Blog

No - this is not a political statment - although it could be construed as one… via rsz by mail

Mixing ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 characters on a webpage, encoding Umlauts 16-byte ISO representation and declaring them to be UTF-8 - no wonder, some pages with Umlauts look like shit, or make the rendering application throw exception (complaining about malformed UTF-8). Such is the joy of i18n development. And a joy, if the people doing the development have no real clue of what they are doing in the first place. So - with a swing of the clue-stick: Here’s a Unicode Table that contains the UTF-8 table, the ASCII, the HEX and a descriptive text. ...

The comments on this blog are turned off, due to various major problems with the comment script sending out spam. I’m not sure if my vintage MoveableType installation has a problem, but I want to play this safe. Also, I don’t have time for redoing all the layouts at the momen, so I have just renamed the mt-comments.cgi script and removed the executable bit. You’ll see 404’s if you click on Comments or if you try to post one. ...

You know that you should get some more sleep if you instead of working on the train during the commute, you read the last 60 mails on the RubyOnRails mailinglist you fall asleep doing so, and give up with the computer, closing more or less sleep for 40 minutes during the train ride wake up to the announcment of arriving at the destination train station falling asleep again, just 1 minute before arriving waking up while the new passengers arrive and take their seats But then, I was awake very quick and got out of the train in record time… ...

Everybody is doing the Ta-Da-List dance, and rightly so. Ta-Da lists is a nice, clean, simple and useful application. Kudos to David - but then what do you expect from the guy who gave us Rails. As a service to the public, I have created a list of things that I plan to blog about some time when I have time in the future.

I use Bloglines to read my daily dose of RSS. My work is spread around multiple places with multiple computers, and the thought of synchronizing 140+ feeds (what have I read, what haven’t I read) over those computers just doesn’t jive with me. And I’m not even sure, it this would work at all. Anyway: Bloglines has a nice feature, that tells you, how many people have subscribed to a particular feed. Of course, the ego-maniac in me has subscribed to my own feed (the Atom feed of course, me also being modern). There are 4 subscribers to that. Coupled with a lot of people coming here to search for ASCII porn (my number 1 Google search term), I thought that I had a relative small audience. Then today, I subscribed to my RSS2 feed also – and behold – there are 46 subscribers to that one. My regular readership just 10 folded, my ego got boosted to new heights. ...