A Day in Paradise

Americans are stupid

BERLIN (Reuters) – A naked American tourist raised eyebrows when he went for a walk through a German city and told police he thought this was acceptable behavior in Germany.

“We have been having unusually hot weather here lately but, all the same, we can’t have this,” a spokesman for police in the southern city of Nuremberg said Tuesday. “The man said he thought walking around naked was tolerated in Germany.”

Many Germans enjoy nude sunbathing which is allowed in public parks. The 41-year-old was carrying his clothes in a bag when police stopped him Monday evening after complaints from pedestrians.

The tourist was not under the influence of drugs, said police. They made him get dressed and pay a 200 euro ($269) deposit pending his investigation for indecent behavior.

ahhh, sweet stereotypes!

Here’s a Forum Post about IRC

Long before the days of the web and instant messaging as we knew it, there was IRC. Internet Relay Chat, was created in the late 80s but gained notoriety during the invasion of Kuwait and subsequent gulf war. Through IRC people who were lucky enough to have access to the then rare internet, were able to engage in real-time chat with others around the world. While the technology itself was not new or revolutionary the rapid growth quickly grew IRC into the standard for internet based chatting.

IRC works exactly like the many different independent “chat rooms” which you will find scattered amongst various websites. The difference is the fact that in IRC all the channels (chat rooms) are connected on servers, and servers are connected using specific networks. This way I can log into a server in my country and have access to all the channels on all the other servers on the network.

So what does this have to do with the podcast pickle chatroom? Well, the podcast pickle chatroom is simply a web based client which connects to the “Afternet” IRC network, so if you want to get connected and wield the full power of IRC, just follow the following steps.

1. Get an IRC client
Using IRC without a good IRC client is like surfing the web without a good web browser. Following is a list of good IRC clients for various platforms

Windows
xchat – http://www.silverex.info/news/
mIRC – http://mirc.com/

Linux/Unix
xchat – http://www.xchat.org
plenty of others

Mac
Colloquy – http://colloquy.info/

2. Join a Channel and Network
Before you connect to your network is to come up with a “nick” which you will be identified as. Choose something that is unique, by default IRC does not “reserve” nicks you want something that someone else isn’t interested in. You also want to think of an alternative nick which the system will use if the nick you want is not available.

I use “awormus” for my nick and “awormus_” for my alternative nick.

Once you have installed your client fire it up. You will be prompted to choose a server and enter your nicks and “real name”. Some IRC clients allow you to choose the default channel, use the following information to connect to the “phpc” IRC channel.

Server: irc.freenode.org
Channel: #phpc

I’m in, now what?
IRC has a whole sub-culture which has been built around it. There are commands, bots, moderated/invite-only channels, ops, kicks, k-lines and much, much more. Thankfully these days the modern graphical clients, provide an easy learning curve for beginners.

This are some notes from a talk I attended at the International PHP Conference in 2005. I don’t think I have blogged it yet. (you find all kinds of interesting things when you try to “clean up” your hdd)

Case study
Survey center is an online survey generator written in PHP. Used to run multi-country panel portals, has interfaces to third-party applications.

Why migrate to Unicode. Before the switch non Western European languages were using html entities which caused a lot of trouble.

UTF-8 is simple to use, backwards compatible with ascii, variable bytelength. Slower than UTF-16, can waste some space on single byte characters.

PCRE supports UTF-8 with the /u modifier

Iconv and mbstring provides functionality missing in PHP. Mbstring offers the possibility to overload some of PHPs native string functions. Overloading functions, will break any binary handling. Slower but safer than iconv. MySQL has good UTF-8 database support in 4.1 and that warranted an upgrade.

The Migration: Grepped through the code and find what string functions were being used. Some functions worked with UTF-8 others had to be replaced with mb_* functions or other custom scripts.

