Need a freeware merge tool? I found a great one: WinMerge. This little guy just saved me a hour of comparing two files and trying to figure out which lines I needed from each.

How'd I get in this mess? Well, I had a dev version of my file and a live version that is running for customers. The dev version is in the midst of large bits of changes and some people using the live code needed a rather large bit of changes to be made. I made the fixes but was left with two files with large disparate chunks of changes. WinMerge fixed me right up :)

Time to go into nerd mode for a bit. Sorry...read this if you want to know why this is happening.

So, Hongyun's new site BubbaNotes.com is getting more users and we've decided to set up a bulletin board system so everyone can get to know each other better and have discussions about learning English. Anyway, I've been trying to get the Simple Machines Forum (which is simply phenomenal in my opinion) to understand Chinese characters. At first, I was able to switch the default character set to chinese simplified utf 8 and everything "just worked"--wow! Then for my own user account, I was able to switch to English which is really cool--each user can have their own UI preference as long as the theme supports it. Anyway, the problem came when I tried to input Chinese into the board. No matter what I did, I got back question marks ("???") instead of the actual Chinese characters. WTF? I thought. So I started digging...and digging...and digging as I normally do in these situations. I eventually stumbled upon Nixser's Solution For MySQL UTF-8 Encoded Data Unreadable In Web Pages..

In case you this page disappears, I've mirrored the info here:

Solution
I’ve solved the problem with phpmyadmin, with the inspiration from this MySQL Doc. I am not sure if my host has upgraded the MySQL server recently or not, but this method worked out for me. Note that I’ve tried to import the same database into my local debian box, the problem still occured and same work needed to be done. Now here’s how it’s solved.Warning, backup everything before making any changes, universal rule!

First, you have to know where’s the data location that needs to be fixed(Database, Table, then Column). With phpmyadmin, I selected the database name, then the related table, and check on the field that needed the workaround. Edit that field DATA TYPE, to “Binary”. It is important that you make sure the LENGTH is maintained same. If the field’s data type was TEXT, MEDIUMTEXT, or LONGTEXT, change it to “BLOB”, with the original length.(This is to ensure that your data won’t get truncated). Collation here is not important since data is going to be converted to binary.

You should now see the field’s data type being changed to “binary”, “varbinary”, or “blob” depending on the length. Now the second step is, change the data type back to what it was before the binary conversion. Note that, a correct “Collation” must be set this time. For my case I’m sure the data is in UTF-8, so I’d use “utf8_general_ci” for the collation. After making this conversion, the data that contains chinese characters is displayed flawlessly on the new site. It’s just that easy.

And it really is that easy...except for the fact that I have to do this to each and every text input field in the db...yikes.

Stuff I'm investigating:

rakaz - Make your pages load faster by combining and compressing javascript and css files
Attach icons to anything with CSS
Dual Boot Vista, OSX on a non-Mac
A few free programming books
H4cker's Corner
Upgrading to MT3.3 tips

Well now that Macs are gaining in popularity (and will soon take over the consumer space, sorry Dell), it is befitting to actually test your websites on Mac based browsers. How to do this if you don't have a Mac? BrowsrCamp.

That's right...this free (and paid) service allows you to take snapshots of pages on Safari for free. You'll need to pay a few bucks a month if you want to view other browsers on Mac OS or if you want to test out Ajax-y, flash-ish type of interactions.

BrowsrCamp

Sysinternals Freeware

Some really nice (and all free!) tools here to help you debug just about everything there is to debug in Windows.

So after I did the initial incarnation of the Flickrization of Hongyunart, I found that permalinking was a little (well A LOT) broken. This next article comes to my rescue (I hope):

Content with Style: Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for AJAX Apps