[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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