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.
I'm awake at 05:00 unable to sleep and instead working on migrating the working copy of my web site to my laptop so that I can eventually retire my old desktop. One of the importunate thoughts bouncing about in my sleep-deprived brain is something someone at work said about some weirdos he'd heard of who actually (ab)use XML as some sort of (standard) generalized mark-up language. This bizarre (to him) concept involves one choosing a set of XML tags to express the structure of the text (as if text could have structure!), which is ludicrous because how would anyone be able to read it? One would have to use XSLT to transform it in to HTML, so why not use HTML in the first place, eh? Read more