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.

NTTP and Character Sets - News.GigaNews.com

I’m working on writing a news reading client in PHP and I use GigaNews as my nntp provider. My first hurdle came quite early in trying to get a list of the news groups. 

One of the news groups groups returned was:

milf.dream.movie.german.komodie

and another was:

milf.dream.movie.german.komödie

only different by one character… problem was that I was using MySQL with a UTF-8 with the utf8_general_ci collating sequence… which it happens to turn out that ‘o’ and ‘ö’ are equal :-(

Not sure what I’m going to do about that, but during my analysis and trouble shooting I did find out that the character set being used by Giganews is Latin-1 (aka ISO-8859-1).