Characters
Oh, what a day.
First Sjoerd tries to take down my weblog by using one of the characters declared verboten by XML. Emboldened by my preview committing aptosis, he deftly attempts to pull the ol' swicheroo by previewing one thing and then substituting another and hitting submit...
Only to find that his character bomb had been splatted by my sanitization logic. This had been long perfected a while back, and the knowledge I gained formed the basis of my first contribution to the rails community in the form of XChar. Since then, I’ve learned even more. In re.sub, the replacement can be a function, so I can replace the wayward character with a suitably escaped numeric character reference, thus:
body=re.compile("[\x01-\x08\x0B\x0C\x0E-\x1F]"). \
sub(lambda c: '&#%d;' % ord(c.group(0)),body)
Then it was off to RailsConf, where I met several old friends that I knew from other contexts. James Duncan (who I knew from the early Ant days) and I talked about Han Unification. I asked Joey about his wife, but apparently she isn’t into rails. I talked to Jeff about the ever new and inventive ways that people find to screw up their feeds. And I got to meet the SporkMonger himself. I guess he can now check me off his list.
While talking to James Duncan, somebody whose name I didn’t catch came up to thank me for XChars. It seams that Builder was in a pipeline of processing in an application that he was involved with, and somewhere there was some unclean data in the form of character encoding issues. Plopping in Builder 2.0 fixed this right up.
I think that he made the third person who thanked me personally for this.
Meanwhile, it seems that XChar went under the microscope by none other than _why himself — and found wanting. This was especially, um, poignant, as today I got to see _why for the first time, live, and on stage, singing “am I a programmer yet?”. I think his final song was a cross between Ventura Highway and chunky bacon.
Hopefully, tomorrow (or rather, the next 24 hours) will be equally as interesting.