Recently in Software and Unicode Category
Richard Ishida has a Web based Unicode look up tool at
http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/uniview/uniview.php
This is a search form which allows you to view data by name, hex value, actual pasted character or range.
There's another conversion utility at
http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/uniview/conversion.php
which allows you to convert characters from hex values to different variants such as decimal values, percent escapes (Web address) and UTF-8 vs. UTF-16.
The character paste feature is especially valuable for random symbols such as ∞ (infinity) or ɛ (Open e, epsilon vowel). You can finally extract a code point from a weird symbol used in your Word doc.
When I'm doing an initial test to see if a product is Unicode friendly or not, I typically switch to my IPA keyboard and see if it will accept and display phonetic character input. Why this test?
The first reason is that I actually know my phonetic symbols and can type something pretty quickly. They're also a fairly straightforward Western type alphabet so there are minimal font display issues.
The second is that while developers may program specific support for East Asian, Cyrillic or Middle Eastern languages, they rarely build in IPA phonetic symbol support (unless the product is targeted towards linguists). So, if the product can handle phonetics, it's a very good sign that generalized Unicode support has been implemented.
Does it mean every script is equally supported? Probably not. The gotchas are usually RTL languages like Arabic and Hebrew and the dead scripts like Gothic and Linear B. But if you have IPA support, you probably also have basic support for Czech, Welsh, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and maybe Armenian and Georgian. That does cover a lot of territory believe it or not.
The concept of time zones isn't exactly a Unicode issue, but it does relate to issues of globalization.
This blog entry from 4 Guys from Rolla explains the advantages of storing times/dates in UTC format vs. local time. The first one mentioned is that if your servers switch time zones, your data will still be the same.
Quick UTC Primer
UTC time zones are defined in terms of the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), from the 0° longitude line estabilshed at Great Britain's Royal Observatory, Greenwich.
If you live in London, then you live in the UTC or GMT. If you live Paris, which is one time zone to the east, then you live in UTC +1 (or one hour later than London). If you live in Philadelphia (Eastern Time Zone), then you live in UTC -5 (i.e. five hours behind London).
The idea of using UTC is to flatten time zones and place everyone in the GMT (London) time zone, but then add information about how many hours to add or subtract in order to convert to local time. If you have operations in multiple time zones, looking at the UTC time can help you determine the sequence of events much better than local time alone.
About Daylight Savings
Interestingly, even though most countries (except Japan) implements daylight savings in the summer, UTC does not. Right now (Aug, 2007) London is UTC +1 (1 hour ahead), but in the fall it will return to UTC 0.
For the Eastern Time zone inhabitants, the summer time zone is UTC -4, and will return to UTC -5 in November.
That means right now, my EDT time of 2:35 PM converts to 6:35 PM UTC (or 18:35 UTC in military time).
References
NASA - http://science.nasa.gov/Realtime/Rocket_Sci/clocks/time-gmt.htmlFederation of the Swiss Watch Industry - http://www.fhs.ch/en/worldclock.php
The good news is that Moveable Type renders text with the UTF-8 encoding by default. The bad news is that the fonts in the theme choices need some tweaking.
First, let me say I used the Movalog’s Movable Type Style Generator utility which is an excellent place to start
The default blog font these days is Trebuchet MS which is attractive, but doesn’t include my favorite Unicode characters (like phonetic symbols). Another choice in the Themes is “Lucida Grande” which does include the right characters...but only on the Mac.
So what I did was:
1) Within the Style Generator, I selected Lucida Grande as the font choice
2) I downloaded the .css file onto my desktop
3) Within the .css file, I made sure the styles (except the banner) were set to
font-family: ‘Lucida Grande’, ‘Arial Unicode MS’, sans-serif
This pushes Windows viewers into their Unicode font, Arial Unicode MS. If you want to be really fancy, you can add other fonts like TITUS Unicode, but that’s another experiment.
4) In my blog settings, I clicked “Templates” then the link for “Stylesheet”
5) I cut and pasted the CSS code.
6) I rebuilt the Moveable Type site and so far so good.
I’m just glad Movable Type is flexible enough to let me fix the fonts as I need.
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