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Saturday, March 13th, 2010
 At work, I've been involved in a project to support the full Unicode character set in a more-than-cursory way*, getting to understand wide characters and utf-8 much more fully than I ever did before; and finally I am thinking I want to encode READIN in utf-8. All this time it has been in ISO-8859-1, which works ok as long as I escape unsupported Unicode characters; but it seems like time to get with the program.
My question is, what's the easiest way to convert my data? A lot of posts have got characters like äöüæ... which are going to show up as garbage if I just change the encoding of the blog. I was thinking I would use mysqldump and use iconv to convert the data. But somehow the output from mysqldump is already encoded with utf8. Does this mean I can just rebuild the database from this output and I'll be good to go? I'm a little confused why mysqldump is not respecting the encoding in the database...
 Well, restoring from the output of mysql-dump does not have the desired effect; characters that were ISO-8859-1 in the original db, that were UTF-8 in the dump, are converted back to ISO-8859-1 in the restore. After further investigation, it seems like my original idea will work: although it looks to me like iconv is essentially double-encoding the characters that were transformed to utf-8 by mysqldump, when I load them back into mysql I get utf-8 characters. Not totally comfortable with this yet...
* (Previously our support for Unicode had consisted of walking through utf-8 strings looking for high-order characters we recognized, and flattening them to 7-bit ASCII.)
posted morning of March 13th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, November first, 2009
I kind of enjoy watching the Google referrals that float by on the right-hand side of the blog under "Where You Came From" -- idly tracking the number of searches that are likely for something that would appear on the page they accessed (ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram) versus words that seem no more related to what I've published here than they would to a page chosen at random from the web (+"dolly parton" +sneezed). Here are some popular queries over the last few months: - 13 views: q=what+do+hobbits+look+like
- 14 q=stroszek+soundtrack
- 16 q=movies+about+outcasts
- 17 q=museum+of+innocence
- 20 q=el+libro+talonario+translation
- 20 q=of+love+and+other+demons+analysis
- 22 q=codex+seraphinianus+download
- 31 q=the+hamlet+faulkner
- 33 q=readin
- 39 q=gordita+beach
posted evening of November first, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Hm, this is looking like a quiet time for the site. I'm not sure why exactly. But I think I will take a couple of days off.
posted morning of March 10th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, February 13th, 2009
I seem to have picked up several new readers in the last couple of weeks, bringing my total to the high single digits or low double digits. If you have recently started reading the site, and you don't mind if I know about it, please leave a comment on this post or at the Guestbook -- I'd love to know who I'm writing to. If you prefer to remain anonymous, no worries, disregard this post -- I understand that impulse as well.
 (A brief rundown of this blog's history, from last spring, in case that interests you. Kind of dull frankly.)
posted morning of February 13th, 2009: 2 responses
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
 Here is a nice idea from Jon Swift: time to add a couple of blogs I've been reading and liking but not linking to. (Swift says "link to some smaller blogs that you've been reading"; I take this to mean "smaller than your site", which would be just about impossible for me. So I'm going to publish links to a couple of sites I'm reading, irrespective of their size.)
Enjoy!
posted afternoon of January 31st, 2009: 2 responses
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Friday, January second, 2009
I've modified my RSS feed-builder to include (almost) the full text of posts, with HTML formatting (mostly) intact. I have been slow getting up to speed with RSS but this should make the site much more conveniently readable for those of you who access it that way. Readers should now show, for each post: all text, including all formatting tags; a link to comment on the post, and if there are any comments, a counter; links for any category tags associated with the post. Readers will not show any graphics or multimedia, and will not have the CSS formatting that's in the blog.
posted evening of January second, 2009: 3 responses
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Sunday, October 26th, 2008
Thanks to commenter RedRum for finding a bug in my comments code and telling me to fix it -- I put in a quick and easy, but hacky, fix; maybe will think about figuring out a more fully-featured solution.
posted evening of October 26th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, August 15th, 2008
 Sorry about the lack of updates recently... someday soon I will start thinking about posting blog entries! I am loving Ricardo Reis, I think I will finish it this weekend, not sure what I will read next.
I am nearly done fixing READIN to be compatible with HostMonster, still just a couple of things to do -- like I can't post "What's of Interest" items on the sidebar, or update the blogroll, at least not consistently.* Timeline for finishing this is Tuesday, when I will have some free time and Internet access.
We are going away for a long weekend, to a place without Internet or even much of a cellular network -- and yet it is nearby! in northern Bucks County, PA -- and spend a few days relaxing. See you Tuesday!
 * If I could do these things, I would have: Added A History of New York to the blogroll, under "Literati"; updated Matthew Yglesias' link to point to his new site; posted an "of Interest" item that today is the anniversary of the Beatles' Shea Stadium concert. Without arena rock, we would not have Kansas, Styx, REO Speedwagon! Also, I would add a link under "Comix" to Bad Gods, which I see is publishing again.
↻...done
posted morning of August 15th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
OK, the new machinery is now active. READIN is now hosted by HostMonster. Comments don't seem to work yet nor does the RSS feed; these too will come.
 OK, comments are working...
posted evening of August 13th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
 Outage this weekend can be laid at the door of my ISP. Now I'm thinking strongly about moving the site out of my house, onto Dreamhost or some such. Recommendations welcomed -- the things I need are MySql, PHP, and ssh access.
(Service is still kind of slow and/or occasionally nonexistent. A new ISP is in the offing, a new hosting service also: changing ISP's means no more fixed IP address for my house. But it ultimately makes way more sense to use a remote hosting service anyway.)
posted morning of August 12th, 2008: Respond
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