intertwingly

Monthly, the Apache Software Foundation has a board meeting, and the work flow that leads up to this is that a rotating selection of Officers prepare written reports and either commit them directly to subversion or email them to a mailing list where they will be picked up.  The end result involves a lot of copying and pasting.

It is an unfortunate truth that a number of these officers are still using proprietary operating systems and tools (editors and mail readers primarily) which haven’t been configured to use utf-8.  The end result is predictable: a file which contains a number of encoding errors.  Identifying them and making the necessary corrections has therefore become a small but necessary part of making the agenda and minutes.

Yesterday, I made a small script (demo) which helps in this task.

I guess this application qualifies as middleware.