1.Convert all files, Scripts, Templates to UTF-8
2.Enabled mbstring and iconv in PHP
3.Make sure all PCRE functions use the /u modifer. Get rid of the ereg regular expressions.
4.Change all the string functions.
5.Implemented on-the-fly character set conversions for IO, make sure that file uploads/downloads have the right character sets. Convert GET/POST to UTF-8
6.Send the HTTP Content-Type headers for the page. IE doesn’t bother reading the meta tags on SSL pages.
7.Update MySQL from 4.0 to 4.1, decide what the best collation is, discovered the most suitible is utf8_general_ci.
8.Update SQL queries which no longer worked
9.Converted all tables to UTF-8 (Set everything to Latin1 first)

Most of the third-party code wasn’t compatible. Serialized data in the database broke because the strings were no longer the same length, to fix this all data had to be unserialized converted and then serialized again.

Everything was much more complex than expected. Don’t do this because you think that UTF-8 is cool, it’s difficult, not well supported in PHP, and don’t do it without needing it. Don’t do this without a CVS.

http://news.morningstar.com/index/indexReturn.html
http://village.albourne.com/places/data/
http://www.hedgeindex.com/hedgeindex/en/default.aspx?cy=USD
http://www.djhedgefundindexes.com/ (download available)
http://www.hedgefundresearch.com/index.php?fuse=indices
http://www.hedgefund.net/HFNRealtime/bench_index.aspx

S&P
http://www2.standardandpoors.com/portal/site/sp/en/us/page.topic/indices_500/2,3,2,2,0,0,0,0,0,5,12,0,0,0,0,0.html

DJIA
http://www.djindexes.com/mdsidx/index.cfm?event=showavgIndexData

Gotta see it to believe it: http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Classics-Week-Chocolate-Covered-SQL-.aspx

Tonight the frankfurt PHP User Group is celebrating their 5th anniversary! It was lots of fun knowing you all – I suddenly got a craving for Persian food – and I wish you many prosperous years.

Check out the website for meeting details. Wish I could be there.

Just hours before his execution by injection, a Tennessee death row prisoner who was convicted of killing a police officer ordered his final meal — pizza for a homeless person.

Philip Workman, 53, requested a vegetarian pizza be delivered to a homeless person in Nashville, Workman’s attorney confirmed.

Riverbend Maximum Security Institution refused, said Riverbend spokeswoman Dorinda Carter.

“We can get some special things for the inmate but the taxpayers don’t really give us permission to donate to charity,” Carter said.

According to the state’s protocol, a last meal’s cost cannot exceed $20.

Source

They pay around 2 – 24 million dollars for each death sentence, but can’t afford a $20 pizza to give to a homeless guy… Priceless!

This is so wrong that I have to blog about it… in this month’s Forbes magazine they have this description of Open Source in their “Network Breakthrough Innovations” section:

1991 Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds kicks off open-source movement, a sort of wiki of computer code, with a plea for contributions to Linux operating system.

That’s pretty funny…

This is the first bit

(more…)

I am finally back online on ALL my IM protocols, thanks to the newly branded pidgin client.

GAIM has always been a fantastic project, and I look forward to Pidgin following in its footsteps.

UPGRADE NOW!

Gotta get me a WRT54G then get DD-WRT running on it.

It’s been a crazy month, and like all crazy months it’s easy to lose your groove. Especially when you’ve moved continents. Especially when you’ve moved from working at home, to working at a job a real job (”real” defined as a job where you’re required to come to work everyday and dress in more than your underwear).

We’re getting to the point where we are finally finding our groove over here. Somehow getting or interweb turned on was a big part of that. Getting the kids into school is the next big project.

Thanks for all your patience, for continuing to visit the blog (even though there have been no updates), and for the $28.43 I made in adsense in the 30 days in which I didn’t post anything (I should not post more often).

I know Cal has noticed, but one thing I am doing is twittering up a storm… thanks to my new blackberry. So if you are REALLY interested in what I am doing then feel free to stalk me there. You can also see what I am doing on twitter in the upper left side of the second column in this blog. Like always I am posting my pictures to flickr.

I am doing my best to ensure that my new groove includes posting the same amount of worthless drivel, which you my faithful audience, have grown to love over the last 4 years.