Tag: Internet Finds

“Flüchtiges, anstrengungsloses Denken führt zu einer politisch konservativen Einstellung”

Muhahaha … anscheinend korreliert mangelnde Zeit, über etwas nachzudenken mit “konservativen Ansichten”.

Die Verbindung steht 😉 … am Ende wird sich auch keiner mehr daran erinnern, dass

  • es die Studie im Kontext des politischen Meinungsspektrums der USA zu werten ist und
  • dass der Umkehrschluss unzulässig ist.

Aber wer denkt schon so weit … 😛

Old Games’ Source Code

Fabien Sanglard has written an interesting drill down into the recently released source code for Doom3. He tries to reason why certain things are the way they are and also had a few of his questions answered by John Carmack himself.

There was news about the source code for the Prince of Persia game on Apple II computers restored from a set of ancient floppy disks. There is also a great quote on why going through the trouble of restoring/releasing the source code of those games is something worthwhile.

“Because if we didn’t, it might have disappeared forever.”

Video game source code is a bit like the sheet music to a piano sonata that’s already been performed and recorded. One might reasonably ask: If you have the recording, what do you need the sheet music for?

You don’t, if all you want is to listen and enjoy the music. But to a pianist performing the piece, or a composer who wants to study it or arrange it for different instruments, the original score is valuable.

It’s possible, up to a point, to reverse-engineer new source code from a published video game, much as a capable musician can transcribe a musical score from listening to a performance. But in both cases, there’s no substitute for the original document as a direct line to the creator’s intentions and work process. As such, it has both practical and historical value, to the small subset of the game-playing/music-listening community that cares.

Fixing Borked UTF-8 Data in MySQL

While updating ownCloud to version 4 it reencoded my already UTF-8-encoded data and left me with borked strings.

I thought about trying to do a bunch of find and replace operations, but I knew this was error prone.

A little internet research produced a very simple simple solution for fixing double-encoded data in MySQL:

mysqldump -u DB_USER -p DB_PASSWORD --opt --quote-names --skip-set-charset --default-character-set=latin1 DB_NAME > DB_NAME-latin1-dump.sql
mysql -u DB_USER -p DB_PASSWORD --default-character-set=utf8 DB_NAME < DB_NAME-latin1-dump.sql

Just replace DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD and DB_NAME with the appropriate values and your good to go. 😀