Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - Posts
Taken out today: Going on Vacation
# of referenced posts by category: Blogging: 1; Development: 3;
Other: 5; SQL: 3; WILY: 0
Line of the day: I propose that we push to have Microsoft
rethink their IDE stance and start to make all features equal throughout visual
studio, or at least between the major supported
languages (C#/VB).
Post of the day:
It's time to come together
Somebody who goes to work for Microsoft took the Red Pill.
Somebody who goes to work for Magenic took the Purple Pill.
But what do you call it when somebody starts a new blog on FoodBloggers.com? How about Bitting the Yellow Pepper perchance?
Either way, that's precisely what I did today. I've got something way-way-off topic for SQLJunkies, but likely just perfect for them.
The "Enjoy Every Beer" feed starts here, and the FoodBloggers main feed is here.
Don't worry, though, my non-food and drink Geeky Stuff, including Take Outs, are staying here.
Jeff Clites posted a rather interesting read about strings this morning on the Perl6-Internals mailing list. Why do I bring this up here? Mostly because Jeff's work is both interesting and well written. Partially because the topic is technically interesting. And don't worry, there isn't any Perl in it. I'd call this recommended reading for anybody who is new to I18N issues. It should help when explaining to folks the differences between CHAR and NCHAR types. A quick out take:
The reason there are so many of them is that, in the early days of computing, most everyone got it into their heads that they needed to represent textual data using only one byte per character, which meant that an encoding could only handle 256 different characters. This was fine for English (and in fact ASCII only encodes 128 characters), but as soon as you hit Europe you needed more characters--for French and German and Greek and Icelandic and Polish and Turkish and so on. You need more than 256 characters to handle all of that, so different encodings where invented to handle different collections of characters.
This doesn't sound so bad, and it's fine as long as everyone just talks to the guy next door, but it quickly turns into a mess if you try to step outside--you can't create a single text document with words from multiple languages (for some combinations), and (potentially worse) when you read in a file created by someone else, you need to know what encoding they used (that is, you need metadata, of the sort supplied by MIME and HTTP headers, but not supplied by most filesystems). This wasn't fun for anyone.
BTW, you can subscribe to the Perl6-Internal mailing lists, as well as many others, using RSS. How cool is that?!
I know the noise-to-signal ratio of my feed of late has been high (after, what on Earth does Iron Chef have to do with SQL and databases?), but what really stuns me is the rate of feedback on those posts. Normally, my average comments-per-post is just barely over one. The ICA posts are running in the fives and sixes, and some of the comments are darned near article length! And there are some really excellent posts too, like this one. The view counts are also sort of out of whack, averaging about 200 web and 170 so aggregator. The crazy thing is that the feed itself is the #6 hit on Google (for Iron Chef America).
But then, maybe I shouldn't be so surprised: Orkut has an Iron Chef community with over 400 members and a Good Eats community with nearly 800. I planted links to "five things" in both of them. That's a good way to get traffic guess, but it doesn't seem to work with the Technoratti. For example, I've posted a link to the "Ask Mahesh a question" post in lots of the Orkut .NET/SQL communities and have gotten one response. Either we don't have much to say or there's a different dynamic at work based on how folks feel about the subject. Likely both, though.
Maybe there is a value proposition here for Donny and Doug. Should they dial up the Food Network and see if they have an interest in banner adverting on SQLJunkies? But I'll put it to you, faithful friends...
Would you click-through?