The Zoolander Phenomenon

Have you ever seen the movie Zoolander? Did you like it? How many times did you see it?

These are crucial questions when determining the phenomenon known as Zoolander. You see Zoolander has a strange effect that occurs with it. Lets be honest its a bad movie, or is it? If you have ever been bored during a TBS marathon weekend -that would be when they repeat the same movie over and over- you have probably seen Zoolander more than once. Well there is something strange that happens after you have seen it 3-5 times. It becomes really really funny! The humour is no longer lost on you and you laugh and laugh and laugh.

What is it about this Zoolander movie that renders itself funny only after several viewings. At some point I will offer some opinions.

 

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Posted by Tyler Posted in: Everything 2 Comments » November 2007

Tyler vs. JavaScript/PHP/AJAX/Charsets/Form Submissions: Hard Fought Victory!

Web development is not refined. The whole industry seems to be quite kludgy, it seems like the whole thing was designed by a few guys sitting in their parents basement getting high on cough syrup. The idea of object oriented design seems to be lost on most projects, short of some of the newer .NET development, but even then, the quality of work I have seen is somewhat lacking.

That little rant has absolutely nothing to do with my current victory, it is just to outline the fact, that what has been done is not the right way to do things, what works in Firefox -a real browser- may not work in that piece of shit IE, and what works with old style form submission may not work with new fangled AJAXing.

Here is the battle that I was dealing with, and -I hope- a clear solution which I could not find anywhere on the web. I’m currently writing a multi-lingual website for a ski team I coach. By multilingual I mean English/French. For most of the admin console I have been using old style form submission, I mean why would I waste the fancy stuff on the backend. Yet I have a -quite kickass- photo manager that I have written and reused a few times now, that uses AJAX form submissions. This shouldn’t be any different right? Wrong!

The problem I was having is that some of my French characters (ie. ç, é, è, etc…) were getting muddled on the way to the database. As it turns out they were getting muddled in the transfer between the Javascript AJAX post and the php server side script. It appeared to me that I was doing everything right. I had my charset that I specified in the AJAX post correct:

ajaxRequest.setRequestHeader(”Content-Type”, “application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=ISO-8859-1“);

Or perhaps I didn’t so I switched it to UTF-8. That seemed to make no difference, a quick browse through the shitty information on the interweb led me to this:

Your are in luck! Transforming text in ISO 8859-1 to Unicode is the identity transform (as in no change at all), as the code points they share have the same meaning in both encodings. For all other encodings (save US ASCII, in part a subset ISO 8859-1), you need to resort to laborious replace() hacks.

Unfortunately that is a load of crap. For all the ASCII points they are the same, and I would imagine for many of the upper range characters that they share they are the same, but there is a range that is not shared. The latin characters that can be expressed as extended ASCII characters. For instance:

As you can see the character encodings for ‘é’ are not the same between the two. This is where the challenge got interesting. Some more research let me determine that the Javascript function encodeURI() would always produce UTF-8 code, and I was specifying the charset to be UTF-8. Perhaps the problem was decoding the URL on the other end. I tried the PHP function urldecode() but it produced the same two character output. é transformed to é

It was at this point that I realized that there was an issue in conversion from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1. Why was my PHP script not able to decode it? The short answer is that PHP does not support UNICODE, and you need to convert incoming parameters. Easily there are two easy ways to do this: utf8_decode or iconv, iconv appears to be only part of PHP5. I used utf8_decode() and it worked as expected. So the transformations appear as such: ISO-8859-1 charset page > UTF-8 encoding to go over the wire > ISO-8859-1 to be usable in PHP.

Did I mention that I find an awful lot of this I18N business very frustrating? Although I suppose that the multilingual nature of the world I have the choice of getting better at it or giving up being a programmer.

 

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Posted by Tyler Posted in: Everything, Software 1 Comment » November 2007

Early-bird Gets A Reasonable Deal From Amazon

About two months ago, I was ordering some books from Amazon. It was about the same time that Dougy Coupland’s The Gum Thief was released. I was about to order it when I realized that there was a special edition box set coming out. The special edition box set was about $8 more expensive. The only downside? Not released until Nov 29th. I thought what the hell… I can wait. So I bought it and have been waiting (im)patiently ever since.

