Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

MobiBLU Cube 2: World’s Smallest MP3 Player

Posted in Computers & Technology, Cute, Encodings, MP3, Music, iPod by Elliott Back on April 20th, 2006.

The MobiBLU Cube 2 is the same size as the original cube mp3 player, but it adds a new touch pad and a color display. Here’s quick photo of this tiny mp3 player:

mobi-blue-cube-2.jpg

If it has the same specs as the mobi-blue DAH-1500, it will have an OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) display, support MP3 and WMA formats, come in a 2GB (or possibly 4GB) size, have an FM tuner an recorder, a digital voice recorder, SRS WoW and Truebass, and come in a variety of very cute colors. So far, there’s no announcement on the American website of mobiBLU. This makes sense, since the leak is in Korean, and you know they get the scoop before we do. I’m working on getting a translation, but it will be a while.

Wordpress 2.0 Upgrade Problems: Character Encoding + Transformation

Posted in Blogging, Code, Encodings, Internationalization, My Blog, Wordpress by Elliott Back on April 3rd, 2006.

The Wordpress 2.0 upgrade.php script in the wp-admin folder is designed to convert older copies of your database from older versions of Wordpress. However, there’s something wrong with the character encoding, or the collation (latin1_swedish_ci). Changing the collation after the fact doesn’t affect the improper characters being passed back, so I assume it would need to be set before migration. Here’s an example of what it looks like:

whoah-weird-wordpress-chars.jpg

After the damage has occured, the best way, it seems, to clean this up is to run multiple SQL queries in the phpmyadmin console emulating find/replace on the wp_posts table:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, "bad", "good")

This has to be done for each character. So far, I’ve noticed apostrophe marks, the left and right quotation marks, all kinds of dashes, and ellipsis are affected.� It’s like it got run through the WP filters before it went back into the database.

It’s weird that my UTF-8 encoding has switched itself over to ISO-8859-1 all by itself…