A while back I heard a report on the radio suggesting that Irish companies employ as many in the USA as American companies do here, can anyone tell me if that is true?
Not sure what exactly qualified as an Irish company or American company in the report…
Looks like I was right about the lack of OPML import/export in iTunes.
Dave says it best, a Roach Motel. WHEN you are fixing it Apple, how about adding support for username/password protected RSS feeds? Its a low hanging fruit, pick it.
The story is a little old, but pretty interesting all the same. McDonalds are cosidering “outsourcing” their drive-thru operators, so the person you give your order to may be in a different state or even a different country. Apparently a trial has boosted order accuracy.
The full article is here.. The USA Today Article
iTunes 4.9 has been released with the much talked about Podcasting additions. But as I look at it I can’t find someway of importing (or exporting…) my OPML file. Have I just missed it somewhere or is this a bad oversight ?
A couple of months ago a guy arrived at my door, selling BT. You can change over to BT just for your calls and it will be cheaper than Eircom he told me. No charges. etc. Being no fan of Eircom I though; why not? So I would pay rental to Eircom and call charges to BT. Fine.
Now I don’t use my land line much, in fact all I want is broadband. So this week I get a bill.
Call charges : 45 cent. Cool.
Talk Balance Charge : €11.88 . WTF?
Now I checked the details of my Terms and Conditions and in section 3 there is something about a minimum charge, but the guy at the door told there was no fixed charges, and well, I didn’t read the T&Cs . Stupid.
So thats the end of BT in my house. Smart telecom here I come.
Bring on country wide community WIFI-MAX, WIFI Mobiles and VoIP and get rid of these assholes.
Check out this Comic Blog, lots of techie and blogosphere / podosphere amusment.
Take an Ubuntu LiveCD, package it with screencast tutorials of an OpenECDL course and give it out free in schools.
A useful, educational piece of software that anyone can use for free.
And instant karma for FLOSS.
Links :
ECDL website http://www.ecdl.com/
I came across a mail on a ColdFusion forum by Brett Suwyn:
I am trying to read the contents of a file and then output it verbatim.
The problem is that if I use cffile to read the file into a variable and
then output it (or readBinary into a variable and then ToString to output
it), I have to specify an encoding. But I don’t necessarily know the
encoding (and if I specify the wrong one, the file contents are altered on
output) so I just want to output it exactly as it came in.
I thought this was an interesting question because Character encodings are something I haven’t a DEEP understanding of. Here was an excuse to find out more!
Usually when I want to have a deep understanding of a subject I start with first principles.
So what is character encoding? There are several good resources on the web, but I found
Jukka “Yucca” Korpela’s site (http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars.html) on the issue to be very comprehensive, with many links for further explaination.
So basically the only why to determine the correct encoding of a file is if the original program that created the file specifies it in the contents of the file (in Ms Word for example or in the encoding attribute of a XML file)
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>An example of encoding specifed in XML
or if the information is passed along with the file when it was recieved, with a charset specified in an email for example.
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
An example of encoding specifed in Mime Header in an email
So back to Brett. In his email he didn’t specify the origin of the files that he was including. But since he is talking about a ColdFusion application I’m going to make an assumation. The files are uploaded via the browser.
RFC 1867 is the RFC that deals with Form-based File Upload in HTML
(http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1867.html)
Section 3.3 deals with encoding
The value supplied for a part may need to be
encoded and the “content-transfer-encoding” header supplied if the
value does not conform to the default encoding.
The default encoding here refers to 7BIT encoding.
Of course rfc’s are not alway conformed to, so some testing will needed to be done.
A note on the Byte Order Mark:
One other piece of information I came across in the field of Encoding determination, was the Byte-Order-Mark. Basically the Byte-Order-Mark may be used to indicate the encoding of unlabeled text in many Unicode encodings. However it is of limited use to determine encoding, in general, as the program creating the file must insert it. If there is a BOM however you know the file is unicode and you also can tell the Endianness of the text.
The Irish Linux User group have launched a wiki to help promote Free Software in Schools.
Read all about scoil.linux.ie here.