[thelist] [OT] tip: use other search engines

kasimir-k evolt at kasimir-k.fi
Wed Feb 1 07:15:10 CST 2006


Ken Chase scribeva in 01/02/2006 3:08:
> I can't judge... and won't judge a culture that I simply will never
> understand.

Not accepting a government's actions is different than judging a culture.

And not accepting a corporation accepting something one considers wrong 
is also not judging  a culture.

> Pretending to understand a culture other than your own is
> denying that anyone can think differently than you do.

"Understanding a culture" is not an on/off issue. As a matter of fact I 
do understand Chinese culture and its history a little bit - sometimes 
it feels I understand it more than I do the culture of Western teen 
agers :-)

Besides, what is my "own" culture? Is it Western? But European and North 
American cultures differ greatly. Is is European then, as I've lived in 
Finland, the UK and Spain? But after living in these countries I'd say 
that speaking about "European culture" is a joke - there just isn't one 
that is common to all corners of Europe.

I don't deny that some people think differently than I do. For example, 
I think that every person should be able to express their views and 
opinions, and everyone should be able to browse the web without 
political censorship. But I know that there are persons and governments 
thinking differently.

But people thinking differently does not mean that I'd have to accept 
and approve everything. For example, here in Europe we've had our fair 
share of genocide - people responsible for those definitely have been 
thinking very differently than I do - and I strongly disapprove the 
action resulting from their thinking.

> Think about it... would you like Google to disobey your government?

Actually, now as you mention it, there are some places where I would 
absolutely love to see Google disobeying my government :-) Besides, I 
disobey governments too :-)

Sorry for an OT-post, I promise I try to resist harder in the future.

.k


<tip type="Ajax, PHP, and the Euro sign" author="kasimir-k">
I was wondering why the Euro sign was giving me serious headache when 
trying to pass it with javascript to PHP. The obvious reason is that 
javascript sends stuff in UTF-8, while PHP was expecting ISO-8859-1. 
Now, just doing
$str = utf8_decode($str);
is no good, as ISO-8859-1 does not include the Euro sign. So this did 
the trick:
$str = mb_convert_encoding ($str, 'ISO-8859-15' , 'UTF-8');

But alas! The host for this site hadn't enabled multibyte string 
extensions... So I had to convert the exact bytes making the Euro sign 
before proceeding:

$str = str_replace(chr(0xE2) . chr(0x82) . chr(0xAC), chr(0xA4), $str);
$str = utf8_decode($str);

In UTF-8 the Euro sign consists of three bytes (#E2, #82, #AC), and in 
ISO-8859-15 it is byte #A4

Even though the utf8_decode($str) gives me ISO-8859-1, it is good enough 
for me once I've taken care of the Euro sign (and remember to serve my 
pages as ISO-8859-15, not -1)
</tip>




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