April 2003

Windows Unicode versus Python's Unicode

During an attempt to better organize a collection of T-SQL scripts I came across a strange behaviour when converting Windows ANSI (8-bit character data) to Unicode (16-bit character data) which appears, surprisingly, to involve the ancient MSDOS convention of using Ctrl-Z (character 0x1A) to end files.

What do you mean, Ctrl-Z?

Picky Picky Game: HTML 4 versus REST

REST is largely based on using HTTP as originally designed—which includes respecting the intended semantics of the methods GET and POST (basically, requests that add or change things should use POST and not GET; requests that view information without altering it should use GET, not POST). A flaw in the HTML 4 definition makes this annoyingly difficult.

Serving my own damn files

I am rethinking my original plan for the Picky Picky Game, which was to store resoures in files as often as possible. For example, index.html is a static file (not dynamically generated every time someone visits it). This requires that when something happens that means index.html should change, this file has to be updated.

Pros and cons