Just the other day I checked my order status. Here’s what I saw:

Looks fine right? Well it is, I wasn’t surprised until I clicked on the The Gum Thief Boxed Set to check out the item. $44.55!!!!!!! Its gone up in price by $17. They just better honour my original price. I actually feel like I’m getting a good deal.

 

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Posted by Tyler Posted in: Everything, Personal Life No Comments » November 2007

Long Gun Registry Back In The News

The long gone registry is back in the news. The conservatives are once again talking about scrapping it. Forget the fact that I have wanted this gone for some time -I mean criminals are not going to register their guns- the most telling fact in this is the second last paragraph:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper campaigned on a promise to scrap the long-gun registry, which was supposed to cost $2 million when the Liberal government introduced it in 1995. Its cost wound up being roughly $1 billion.

Two million ballooned to one billion?!?!?!?!? What the crap? I mean quite honestly if you paid someone $20,000 to renovate your house, and after the job was finished it had ended up costing $10,000,000 you would be uber pissed. If you weren’t uber pissed then something would be wrong with you. Very wrong with you, Liberal wrong with you…

 

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Posted by Tyler Posted in: Everything, Politics 3 Comments » November 2007

Mail-In-Rebate: How Can I Lose?

Mail-In-Rebate. Those 3 words must bring a smile onto the face of any manufacturer/retailer. Never has a more enticing scam ever been developed. The main portion of the scam is that less than half of people actually send in their mail in rebates. That is a pretty good deal, the discount is really only half of what they advertise. Well I have been finding out over the past few weeks that there is a second part to this scam.

Three weeks ago one of my colleagues was saying that she had a terrible experience with a mail in rebate from the states. Apparently she had to fight for months to get them to actually send the rebate. That seems kinda shabby.

Where this ties into my experience is on August 19th I bought three GE appliances from Home Depot. They didn’t have the best price until you factor in the rebate; which totaled $300.  I mailed it in promptly, and began waiting. As it got to the middle of October I still didn’t have my rebate, I went to Home Depot to ask what I should do, and they gave me a number to call to ask about the rebate. I phoned the rebate center in Missasauga -apparently rebates are handled by companies that specialize in rebates. They have a policy of not answering their phone -again kind of Shabby- so I left a detailed message as requested. The next day they phoned me back at work and asked for more information. At that point they informed me that they had not in fact received my information (that I had mailed in eight weeks earlier) and asked that I resend it. I asked if I could fax it in rather than mail it. Surprisingly they agreed.

On October 31st I faxed in all of the documents and later that day they phoned me back to confirm that they did receive it, and everything looked in order for me to receive my $300. They also informed me that my cheque would be going out within the next few days. Fast-forward now to November 15th, and still nothing. Now I know that Canada Post is terrible, but it should not take two weeks to get for a letter to get from Missasauga to Ottawa. I thus once again phoned the rebate center in Missasauga and asked about the status, they returned my call -since they have a policy of not answering the phone- and informed me that my cheque had been mailed out this past Tuesday. Here we are Thursday night, and it should arrive tomorrow or Monday at the latest. If it does not I have honestly no clue what I will do.

Long and short of it is, that I think from now on I will go for the lowest non-rebated price. It just makes things easier.

 

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Posted by Tyler Posted in: Everything, Personal Life 1 Comment » November 2007

This Developer For One Welcomes Our New Internation Business Machine Overlords…

Alright perhaps not overlords… It has been suspected for sometime that Cognos (my employer) would be acquired by a larger company. The even bets were on IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. To be honest I didn’t really have an opinion one way or another as to whether this would be a good thing or a bad thing. For the record I still don’t.

I did feel that IBM was going to be the best fit for Cognos at least technologically. Microsoft is not an Java shop, and with their current position they never will be. With the current trend at Cognos that just didn’t seem like it would be good fit. From that perspective I welcome IBM. As with all of this M&A stuff there are bound to be some pains, but I am quite confident that I will come out the other end free and clear. And that is what really counts isn’t it?

As for the prospect -in about 3-4 months once the deal closes- of being a Big Blue employee. It seems good. A quick perusal of the IBM Canada benefits. It looks like the working hours are more flexible. I do like the idea of working 4 days a week -and spending 3 days a week skiing during the winter. As well in my travels I found a blog in regards to some guys work experience at IBM. It sounded positive for the most part with the exception of him getting low-balled salary wise on entry.

