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Let me tell you. Learning Chinese is damned hard. The character set, the tones, the pinyin phonetic alphabet (which uses latin characters but the characters rarely correlate to English pronunciation), the grammar… In comparison, learning German was a snap. And German is no snap. I can babble like an idiot in German but I’m understood. I’ve found Germans, Austrians and the Swiss quite accomodating of my linquistic struggles. Perhaps its because they already speak English and can decipher my grammatical gymnastics, translate my mangled vowels, forgive my nouns’ gender jumping. Perhaps English is a piece of common ground. ...

I’m reading the news of Apple pulling out of MacWorld with a touch of sadness. MacWorld Boston is long dead. It was only a matter of time before MacWorld San Francisco ended, too. It makes sense to me. Consider the history of COMDEX. In it’s heyday, COMDEX rocked. There was excitement, drama, confusion. I attended my first COMDEX in 1991, my last in 2003. Fall COMDEX reigned supreme but I also have fond memories of Spring COMDEX in Atlanta. (Never made the Chicago show). ...

My Tuesday dancecard is filling up. The first mandarin course has ended and I’m now registered in the next chapter of Mandarin. Beginning Chinese II “This course is the second of a three-quarter sequence of beginning Mandarin Chinese. It is designed for students with little knowledge of Chinese. With an emphasis on conversation, the course will focus on the acquisition of basic communication skills for travel, business, and everyday use.” ...

Just about the time I believe the UTF-8 beast is in the cage, it escapes and runs amok. This AM, I started to deploy an update to the webapp on EC2. Seems that some of the static strings in the app contained UTF-8 encoded non-ascii characters. The java compiler barfed. “The heck?”, I thought. I just compiled the app on my MacBook. I checked the usual suspects (tomcat’s server.xml, JAVA_OPTS) but everything looked fine. However, when I looked at the code, it was indeed mangled. ...

I wanted to complement my bash directory crawler post with a bash array crawler example. Sometimes, it’s easier to jack a list of identifying tokens into an array and process them rather than to build an end-to-end script with database access. For this contrived example, I grab a list of UUID from MySQL with a simple SQL statement. mysql> SELECT id, uuid FROM icons; +-----+--------------------------------------+ | id | uuid | +-----+--------------------------------------+ | 1 | fe0b16ed-3369-4dda-8e60-faffb966375d | | 3 | 82bfcbc2-84a2-4ca7-914b-13172b94feb6 | | 6 | ab5e7265-3698-4205-b081-e6aec528fee2 | | 11 | 4b6ca26b-c6ed-494f-aeb4-9bf369e2d465 | | 19 | e7cc807b-7f15-46fa-b1c5-85d1f1050155 | +-----+--------------------------------------+ 5 rows in set (0.00 sec) Next, jack the tokens into an array and simply crawl over the tokens. ...

Once again, it’s the holidays; I’m not feeling very cheery.

I use Apache httpd + mod_jk with tomcat and connect to port 8009. Be sure to tell the tomcat connection that you are using UTF-8. # vi /usr/local/tomcat/conf/server.xml <Connector port="8009" URIEncoding="UTF-8" enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" protocol="AJP/1.3" /> Add two parameters to the list of JAVA_OPTS (at least for tomcat) -Djavax.servlet.request.encoding=UTF-8 -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8"

When I moved to wordpress, I purposely picked a theme with paged listings. Of course, I also started with the latest v. 2.7 release. (Actually 2.7 rc2, then an upgrade). The paged navigation at the bottom of the content section did not work. I tried to install the wp-pagenavi plugin but wordpress complained that the anjing theme had already defined wp_pagenavi(). I’m new to wordpress (and don’t know PHP well) but I do know how to comment out code. ...

Character codes and encoding In the beginning, there was ASCII. (There were others, but we begin here with ASCII). 7-bit ASCII in an 8-bit package. Using only the first seven bits of a byte, standard ASCII could not deal with diacritical marks (accents and funny dots in the vulgar vernacular). Therefore, the German word for later, später, would sometimes be transliterated into spaeter. I suspect this started in the days before computers when typewriters had only so many keys. You had to make do. ...

I’ve been building systems lately on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). At first, I was only interested in Amazon’s Simple Storage Solution (S3) after seeing the SmugMug slide show. I hadn’t really considered using EC2 since we had more servers in colocation than I really needed. But I had a file storage problem. When you have a thousand files, you stick them in a directory. When you have a million files, you cannot simply stick them in a single directory. You distribute them across multiple directories. What a PITA. ...