the folks who bought the album before it had been made. i haven’t really had time to sit down with it yet, though.)

justin mason has written up an explanation of how gmail handles threading. looks pretty tasty.

but reportedly they fall back to doing subject-matching in the absence of headers that allow proper threading.

the light of other days by arthur c. clarke and stephen baxter takes an idea that was a minor element of clarke’s childhood’s end and really explores the ramifications: what happens when you can open a window into any other point in space, and even into the past? it’s the death of secrets. religions collapse. governments crumble. people go into hiding, moving about under chameleon-like cloaks and within darkened spaces.

fun stuff, and a story well told.