Nerd Life

Yesterday, I came accross this interesting table which lets me know what conversions I need to do when I paste text from Word into a textarea and further want to use this text on the web...

To be accurate, this table is useful for conversion from the default windows charset (windows-1252 aka CP1252) to the default web charset (ISO-8859-1 aka Latin-1). Nethertheless, this allowed me to check the conversion in my b2evolution software and I noticed that it was missing one conversion (in a total of 27).

Anyway, the world actually extends way beyond cp1252 and Latin-1, so how would one deal with other languages? :?:

For example, how do I convert Latvian from Windows-1257 to iso-8859-13 (close match) ? Or Russian from Koi8-r to iso-8859-5 (funky match) ? Check out this awesome character set database provided by the Institute of the Estonian Language. (Wouldn't it make sense if unicode.org provided this? :crazy:)

By the way, how do I know what charsets are to be used for a particular language? Here's a page by the W3C, but it's a little sparse... Another one.

Today I thought it was time for me to catch up on Atom and add support for this format to b2evolution.

Okay, done. Here's my Atom 0.3 feed. And it validates too.

But I had to leave out a link to comments as well as my categorization! There's no support for these in the spec yet. What a shame! :no:

And finally, the biggest frustration: checked out my feed in the popular SharpReader aggregator... and it turns out it doesn't support "multipart/alternative" content. Bleh! >:XX So I had to leave that out too...

So at least, we have b2evolution supporting Atom in croncrete terms now... but if you ask me, RSS 2.0 is still the most useful syndication format! :roll:

Is it me or doesn't Windows even include any form of a grep tool? Not even a full grep, but just search and replace of litteral string in files? Not even in recursive, nor in multiple files, just in one damn file? Something I can automate from the command line? Doesn't look so!
Microsoft actually has such a tool. It's called MUNGE. You want it? Buy the resource kit! >:XX Morons!

Then you go google for it... and you find half a dozen beta projects that call themselves things like 'grep for windows' or 'windows grep' or 'wingrep' or whatever name they are smart enough to come up with, but none of them actually runs from the command line! >:XX Morons!

I found one, exactly one tool that does what I need (and also a lot more) and that is immediately available (unzip the EXE and you're ready B) ). I want to share it with you: it's called XchangeCL.

And you know the irony: they don't even call that "grep" in any way! :|

Actually, it's too late right now to search for alternatives, but this one is a $25 shareware... :-/

From htmldog.com:

Q: Why did the XHTML actress turn down an Oscar?
A: Because she refused to be involved in the presentation.


Q: Why was the font tag an orphan?

A: Because it didn't have a font-family.


Q: Why do CSS designers have too many children?
A: Because they employ lots of child selectors.


Q: Why was IE5's 3-metre wide cell in the insane asylum smaller than IE6's 3-metre wide cell?

A: Because the width of the cell included the padding.


Q: Why was the XHTML bird an invalid?

A: Because it wasn't nested properly.

XML-RPC is a spec and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet.

It's remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned.