News/Blog
UTF-8 Support
By Lord d'Eath at Sep 30, 2007
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:
UTF-8 in PHP and MySQL
By Lord d'Eath at Sep 22, 2007
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.
My Xbox 360 Died Again!
By Lord d'Eath at Aug 8, 2007
Update (2007/09/22):
I should probably update this to say that on the 30th August I received a refurbished Xbox 360 from Microsoft that not only works (no problems thus far, and I've had many a 5-hour gaming session on it), but it also considerably quieter than my last one. So it would seem that contrary to what I had read elsewhere, Microsoft are still sending refurbished units out instead of fixing and returning people's original console. For me, this was a good thing, but for others I can imagine it wouldn't be.
Well, here we go again.
More Spooky Occurrences
By Lord d'Eath at Feb 9, 2007
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.
Spooky Xbox Blog
By Lord d'Eath at Feb 4, 2007
I'm a little concerned that my Xbox 360's blog[1] says "he better not be playing with a Nintendo Wii" on the day after mine's delivered and, in fact, I had spent a good part of the day playing LoZ Twilight Princess. There is nowhere where 360voice.com could have obtained that data, it's just a coincidence. A very spooky coincidence, though.
