i.justrealized

I’ve been reading about character encoding recently, in particular to the various unicode standards. I’ve been rather pissed off with setting up the wrong collation in MySQL, I just realized that at my other blog, I have posts that are in utf8_unicode_ci, latin1_general_ci and utf_general_ci. This is what you get when you migrate database blindly without knowing what is character set. I regret not reading enough. Now I set everything to utf8_general_ci.

Anyway, something about another encoding set - GB2312 - caught my attention.

Here’s a trivia, the older Chinese encoding GB2312 cannot write the former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji’s name. His name has often appeared as 朱熔基. Zhu disapproves of this and prefers the correct version, 朱镕基. (more…)

I just realized what does those short codes that Intel have mean. They have things like P9500, T9400 and SP9400. Never understood what they meant. These generally apply for the Montevina chip sets to arrive this May.

• QX: Mobile or desktop quad-core extreme performance (Over 40W)
• X: Mobile or desktop dual-core extreme performance (Over 40W)
• T: Mobile highly energy efficient (30-39W)
• P: Mobile power optimized energy efficient higher performance (20-29W)
• L: Mobile highly energy efficient (12-19W)
• U: Mobile ultra high energy efficient (Less or equal to 11.9W)
• SP: Mobile small package power optimized energy efficient higher performance (20-29W)
• SL: Mobile small package highly energy efficient (12-19W)
• SU: Mobile small package ultra high energy efficient (Lessor equal to 11.9W)

I think this is helpful for me for my September shopping trip - to buy a new notebook. (Source: DarkVision Hardware)

I’m probably going for the medium voltage Penryns maybe P9500. I’m looking forward to Centrino 2 (Montevina) coming this June too. I procrastinated for a year to buy a notebook, it’s about time…

Every time I need this, I start search all over the internet and I simply don’t remember what method to use in PHP. So I’ll post it here:

What this does is to change ‘0′ into ‘00′ or ‘2′ into ‘02′, but ‘30′ will still remain as ‘30′. It uses sprintf. I don’t know how you pronounce that it sounds like aspirin to me. The above places a zero in front of a single digit.

Just something not so related. You know the word ‘prepend’ is sort of invented by geeks? It first appear in LISP. In computing, append is typically assumed to be placing something at the end and prepend to be placing something in the beginning. But in English, the word ‘append’ doesn’t really suggest the position of where to add, it basically just means ‘to supplement’.

Django’s session id cookie used to be called ‘hotclub’ until people start deeming it too pornish.

Django: Now 10% less pornish

We’ve changed the default session cookie name. Instead of “hotclub”, it’s now “sessionid”. Intended as a reference to the Hot Club of France (one of Django Reinhardt’s bands), “hotclub” had been misinterpreted by some people as having some sort of porn-site meaning.

Oh, well. Wit and obscure references only go so far.

Source: Django weblog

And you can see from the changelog:

Of course, if you much prefer ‘hotclub’, you can change it back with the SESSION_COOKIE_NAME setting.

Pretty amusing I say.

Here are a list of 62 facts that you may or may not have known. Some facts are kinda outdated though, nevertheless it’s still an interesting list.

Things You Might Not Have Known

1. Money isn’t made out of paper. It’s made out of cotton.
2. The 57 on the Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of varieties of pickle the company once had.
3. A rat can last longer without water than a camel.
4. Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.
5. The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper.
6. The dot over the letter “i” is called a tittle.
7. A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.
8. Susan Lucci is the daughter of Phyllis Diller.
9. A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate.
10. A duck’s quack doesn’t echo. No one knows why. [Actually they do now.]
11. A 2 X 4 is really 1-1/2 by 3-1/2. [Honestly I don't get this.]
12. 40% of McDonald’s profits come from the sales of Happy Meals.
13. Every person has a unique eye & tongue print.
14. The “spot” on the 7-Up comes from its inventor who had red eyes. He was an albino.
15. 315 entries in Webster’s 1996 dictionary were misspelled. [That's why they had the 1997 version - to correct them!]

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I didn’t know it’s April Fools’ Day until…

Conversation at 1:45 AM

Wynn: not sleeping ar?
Wynn: tmr got class leh
KahWee: got what class leh
KahWee: got meh
Wynn: ya
Wynn: 9am
KahWee: oh… is it
KahWee: what class is that
Wynn: 108
KahWee: huh
KahWee: really ar
Wynn: april fool
Wynn:
KahWee:

108 is one of the modules I take at school. So fast and it’s April 1st already. Time really flies. April Fools’ a good day to check out the web. Companies like Google always have something prepared for you - typically making some bogus announcement. Some of the not-too-funny April Fools’ pranks include: (more…)