Step No. 3
Learn from my own mistake… Do not accept a job with IBM unless your starting salary is appropriate for your education and skill set. Check with your professional organizations to make sure the IBM salary offer is what the industry pays. IBM benefits are no longer the industry’s best, but simply industry standard, and salary is the only negotiation you control at the beginning.

All in all it sounds like a pretty good place to work. Perhaps not Google good, but what can you do this side of working for Google. As for what this means for Cognos as a company? Well I’m not a business guy but I do think that it will allow Cognos to be more competitive with larger organizations, but that isn’t my forte and if you really want evaluation on the IBM purchase there are hundreds of articles to the effect.

 

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Posted by Tyler Posted in: Everything, Personal Life, Software, Technology No Comments » November 2007

How Do You Hide An Aeroplane Factory?

Got an email with a very cool history lesson.

During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and made it look like a rural subdivision from the air.

Before:

 

After:

 

 

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Posted by Tyler Posted in: Everything 1 Comment » November 2007

For Individual Honour

Leave the glory to someone else. Let the honour fall on whoever goes out and gets it. There is nothing that angers a coach more than a lazy athlete. An athlete that puts in a poor effort during training looks poorly on  their self and their coach. For a while I have been struggling with the idea of how to motivate an athlete. Not necessarily to motivate the athletes that craves victory,  but an athlete where the strongest performance would be a top 10 finish.

An even greater question that I have been dealing with is how to deal with an athlete who believes that their best finish would be a top 10 and don’t realize that victory may be within their grasp. My answer had to be something that is extrinsic but not necessarily material.

For the ski team that I coach I am questioning the usefulness of an armband or a bib. A show of importance, and the wearer would be the hardest worker of the previous day. Perhaps not even the hardest worker as much as the smartest trainer, the athlete who is most receptive to coaching, willing to relax and have a fun day, willing to step up and put in 100% effort, and most importantly willing to lead by example. It could not be the same player every day, everyone has bad days, but i feel it would be important to be honest, and not bow to the adage of getting everyone a turn. This wouldn’t be an award that would be handed from athlete to athlete to make them feel special, it would be a badge of honour that other athletes could look to see what being a successful athlete looks like.

Its not about the glory of standing on top of the podium, its about the honour of training right.

 

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Posted by Tyler Posted in: Coaching, Everything No Comments » November 2007

Best Buy Removed From “The List”

I have had an on-going battle with Canadian retailers. For months I have been arguing with Pier1 about a mirror that we wanted that was selling for $200 US and $280 CDN. They gave some stupid reasons in that it costs more to ship stuff from Texas. I asked them what the price was in their Alaskan store. Alright I will admit it, I was asking for trouble; and this was back in the summer before the Canadian dollar had broken parity. People thought I was somewhat crazy, but I insisted that this would become a huge issue the moment that the dollar reached parity.

I was right.

Now the Canadian dollar is hovering around $1.10 US and Canadians are still getting screwed by retailers. Things are still 30% more than the same item in US dollars. Just pick up a book or a magazine and its obvious.

Yet perhaps all that is changing. I am currently planning on a cross border shopping day down to Syracuse. -For the record I don’t think its wrong to hurt the Canadian economy, but rather the best thing to do to smarten up the Canadian retailers that are screwing us.-

Anyway, I am starting to do a bit of research of items that I may like to purchase and the cost differential.  So just out of curiosity I checked on the LCD TV I am longing for both from BestBuy.ca and BestBuy.com. Low and behold, SAME PRICE! This just goes to show that some research may prove worthwhile. That and at least some companies are making an effort.

 

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Posted by Tyler Posted in: Everything, Politics 3 Comments » November 2007

Confirming Colours

Yesterday we got an email from Shanna at Richcraft (she was/is our designer) asking for a clarification of the colour of our back splash tiles. There were 3 tile colours on the sample that we choose and she wrote down the model but not the colour.

She took the time time to layout our kitchen counter and cabinet colours to make sure that we were making an informed decision. We went with the colours that we had chosen the first time. The lighter colour of tile, the darker was just too close to the cabinet colour.

 

 

 

 

 

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Posted by Tyler Posted in: Everything, Personal Life No Comments » November 2007