Ok I know I’m being quite an ass for posting so much blog entries in a short time, but I had part of them already in mind in the last days and I just hadn’t had time to actually write them.
This entry has a title that would probably be misleading at the end as I’m going to summarize a couple of things here…
Starting from the topic in the title, I’m really loving UTF-8 these days. With the surname I have (“Pettenò”) is quite important being sure that the final ò is handled correcly by computers.. it already happened that I received (snail) mails with the surname mangled with the wrong encoding, and sometime I just get mails with “Petteno” as receiver (which is completely another surname).
Luckily, using UTF-8 is possible represent my surname as well as kloeri’s (Østergaard, sorry for naming you but was the only other one with special chars in name that I had in mind) without having to mangle encodings, and at the same time also writing ?? without having to install special supports for extra encodings or force disabling latin-extended characters (for who’s wondering what is wrote there, it’s “baka” .. and if you don’t know, just google :P).
Unfortunately, UTF-8 is not a magic solution as there is also someone who fails to write ChangeLogs with my name spelt right.. eh Mike? (I am refering to late ChangeLogs from vapier where I had to fix my surname as it was using broken, nothing personal 🙂 ).
Then I must say that lately my (real) life is being really fooled up and strange. Maybe it’s just the weather, maybe the time that’s passing, but I really feel depressed in the last days. More probable, is the knowledge that the someone I care about is happy, but with someone else, that’s making me feel strange. While I’m happy for her being happy, I’m totally sad as I know I won’t be able to be at her side for all the time we have in front of us. This feeling is really messing me up, so I don’t really know if I’ll be present or not on IRC, if I’ll look at bugs or if I’ll complete GNOME porting without pauses… I think, I hope, to remain the same as usual, also because it helps me not to think of her, but I can’t really say what I’m going to do.
On a little more happy note, after being published on NewsForge, becoming the Developer of the Week (of three weeks ago) and now becoming Deputy Lead for G/BSD project, I’m starting thinking that I’m not wasting others’ time every day all the day, so I feel relieved on the “professional” part of my life.. I just hope I’ll be able to continue like this after I find a job, as I’m have been paid yet for the translation, and I don’t have any other income. It sucks not being able to test G/FBSD 6 just because the only other machine requires a damn PC100 memory stick to work (the memory I had was faulty, I had to trash it).