Unicode is nifty.

[bnewman]

I just realized that I can cut and paste Chinese characters like any other text.

Since, lately, if I've been writing code, the user interface has been a terminal emulator that can't display Unicode (for example, the first character below, pasted into Terminal, comes out as "\347\245\236"), it's been hard for me to get excited about basically everyone standardizing on UTF-8. On the other hand, it means I can put this in an LJ post:

Each of the two-character phrases below is the name of a quasi-governmental mega-corporation in a well-known science fiction universe — three different science fiction universes:

鄭和

靑日

神羅

1. Qeng Ho* — A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
2. Blue Sun (Qing Re) — Firefly, Joss Whedon
3. Shinra — Final Fantasy VII, Squaresoft

*actually, pinyin "Zheng He", Wade-Giles "Cheng Ho" — Vinge erred in his translation from W-G to pinyin. In-world, I attribute this to linguistic drift — since the story is set thousands of years in the future, that's a pretty modest amount of drift.

I am thinking of making a costume consisting of corporate-logo gear from these three companies.

Comments

[sinsofthedove.livejournal.com]

rabican actually has a Blue Sun shirt, as of today. It's nifty.

[ultranurd.livejournal.com]

It's not entirely Terminal's fault. There's no reason that Apple Terminal couldn't take Unicode characters (well, as you said, UTF-8 on a Mac, UTF-16 on Windows)... except that it has to behave like a VT100 teletype, which naturally only operates using ASCII characters.

Incidentally, if you use the appropriate functions, you could read those raw UTF-8 bytes from an environment variable or argv and your program would get the correct unicode characters (well, assuming locale for UTF-8 was set up correctly and everything).

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I randomly saw some guy walking around campus here (Michigan) wearing a Blue Sun shirt last summer.

[creed-of-hubris.livejournal.com]

Qeng Ho is named after the kickass admiral? I guess I forgot that.

[crystalpyramid]

Any guesses as to why those show up as boxes with numbers on them on my computer? Or how I would go about fixing that?

[mneme]

They show up as numbers here too, probably because I don't have any chinese fonts installed

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Numbers? For me, they just show up as large, bold question marks. Before I saw what the actual question was, when I just saw the word "Answers" as an lj-cut, I thought that the large, bold question marks were pretty neat :).

[batyatoon]

Should it worry me that I recognized Blue Sun?