Supporting UTF-8 in PHP
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
Up till now, I didn’t mention much about the little project I’m working on now: a RSS feed reader. It’s called SpoonFeed, as I want to literally spoon feed users with news, LoL.. One of the reasons for the discretion is that hardly any work has been done on it. I’m still working on the layouts and stuff like that. A basic model that allows adding and viewing feeds might take another week or two, depending on how tough advanced diploma is.
So I was working on scripts that’ll sort the feed items alphabetically, and I thought about Unicode characters. Throughout the project, I thought that enabling UTF-8 support only required minor tweakings like changing the charset in MySQL and the HTML output. But boy was I wrong. I did some testing and I was sure that it was a PHP code related problem since phpMyAdmin could display UTF-8 characters in my sample database without a problem. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: php
Of Movies and Players
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
This is the season for movies. Tom Cruise kicked things off with Mission Impossible 3 but sadly, I didn’t watch that one. After my Tioman trip, we went for a movie on friday. Since a few of us had already watched M:I 3, so we decided to catch DaVinci Code, right on the day it premiered. That bloody ticket cost RM 11. Damn.. and to top it off, I didn’t catch much of it, and it wasn’t such a thrilling movie after all. Crap. It was there when we realized how many great movies are on the way, Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Mans’ Chest, the Fast and the Furios: Tokyo something.. and ah, s00kwei’s “must watch”: ??? (dragon tiger gate). The trailer showed several guys sword fighting or something like that. It didn’t hit a a great storyline or any humour at all. Why is it a must watch? Coz it stars Nicholas Tse. Heck, even Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom movies have better storylines (or trailers, at least). Yes yes, s00kwei wants to watch that movie simply coz of Nicholas Tse. So with that many movies I have to watch, I think it’s more maggi mee for me..
As for players, Windows Media Player 11 beta is now available. However, the only thing I find different about it is the UI. No doubt it looks cool, but the black can’t be changed at all. You can’t pick silver or navy or anything else. It’s supposed to have better integration with mp3 players or something like that, but heck, I still find that Foobar gives me much better control of my media library. If you would still like to show off the pretty UI to your friends, go Google for the download and Windows Genuine Advantage avoidance steps.
Tioman Trip
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
I’m a geek. I don’t travel much. Hence, Tioman is one of the first islands (other than Penang) that I’ve went to. The trip is actually a “celebration” of the success of activities in which I had a part in organizing. Tioman is an island on the east coast of Malaysia, somewhere between Johor and Pahang (I heard it belongs to Pahang). Anyways, to get there, we had to take a 11pm bus to Mersing. Incidentally, the bus tire went bust. Luckily it didn’t do somersaults or anything like that. Another bus picked us up and we arrived at the Mersing jetty at around 6am i think.
Here’s one of the reasons I dislike travelling: travelling. It’s just so boring, so much time to kill. The ferry to Tioman was scheduled at 10:30am, and it was another 1 hour plus before reaching Paya Beach Resort. There wasn’t much to do on the first day. We were supposed to try out the snorkels but ended up swimming in the sea for like hours. Thankfully, the life-jackets made swimming in the seas a piece of cake. There was a tiny isle off the beach, and we thought it’ll be fun swimming there. It looked near enough on foot, but swiming there was a different story. I could reach the island in maybe 40 minutes, but I had to drag s00kwei along, and wait for her since her mask/goggles seems to kept leeking.
On the second day, we boarded a wooden boat (looked pretty much like those typical fishing boats) that took us snorkling. We were dropped off at 3 spots to snorkle, and even had lunch on the way. No, it’s not a yacht so no barbecues on the boat, just some pre-packed food from the resort. Whenever we dived in, the fishes and corals looked wonderful. Besides, it was fun to just keep swimming without constantly coming up for air. However, after like 15 minutes, it started to get boring at each spot as there aren’t many types of fishes and corals.
Heck, I feel lazy blogging about the trip. Head on here to check out some pictures. I’m on dial-up so there isn’t a ton of them.. sigh…
Tags: life
Who Says Dial-Up Sucks?
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
Really, when your ISP tells you broadband isn’t available for whatever reasons at your location, dial-up is like heaven. Being able to check your mail, update yourself with the latest happenings in the tech world, check up some favourite blogs feels so great. That feeling is particularly amplified when you’re starved of Internet for the last couple of weeks.
That’s what exactly happened to me. After completing my diploma, I’m now waiting to continue for me “advanced diploma”. So the desire of living closer to “friends” and the lust for potentially better broadband services (think more bandwidth and bt) got the better of me, and I moved out to a residential (or rather, student) area right beside college. Applying for the phone line was a piece of cake. Broadband was an entirely different story. To sum it up, I called the tech support today and they told me “port rosak” or some crap like that. “We’ll call you when it’s fixed. Don’t worry..” Thank God I didn’t splash RM 170 on that D-Link ADSL modem+4 port router.
So now you know why the long absence. Progress on my FeedLounge clone is super slow. Still slowly working on the feed processing stuff… sigh…
Lastly, see? I can post now with dial-up.. yeah~!
Tags: life
