[Melbourne-pm] Next Melbourne PM meeting, Wednesday 8th February

[Alfie John]

Hey Jacinta,

I'm going to send out a call for talks on Wednesday. So far we have Brad giving a talk on the Sub::Sampling and Sub::Space modules but your talk is most welcome :)

Alfie

On Sat, Jan 21, 2012, at 10:43 AM, Jacinta Richardson wrote:
> G'day lovely people,
> 
> I don't know where the next meeting will be, but I'd be happy to give the 
> following talk thereat (my OPL mini conf talk at LCA this year).
> 
> 
>     Don't hate Unicode
> 
> Unicode sneaks into the most unexpected places. Do you ever wonder if
> your life 
> would be much, much easier if your default encoding was not ASCII? Do you
> know 
> what the difference between UTF-8 and Unicode strings are? Do you know
> what your 
> default encoding is, or how to change it? Does it all seem to hard, and
> make you 
> resent anything to do with the locale?
> 
> If 7-bit ASCII was good enough for me, it should be good enough for you!
> Have 
> you been left behind with this whole Unicode thing to the point that
> you're 
> confused and resentful of the whole thing? I know I was. When your name,
> and 
> everything you write works wonderfully in ASCII it can be hard to summon
> the 
> enthusiasm to learn about Unicode, even when you know that you should be 
> handling your data better.
> 
> Imagine your code is using a logging library, that expects strings. What
> does it 
> do when you pass it a Unicode object? It'll probably write it, encoding
> it in 
> your default encoding (probably ASCII). And it'll probably work, on all
> of your 
> test cases, and on most of your data. Until someone comes on with a
> non-ASCII 
> character in their name, and causes your code to throw an exception. You 
> probably weren't expecting it, it might not even be your library. Unicode
> works 
> implicitly often enough that Unicode can sneak in well before you realise
> your 
> code isn't robust enough to handle it.
> 
> This talk will cover the essentials of Unicode and how it affects things
> like 
> regular expressions.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
  Alfie John
  alfiej at opera.com