About This Blog

(I'm still learning how to drive Blogger. Can you tell?)

I started this blog to get practice in writing reasonably good English in a reasonably short timeframe. It's a bad sign when even a clumsy paragraph takes an hour to write ...

I intend/hope to publish a series of programmer-friendly articles about Unicode, possibly including:

A Short History Of Computer Character Sets

Where Unicode came from

A Short History Of Writing Systems

Alphabets, Syllabaries and Ideograms

What is a Character?

Or wchar_t considered dangerous
Combining Marks, Surrogates and other complications

Unicode Normalization Forms

The orthodox way to compare two Unicode strings

Encoding Characters

UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32.
Why older character sets are now just subset encodings of Unicode

Storing Unicode Text

In files, just use UTF-8 or UTF-16.
In memory, ... that's a tricky one

Programming with Unicode

Why you really want to use a library: pango, ICU, etc

I would also like to write about the lessons of the Self project, which advanced the state of the art in language design (an object-oriented language classes), run-time systems, optimization of highly object-oriented code and user interfaces. Although this project ended nearly 10 years ago, their ground-breaking optimization techniques are barely known, and that's a shame.
  ¶ 1:56 pm

  About My Surname
Frequently-uttered Answers:

1.	Chittleborough. That's Cee Haich I Double-Tee you'll need to write smaller Ell Ee Bee write really small Oh Arr really, really small Oh You Gee Haich
2.	Yes, it is a long name.
3.	English. From Norfolk, actually.

According to the late Reverend Colin Chittleborough, my seventh cousin ((I loved writing that)), "Chittleborough" is a modernised form of "ce-etol beorgh" (in my own, unreliable, phonetic rendition), which meant "stronghold near water". The "borough" part comes ultimately from an old German word, bergen, to protect, which became beorgan in Old English. From this, burg or burh came to mean a city, as in Hamburg and Magdenburg in Germany, presumably because the cities were protected (by walls?). The English words burrow (where rabbits etc live) and borough both derive from bergen/beorgan. In England, "borough" came to mean a town with legal protection, not part of any shire and having its own charter.
  ¶ 1:47 pm

  Had to Happen

Before Harry Potter and Hoggwarts, there was another series of books featuring
an adventurous English schoolboy ...

Now you can read the story of
Molesworth at Hoggwarts online!

(Molesworth is the hero narrator of Down With Skool, How to be Topp, and Molesworth's Guide to the Atomic Age, all by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle.)  ¶ 7:38 pm

  Chris Muir is back!

And Day by Day is in top form.

Speaking of great daily comic strips, Get Fuzzy has been particularly good lately.
  ¶ 7:28 pm