The rants and ravings of a Mac developer

I Love programming, Macs, the iPhone, iPad, Apps & iOS! In my spare time I like Programming in ExtJS, PHP, MySQL / SQLite3 and Apache - in other words a Real Geek's geek. I've tinkered around with programing for iOS in the not so distant past . During the day I work for Motorola Solutions in IT as BSA for our Export Compliance system JPMorgan's TradeSphere. At night I freelance program on the Mac & Web. I'm also a techie who likes Sci-Fi and Horror. Some of my favorite authors include Stephen King, William Gibson and Frank Herbert as well as his son Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson.

But my real passion is for Comic Book Collecting. My current freelance project is writing a web based application using ExtJS for collecting comics books. After I get the web application completed, I will be integrating some portion of the web application into a desktop client for the Mac through the use of web services for all data exchange & transaction. Eventually, the web site & Mac client would also include a social networking component as well as an iOS component.

I started collecting comic books as a kid when my grandfather passed away and we found my father's comic book collection when we were cleaning out my grandfather's basement. There were a number of early issues in that stash, such as Fantastic Four number one, The Amazing Spider-Man number one, number 22 of the Uncanny X-Men... and others. So needless to say, I was hooked.

After high school I stopped collecting - college, drinking and woman took priority (not necessarily in that order) over visiting the local comic book shop. Now that I have 2 kids of my own, I've gotten back into collecting.

Ah, Language, isn’t it wonderful. If you’re not a programmer

Well I’ve spent a good part of the day reading the MySQL manual pages for Language support… and I’ve got to say, life would be so much simpler if everyone only wrote, spoke and used English… I know that’s not a very global attitude, but really, when you get into things like multilingual support (i.e., Unicode) in applications, programming languages, databases, web browsers its a wonder that anything works at all!

This basically comes into play, when importing, exporting or displaying data across different systems that use different character sets. For example reading data from database (stored in latin1 for example) and them manipulating it in PHP (defaults to cp1251, I believe) and then displaying in in a user’s web browser (using utf8). Not only do you have to worry is the character that I want available in the character set that my programming language uses, but now you have to make sure you translate it properly when reading and outputting it. Not only are there all these different character sets, but no two applications/databases/programing languages refer to them by the same name! Talk about impossible tasks!

Not only are there different characters in different languages, but there are differences how the characters in each language are sorted - this is referred to as a collating sequence. For instance in Spanish an ‘ñ’ (n-tilde) sorts between the ‘n’ and ‘0’ characters. And if using traditional spanish, there’s a ‘ch’ character that sorts in between ‘c’ and ‘d’, like wise with the character ‘ll’, its in between ‘l’ and ‘m’.  And it gets worse for other languages such as Swedish/Finish.

This issue also affects the comparison of characters and doing database searches… like is ‘Ano’ equal to ‘Año’ (2nd character is a n-tilde)? Other examples (not sure these will show up correctly in this post) are ‘ß’ is ‘technically’ equal to ‘ss’, but some programming languages/database may say its equal to ‘s’ (I don’t even know what ‘ß’ is for). And look at these other ones, ‘Ä’ = ‘A’, ‘Ö’ = ‘O’ and ‘Ü’ = ‘U’!

Woe is me… and here UTF was supposed to be the holy grail. Remember, “There is no silver bullet.”