Lord d'Eath's Stuff

I recently purchased a new laptop - a Dell Studio 1735.  Its price tag of £1250 is high, but acceptable given the specification and options I added:

• 2.1GHz T8100 Core2Duo CPU
• 3GB RAM
• 320GB 5400 rpm hard disk
• ATI/AMD Radeon HD Mobility 3650 256MB
• 17" 1920x1200 LCD
• Windows Vista Ultimate
• 802.11n WiFi card
• Bluetooth
• Gigabit Ethernet
• DVD+/-RW drive
• Integrated webcam
• Backlit keyboard
• Fingerprint reader
• Multi-card reader (SD, MMC, MS, etc.)
• Logitech VX Nano mouse (wireless laser mouse with Logitech's "nano" receiver that barely protrudes from a USB port)
• 4-year warranty
• Also possesses an HDMI output

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After spending ages working with UTF-8 the other day, as I mentioned in my previous post, I've finally added UTF-8 support to this site.  Both comments and posts by me are now able to contain all kinds of crazy characters without resorting to complex HTML entities!

Examples:

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I spent the best part of today researching how to properly handle Unicode - specifically UTF-8 - with PHP and MySQL for Web applications.  Since this is something that has stumped me for a while, I decided to make this post about it.  This will be as much for my own benefit as anyone else's: hopefully I'll remember it for future use if I write about it, and I can always refer to this post at a later date if necessary.

A quick and very basic introduction to UTF-8: whereas the ASCII character encoding that we're all taught about first at school stores characters very simply with one byte per character, UTF-8 uses anything from one to six bytes to store each character, depending on how many bytes are actually needed to store it.  This means it can store many more characters than ASCII or any other one-byte-per-character encoding which are limited to a maximum of 256 "characters" (the first 32 ASCII codes are actually unprintable control codes, leaving a mere 224 values for actual characters), which is enough for English (mostly) but not enough for the vast majority of other languages which have accents and all kinds of fancy letters.  And that's before we get onto Japanese, Chinese, Korean and the like with thousands of characters each.  UTF-16 and UTF-32 also allow many more than 256 characters to be stored, but they take 16 bits and 32 bits, respectively, per character to store data, which is fair enough if you're using a lot of high-numbered characters, but a huge waste of storage space, bandwidth and/or memory if you're primarily using the basic ASCII characters which otherwise fit in a single byte each.  UTF-8 gets around this by storing the lower ASCII values (i.e. just 0-127 - the original ASCII standard, rather than any of the extended ASCII sets which filled in the remaining 128-255 range) in a single byte, and using the most significant bit to indicate if another byte is needed to store the character, allowing the number of bytes used by a character to grow if necessary, but only if it actually is necessary.  This also has the pleasant side-effect of keeping the majority of the English language characters in the same position as they are in ASCII: only the odd characters like £ are moved around.

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Well, here we go again.

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What the hell is this?  A CAD comic containing both a character whose name contains "lorddeath", but also a character named Andrew in the same panel.

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