Space Babies » tech

Twelve minutes of your time

joost — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:50:31 +0000

Please spend twelve minutes of your time and watch this video. It is a very important video to watch, certainly this decade, maybe further back than that. It explains a new proposed law in the US called SOPA and it explains very, very well why technology people and companies are opposed to this law.

Twelve minutes of your time

joost — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:50:12 +0000

Twelve minutes of your time

joost — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:50:03 +0000

Please spend twelve minutes of your time and watch this video. It is a very important video to watch, certainly one of the most significant videos of this decade, maybe further back than that. It explains a new proposed law in the US called SOPA and it explains very, very well why technology people and companies are opposed to this law.

Z@ppelin iPhone/iPad app

joost — Wed, 11 May 2011 08:05:32 +0000

Now online: the Z@ppelin iPhone/iPad app. I am involved in the back-end of this application, which in this case means most of the content. If you have children in the ages 2-6, try it out!

Smalltalk best practice patterns

joost — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 18:20:08 +0000

If you’re programming along, doing nicely, and all of a sudden your program gets balky, makes things hard for you, it’s talking. It’s telling you there is something important missing.

Yep. Great book (ht: dhh).

Radio 1 gadget

joost — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 23:58:27 +0000

For listening to (Dutch) public radio, you can now grab the gadget code here and use it in your Dashboard. (click the down arrow for Google/Hyves/HTML embed codes)

Fixing MySQL encoding issues with Ruby 1.9.2

joost — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 13:53:46 +0000

There have been tens, hundreds, thousands blogs posts related to Latin1/UTF8 encoding issues. So here is yet another, this time related to upgrading from Ruby 1.8.6 + mysql gem to Ruby 1.9.2 + mysql2 gem.Here’s the thing: ever since Rails 2.1 I was under the assumption that all strings in my app were UTF-8 throughout. Wrong. Depending on your database settings, HTML HEAD, database driver and Ruby version you might will have a mix of character sets. Jay!

A recent upgrade of www.zappelin.nl brought this to light:

utf-8 present in HTML HEAD;
generated Rails app with all utf-8 defaults present;
mysql database still had latin1 as default character set;
same for the table;
using the old mysql driver gem.

The above combination led to strings still being stored as latin1 in the database.

MySQL documentation mentions charset conversions using ALTER TABLE. These did not work — the offending characters remained in their original character set. In the MySQL console these were printed fine: for instance ë was visible in the correct places. However in the Ruby world this was displayed as Ã«. Wuh?

I briefly considered dropping down to unix and using iconv on the database dump.

Luckily I was just too lazy today. Turns out you can convert the offending column to BLOB first and then to the correct character set. This worked! So if you have this problem the query below might fix things.

ALTER TABLE tbl_name MODIFY col1 BLOB;

ALTER TABLE tbl_name MODIFY col1 VARCHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8;

However, it still needed a bit of magic with regards to the default charset on the table. My best combination was to first convert the entire table to use latin1 by default, then run the conversion, then set the default to utf8. However, this didn’t work always.

ALTER TABLE tbl_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET latin1;

Keep in mind to always use the mysql2 gem when running under Ruby 1.9.2. Anything else is rubbish since this will not know how to deal with UTF-8 and you app will break and you will cry.

My wish for 2011: a definitive end to character set issues plz. This really is no fun.

Geocities

joost — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 20:02:24 +0000

Most of geocities.com has been released as a torrent. All 900 GB of it. I can’t decide what intrigues me the most: that apparently I could put all of geocities on a spare harddisk or that some clown board member destroyed fifteen years of internet culture without even blinking.

I want

joost — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 20:43:08 +0000

an Urban Arrow. It will not only replace my second car, but also my first!

Office Mac 2011: incompetence nor malice

joost — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:20:19 +0000

I have played with Office for Mac 2011 lately and noticed one of my personal annoyances still present. I am talking about the Microsoft User Data folder inside ~/Documents.

This annoys the heck out of me because ~/Documents is for …. well Documents and not for Application Support. There’s ~/Library for that; MacBU use it damn it! But then I Googled a bit since this misfeature has been in Mac Office for so long. Turns out there’s actually a sane decision behind it:

Yes. We tried to move the db to somewhere in ~/Library, but Spotlight explicitly ignores everything under there except for ~/Library/Mail (hmmm, I wonder why…!?) and Spotlight support was a must-have feature. We’re working with Apple to get OS changes so that we can have Spotlight support for some location inside ~/Library be officially supported.

I get it and it makes sense to me now. Hope Apple can fix this pretty soon. There’s a boatload of Adobe crap in ~/Documents as well (although I have no hopes of them ever fixing their stuff).