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he Basics
Letters are represented in a computer by numeric codes. Pretty much everybody agrees that, when the computer sees a code of 100 (decimal), it represents a lowercase “d”. We don’t all agree on what 250 represents, and therein lies the rub.

ASCII vs ANSI
We commonly refer to character encoding as a letter’s “ASCII value,” when we really mean “ANSI value.” A lot of the time that’s sufficient, but in fact the ASCII standard is pretty much obsolete.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit standard that has been around since the late 1950s (its current incarnation dates from 1968). It defines 128 different characters, which is more than enough for English: upper- and lowercase letters, punctuation, numerals, control codes (remember control-c?), and nonprinting codes such as tab, return, and backspace.

ASCII and ANSI are pretty good as long as you are western European. These two mappings are extremely limited in that they may only code (i.e. assign a number to) 256 letters, so that there is no space to include other glyphs from other languages.

Unicode
Unicode fixes the limitations of ASCII and ANSI, by providing enough space for over a million different symbols. Like the above two systems, each character is given a number, so that Russian ? is 042F, and the Korean won symbol ? is 20A9. (Note that all Unicode numbers are Hexadecimal, meaning that one counts by 16’s not 10’s, not a problem as users really don’t need to know the mapping numbers anyway.) So, although not yet totally comprehensive, Unicode covers most of the world’s writing systems. Most importantly, the mapping is consistent, so that any user anywhere on any computer has the same encoding as everyone else, no matter what font is being used.

So Unicode is a map, a chart of (what will one day be) all of the characters, letters, symbols, punctuation marks, etc. necessary for writing all of the world’s languages past and present.

What is the difference between UTF-8, UTF-16?
UTF-8 uses variable byte to store a Unicode. In different code range, it has its own code length, varies from 1 byte to 6 bytes. Because it varies from 8 bits (1 byte), it is so called “UTF-8″. UTF-8 is suitable for using on Internet, networks or some kind of applications that needs to use slow connection.

Unicode (or UCS) Transformation Format, 16-bit encoding form. The UTF-16 is the Unicode Transformation Format that serializes a Unicode scalar value (code point) as a sequence of two bytes, in either big-endian or little-endian format. Because it is grouped by 16-bits (2 bytes), it is also called “UTF-16″, which is the most commonly used standard.

Source: http://forum.iopus.com/viewtopic.php?t=2783

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I have been running latest Ubuntu on my laptop which works like a charm. But still I have windows in dual boot because I need to sometimes work on Photoshop, Flash and Visual Studio. But slowly I have started to move my development environment to Linux.

I think SVG is going to be big in following years; SVG has more potential than XAML simply because SVG was designed for web and it’s part of web standard. It will revolutionize interface in internet as well as on operating systems. Therefore I have decided to start move to SVG world with the Mono, Cairo and Gtk+. Gtk+ is a library used to build GUI applications on UNIX and the heart of the Gnome desktop. Gtk+ is built on top of the 2D graphics engine Cairo which released version 1.0 in August: every widget is now written using Cairo operations and most importantly developers can now draw their own widgets using the PDF-like rendering model offered by Cairo.

Cairo also brings to the end user nice touches like anti-aliased rendering for a more pleasant experience. Gtk builds on this new functionality to bring vector-based themes to the desktop as well.

Intresting links for .NET developers

• How to create the Google Suggest feature with ASP.NET 2.0
• Enhanced Client-Side Script Features in ASP.NET 2.0
• Script Callbacks in ASP.NET (includes techniques for doing this in ASP.NET 1.1)
• Implement Script Callback Framework in ASP.NET 1.x
• Remote Scripting (class library & javascript library for working with client script callbacks)
• Remote Scriptease (general info about several types of techniques for doing this pre-ASP.NET 2.0)
• AJAX Wrapper for .NET See also( http://ajax.schwarz-interactive.de/)
• Fun with callbacks Part 1: What’s in the ASP.NET box? (info and samples for using remote callbacks with ASP.NET 2.0)
• Fun with callbacks Part 2: The RefreshPanel (code sample for creating a Panel control with support for client-side refreshing)
• Dynamic Page updates using XMLHTTP (interesting example that uses an ASP.NET web service and SOAP to retrieve the postback data).
• Cross Domain XmlHttpRequests ( Ajax) (using client-side calls to get data from a different domain in a way that doesn’t cause problems in Firefox or IE SP2).
• Ajax Post Request (POSTing data to the server handler rather than sending a GET request)
• AJAX Library for ASP.NET (an HttpHandler and attribute based framework for working with objects and client-side postbacks) See also(http://mcgiv.com/blog/)

From Sourceforge

• Ajax.NET is an implementation of the AJAX technology used by Google, Orkut, Flickr, … for the .NET environment. Call server side methods as if they were on the clientside.
• The AJAX (asynchronous Javascript And XML) Framework is a cross browser framework that allows developers to quickly develop web pages that can call web services and server pages through javascript without having to submit the current page.

Other interesting stuff

• http://www.ajaxian.com/
• http://www.fiftyfoureleven.com/resources/programming/xmlhttprequest
• http://www.modernmethod.com/sajax/index.phtml
• http://www.bigbold.com/rssdigest/examples/ajax.php
• http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/03/ajax_promise_or.html
• Collection of AJAX Design Patterns

<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:value-of select=”$word”/>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

Here’s the call:
<xsl:call-template name=”br-replace”>
<xsl:with-param name=”word” select=”.”/>
</xsl:call-template>

See picture below:

As picture tells there is a little RSS button on page when there is a rss feed available for page contents. When you click it Firefox creates new folder into bookmarks with feed links and titles.
Niceee…

More information in Mozilla.org

Legendary XSLT books by Michael Kay are now in print. Here is related discussion in xsl-list about XSLT 2.0″ and “XPath 2.0″ books.