Archive for March 5, 2013

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

How Emoji Conquered the World

Jeff Blagdon:

In Japanese, personal letters are long, verbose affairs, full of seasonal greetings and honorific expressions that convey the sender’s goodwill to the recipient. The shorter, more casual nature of email lead to a breakdown in communication. “If someone says Wakarimashita you don’t know whether it’s a kind of warm, soft ‘I understand’ or a ‘yeah, I get it’ kind of cool, negative feeling,” says Kurita. “You don’t know what’s in the writer’s head.”

Ugly Font Rendering in PDFs

Dominik Wagner:

The design decision why your personal choice of having ugly fonts in smaller font sizes should be hard baked into generated PDFs puzzles me. It strikes me simply as an over-eager implementation of a feature that makes the world a worse place.

Higher-Order List Operations

Matt Might (via @CompSciFact):

While recursion is better than iteration for functional programming, new functional programmers are unaware of powerful libraries to encapsulate recursion over common data structures like lists.

This post explains some of the common higher-order list operations in Racket and Haskell by re-implementing them.

Bypassing PHP strcmp()

Daniel Regalado reports on how PHP’s strcmp() returns NULL when comparing a string with a non-string, and how if your code uses == (which sees NULL as 0) instead of === it will erroneously think the two are equal (via Colin Barrett).