Gavin Panella

BCEE is the Banque et Caisse d’Epargne de l’Etat, also know as the Spuerkees. It is one of the major banks in Luxembourg, and where my wife keeps some of her money, including the money that we made back from the sale of our apartment in Luxembourg in 2007. We’re renting at the moment, so it’s been sitting there, accruing interest, waiting for the moment to strike…

Which was Monday.

Read the rest of this entry »

Take a look at the Encoding section in the Twitter API docs:

The Twitter API supports UTF-8 encoding. Please note that angle brackets (”<” and “>”) are entity-encoded to prevent Cross-Site Scripting attacks for web-embedded consumers of JSON API output. The resulting encoded entities do count towards the 140 character limit.

Does anyone notice the weirdness there? Apart from the MAGIC_QUOTES smell.

If I were feeling pathological, I could tweet a message of 140 characters all between the Unicode code-points U+010000-U+10FFFF. I think that would end up as 560 bytes. And I think that would be all fine with Twitter. Which is another way of saying that Twitter would, I assume, be happy to exceed 140 bytes for a message if it were written in, say, Japanese.

By contrast, while on my pathological holiday from good sense, I would only be able to tweet a message of 35 angle brackets – hence 140 characters, 140 bytes in UTF-8 – because the encoded angle-brackets count toward the number of characters. Seems a bit backwards doesn’t it?

Does anyone know the reasoning here? Or are the docs at fault?

Back to the angle-bracket quoting. Just as the PHP folk are finally ending their own embarrassing journey through that silliness, it looks to me like Twitter are now making a similar mistake. JSON should safely encapsulate angle-brackets, so perhaps I don’t understand the problem that they are trying to solve?

One more question: what if I tweet “&gt;”? When using the API, can that be distinguished from a “>”?

(You might have noticed that I’ve have so far been too lazy to experiment with all this stuff; I just wanted to write it down before I forgot. I’ll add a comment if I get the time to play.)

A few months ago I downloaded angL by Ihsahn (Wikipedia, Ihsahn.com), but I noticed that a couple of tracks were broken. One skipped a lot and the other went silent half way through. I emailed eMusic and followed up a month later. To their credit, they replied and gave me a free track, but said it was down to the record company to provide new tracks.

After a couple of months, I was getting frustrated. I didn’t think eMusic were following up on this, so I emailed Ihsahn’s record company, Candlelight Records, and his management/production company, Mnemosyne, to let them know. I got a couple of replies, including one from Heidi at Mnemosyne – who I’ve just realised is Ihriel, Ihsahn’s wife and fellow artist – apologising and thanking me for telling them.

And this morning I also received angL on CD, sent by post from Mnemosyne, with a hand-written postcard saying “Thanks for helping us out”, and signed “Ihsahn”.

Thanks Heidi and Ihsahn, you’ve totally made my day, and I wish you all the best.

(Side note to everyone else: angL is a bloody brilliant album, so go and get it now :)

By now, MILF – legitimised somewhat by Tori Amos – is probably in the OED, so what about a similar acronym-cum-word for the other gender?

I’ll start the ball rolling:

• Father: FILF
• Dad: DILF
• Pop: PILF

Farking hell, Mac OS X is really annoying me now. This, in case you hadn’t guessed already, is going to be a vitriolic rant, and is really for my own benefit rather than yours. But please read on anyway…

Read the rest of this entry »