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Friday, February 24, 2006

utf-8 is encoding for unicode standard

just put a pot full of cold water on my head & you will soon get a boiling pot of water, for tea or for ramen.

UCS, unicode, ISO 10646, RFC 3629, CJK, Jamo, Plane, encoding, decoding, ..., too many vocabularies and too many acronyms.

After reading about 10 dozen different articles over past 2 weeks, re-reading some, I think I finally understand how ISO 10646 and Unicode differs, and what utf-8 and UCS encodings/decodings are.
Phew~~~

unicode and ISO 10646 are standards. like brits and australians and japanese have driving standard to be on opposite side of US whereas many other countries have standard of driving on the same side as US. and utf-8, UCS are encoding methods/rules to implement unicode and ISO 10646 respectively.
Thus utf-8 and UCS would be vehicles with steering wheels and drivers' seat configured to comply with driving standard.

So far so good.

Next, numbers of possible local encoding/decodings different countries came up with, and possibilities of conjugations in encodings of certain characters are overwhelming. utf-8 seem to be good enough in many cases in current use, but there's utf-16 and utf-16wl, utf-32, utf-32wl to support wide-characters, and extended set of all existing/possible languages on earth.
utf-8 is supposed to handle up to 2^16 (or was it 2^31?) combinations of characters in different language set.

no wonder computer hardware and memory had to evolve so fast. with old day computer hardware, we can't even implement half the language set.

we're not using unicode to fullest extent and yet, the required hardware would be pretty big as is.

it's good i can related hardware history with unicode history.

encoding/decoding details of unicode also look about as obscure as assembly codes, like 4th languages that are very easy for human read.

slowly, i'm making progress at understanding bits of utf-8 and its usage.

hmm.... maybe i'll change to frying pan from pot on my head, it's time to fry some eggs for breakfast.

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flickr uses ajax?

while adding descriptions and titles on my photos on flickr, it occured to me: is flickr using ajax? when i click on titles of two or three photos at once, modify only one of them, and click save, the edit section of other photos don't disappear. if it's a traditional form based application, the whole page should've been refreshed.

neat!

it's like newton's apple and columbus' discovery of america.

it's been there all along, I just didn't realize it.
now, i see! i'm no longer a blind.

ajax isn't future, it's present.
more reason for me to learn CSS and javascripts back from my old '97/'98 UI skills.

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Tuesday, February 21, 2006

JDBC, jay-di-bi-di-bi-dib

In addition to "Autobiograph of Santa Claus", which wasn't exactly to my taste, I've been re-reading old books I had on Java & XP tools, such as Ant and JUnit.

Installing & running JDK on Debian still remains tricky, but why not...

So I've been babbling JDBC stuffs, syntax and drivers and things like thin client and thick client, ..., in addition to my other idiosyncratic pharase of 'my brain is suffering from buffer overflow' or 'lets buy a big apartment building and put each units in linked list for search, and pop/push stack.'
Maybe I've been obsessing with these technical jargons a bit above my 286-processor capacity? Maybe...

So Ant from Apache project seem to be 'make' in XML format. And, JUnit seem to be bunch of assert wrapper for unit testing. Tada!
Advantage? Disadvantage? well, i'm sure there are plenty of both. Heh...

As I feel more and more stupid, I was babbling this JDBC and loading the driver, and syntax for connecting, creating statement, and parsing resultset, ..., to Niagara-crazy DaveM, and he goes "What? jay-di-bi-di-bi-dib what?" and I had to tell him JDBC is like Java to Database driver, and that he should've heard of ODBC the generic database driver for Oracle, ...
He still says "jay-di-bi-di-bi-dibb what?"

Hmm.... maybe I'm not so dumb as I had worried. If kernel hacker with a pride will have to learn JDBC from me, maybe I'm whole lotta smarter. Heh...

Disk space in my head definitely is running out, to push any more of jargons in my head. Better switch back to the comic strips.

I wonder if I'll get to use these Ant and JUnit and JDBC syntax I've been reading up any time soon. Or will soon forget like my Japanese or Chinese vocabularies.

Google

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

a strong shot of espresso

debates on whether green tea can replace coffee to chase away sleepyness...

someone uploaded rather a difficult medical terms to differentiate caffeine in coffee and in green tea.

opinion on this issue, listed on naver.com is divided, swinging widely both ways.

it's been about an hour since lunch, so instead of a foam-heavy latte, i tried espresso.

so strong, so bitter, ...

i think bitterness will keep me awake, if not caffeine

Google

Saturday, February 04, 2006

thornbird playing the piano

I was soooooo engrossed w/ linux.conf.au, and sooooo tired I didn't get a chance:
New Zealand is the background of the book 'Thornbird' that was made into TV movie.
The book's a bit dense in volume, but like other best sellers of the type, it's pretty much a page-turner.
The title is mysterious, and the background set in wild frontier of New Zealand sheep ranch, over three generations.
While looking at sheep on every big and small green hill, I did occassionally thought of the book and of the movie.
Darn, time goes too fast and my fingers hurt as is with too much typing, and that's my poor excuse at letting this vital info slip.

On the same note, it's also the background of movie 'The Piano' that won (I think) Holly Hunter the Oscar and introducing that cute little girl who's college-bound now. Her accent in that movie was pretty cute, and I do wonder if my assumption of the movie being set on New Zealand background then would the natives shown in the movie be Maorian? ^^ Not much of touring done, I'm glad I at least know natives of New Zealand are called Maorian.

Queenstown, the town that made NZ a famous tourist spot with "Lord of the Ring" series, is yet 4hrs drive away from Dunedin, thus I'm not at all familiar w/ preserved movie set.

Green hills, and sheep every where, it was a beautiful country.

Google

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

debugfs -- something to know

as usual, i've deleted important files. i've deleted penguin photos.
searching up yahoo and google, i've tried some tools for ext2 files, and i've seen some comercial software.

finally, i see an article w/ 'debugfs' to debug the file system: debugfs -w , then lsdel to list deleted files, then use stat...

unfortunately i get error w/ opening the device, my usb storage key, but it's pretty neat thing, the debugfs. i didn't know it before. should get to know it well...