6. Zero-based arrays

C arrays began at zero to match memory addressing. In a weakly typed scripting language, there’s exactly no reason to do this. There hasn’t been for decades. Can’t we please start the arrays at 1 where God intended?

I dunno what god[s] have to do with numbers and arrays. But while myArray(VIII) would certainly be geeky enough, there’s a reason why the Roman civilisation disappeared – crashed like an 8-bit processor running Flex or CP/M on January 1, 2000, rather – and the Arabs, after millenia of internal and external fights, massacres and general disarray, are still there. They have the zero, and the Romans dinna have it. Of course, arguing – like some did in the comments – that 0-based [which I favour, if you hadn’t noticed yet] are POLS is a bit disingenuous. See the battles that raged in 2000/2001 regarding when the 21st Century started – people expecting the new century to start on ~0, whereas it starts on ~1. Surprises can smack you in the face – or sour a dinner party – at any corner.

I was watching M6’s Turbo, a show about, duh, cars and other vehicles with an engine – or more than one – and they did a segment on Saab’s Alcokey and Volvo’s Multilock. And from what they said this was the solution to end drunk driving and related accidents. Apparently, it has finally reached France – engadget’s article dates back from February 2005 – and the first target is corporate fleets; meaning companies wanting to prevent their salesmen to DUI. Enforcement, rather than self-control. Which is retarded, I think. Between a bike pump or a friend, what’s to prevent them to drive if they feel like it?

Prepare for pain. The icon comes from the Open Clip Art Library. Very naiseu.

Paid a visit to the 韓國學 用語/用例 辭典, and entered a simple query. And clicked search. Woops…

1. Don’t use IIS / ASP. They suck goat’s teats
2. Hitting the enter/return key is supposed to submit the form. Not reloading the page.
3. Don’t use EUC-KR. That encoding suxxors big time. And ‘English’ looks crappy in that encoding – not really the encoding’s fault, since euc-kr makes the browser default to Korean fonts, and Latin characters *do* suck in Korean fonts. Use Unicode, dudes. Which is exactly what you are using – sans charset declaration, wherever there is M-R, like here
4. M-R is nice, but be consistant, if you please. shi or si? oe or oi? Pick one each. Oh, and check both transcriptions. 二軍六衛 doesn’t transcribe to either yigunyugi or Yikunyuki. Really…
5. Making the HTML standards-compliant would be nice – and lose the tables, the <font> and other stylistic bits. After all, you seem to use CSS, too. <td class="font12" bgcolor=white align="center"><font face="굴림"> could be replaced with a better ‘font12′ class – or possibly forks of this class…

This looks like an ad-hoc effort handled the good ole Korean way I have learned to recognize, sometimes admire, but usually despise. Act first, plan later [and order lots of green tape and silicon]. Ah well, I still ould have liked something like that when I was a student…

Hat tip to The Marmot.

Via Bill de Hóra, unicode converter.

Clic clac!

Why go to the web for that? This thing stays out of the way when not needed:

Automatic copy/paste: when you enter the plain text box, it pastes whatever text the clipboard has, and selects it. In the Unicode box, it pastes the content of the clipboard if it matches the \uXXXX format. After conversion, the result is copied back to the clipboard. What say?

Download  Tested on a TiBook 17″ running 10.3.9. Prolly won’t work on MacIntels. Not me faults, Guv’.