Sam Ruby: PHP and Unicode. I haven't had a problem, and my site's in PHP and does Unicode (example). Everything's stored everywhere as UTF-8 (The One True Unicode Encoding).
Personally, I kind of like knowing that my data are just bags of bytes, as PHP strings currently are. PHP has extensions to do any Unicode heavy-lifting, like doing character set or encoding conversions, so I'm not really lacking there. One thing I really should be doing is sanitizing all my input to protect myself from non-UTF-8 data, but that's not a PHP-specific thing. If I get non-UTF-8 data in Python, the code will throw an exception and I have to handle that, but it's harder because Python doesn't let you break the string abstraction and get at the bytes easily (at least, not that I know how to). PHP will just carry on and I can do something to fix the problem wherever (so long as I check for it).
After the successful disasters of the current round of social software, people are realizing that the social interface is an equally important consideration to the user interface.
Clay Shirky has a piece I have to finish reading: Many-to-Many: The Seven Two Pieces Social Software Must Have, and Joel Spolsky has an excellent essay explaining why for social software, It's Not Just Usability.
One interesting thread seems to be that what works in social software is often unexpected. For instance, given the definition of a wiki, no one would think it would actually work. But it does -- spectacularly.
There was an essay a while back where someone pointed out that the current generation of social software creates awkward social situations that don't even exist in real life. If anyone remembers what I'm referring to and can point me to it I'd appreciate it.
HUNDREDPERCENTER NEWSWIRES: President of Poland Calls Kerry 'Immoral'. I'd seen that post earlier in the day and was skeptical. I don't remember where I originally came across it, though Allah might have been the place. In any case, Allah links to a translation of the original Polish that seems genuine. And it's a great read:
“I’m sorry that a senator with a 20-year experience doesn’t appreciate Polish sacrifice.” – so commented president Aleksander Kwasniewski the part of the televised debate between George Bush and John Kerry, during which the Democratic candidate didn’t notice the presence of Poland in the coalition fighting with terrorism.
“I don’t think it was ignorance – underlined president in Facts TVN. – One thing should be said clearly: this coalition is not just The United States, Great Britain, and Australia, but also participation of troops from Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Spain, who have died. It’s immoral not to notice this engagement, which we undertook convinced that we must fight together with terrorism and that we must show international solidarity, and that Saddam Hussein presented a danger for the world.”
“President Bush acted like a true Texan gentleman – fighting to acknowledge (appreciate) the involvement of other countries in the coalition” – underlined Kwasniewski.
“By attacking President Bush, John Kerry underlines that his efforts in building the coalition in the war against terrorism are limited and forgets that next to the American troops in Iraq are the British, the Australians, Poles, and also around 30 other countries that sent troops for stabilizing purposes so it is surely very broad coalition” – said the premier.
Monday, October 4, 2004
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