I started to write a guide on using PHP with UTF-8. It's on German, but I plan to translate it within the next couple of days.

Today Comic-Sammlung.Net went online. Well, layout is still to be done, and the functionality sure will increase (there are non-hierarchical relations to be implemented, and user reviews will be integrated, too), but for now its OK (and gives the search engines something to do).

The site contains information about nearly 90.000 German comics, grouped into more than 6.000 comic series and categorized by topic, style, and publisher. The project was realizes in Drupal with (nearly) no special programming, but with sole use of Content Construction Kit and Views module.

As you might have heard, Apple's Safari browser now is available for Windows, too. So there is yet another browser to support for us web developers. Hallelujah!

Unfortunately, the current build seems terribly broken, as the following screenshot shows (Click to enlarge):

For one of my projects I'm using Apache's Xerces C++ XML Parser and run into this strange error:

The primary document entity could not be opened.

Took me a while to figure out that Xerces simply wants to say "File not found" here, because I was was calling parse() with the data to be parsed, while Xerces expects a file name here. Silly me.

However: Here's how to parse an XML string using Xerces SAX parser. you need to use a MemBufInputSource:

.. this may be because of a wrong script tag. Actually, both Internet Explorer 6 and 7 will fail, if you use the script tag like this:

PS: This is primary a note to myself, since I get trapped by this over and over again...

I'm maintaining the Drupal userreview module now and hope to do the first round of bug fixing before Christmas.

Two things I find especially annoying about updating iTunes:

1. Why I need to download a full setup each time?
2. And why are all QuickTime settings - especially the setting to not install a QuickTime icon in the taskbar on startup - lost after each update?

In Search of The Holy Grail describes an easy way to create a three-column, source-ordered, table-less layout with a fluid column in the middle. It is used by the Comic Marktplatz, for example. However, there is an annoying bug with the shiny new Internet Explorer 7. IE7 has a problem in understanding the left column rule of

margin-left: -100%;

Instead of considering the width of the surrounding div container, IE7 inserts the width of the body, which leads to the left column being moved out of sight to the far left. Here's how to fix it.

I was pointing to articles about if low level optimization really makes sense and if C++ is really faster than higher level languages several times. But of course this will be a never ending debate, and it still continues. This time C and C++ should be the best languages for higher level mathematics problems. Unfortunately this is not the case.