I've made an extension for Internet Explorer 8, FormToAccelerator which turns HTML forms on a web page into either an accelerator or a search
provider. In the design of the accelerators format we intentionally had HTML forms in mind so that it would be easy to create accelerators for existing web services. Consequently, creating an
accelerator from an HTML form is a natural concept and an extension I've been meaning to finish for many months now.
This is similar in concept to the Opera feature that lets you add a form as a search provider. The user experience is very rough and requires some knowledge of accelerator variables. If I can come up with a better interaction model I may update this in the future, but at the moment all the designs I can come up with require way too much effort. Install IE8 RC1 and then try out FormToAccelerator.
I've found while debugging networking in IE its often useful to quickly tell if a string is encoded in UTF-8. You can check for the Byte Order Mark (EF BB BF in UTF-8) but, I rarely see the BOM on UTF-8 strings. Instead I apply a quick and dirty UTF-8 test that takes advantage of the well-formed UTF-8 restrictions.
Unlike other multibyte character encoding forms (see Windows supported character sets or IANA's list of character sets), for example Big5, where sticking together any two bytes is more likely than not to give a valid byte sequence, UTF-8 is more restrictive. And unlike other multibyte character encodings, UTF-8 bytes may be taken out of context and one can still know that its a single byte character, the starting byte of a three byte sequence, etc.
The full rules for well-formed UTF-8 are a little too complicated for me to commit to memory. Instead I've got my own simpler (this is the quick part) set of rules that will be mostly correct (this is the dirty part). For as many bytes in the string as you care to examine, check the most significant digit of the byte:
| Code Points | 1st Byte | 2nd Byte | 3rd Byte | 4th Byte |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| U+0000..U+007F | 00..7F | |||
| U+0080..U+07FF | C2..DF | 80..BF | ||
| U+0800..U+0FFF | E0 | A0..BF | 80..BF | |
| U+1000..U+CFFF | E1..EC | 80..BF | 80..BF | |
| U+D000..U+D7FF | ED | 80..9F | 80..BF | |
| U+E000..U+FFFF | EE..EF | 80..BF | 80..BF | |
| U+10000..U+3FFFF | F0 | 90..BF | 80..BF | 80..BF |
| U+40000..U+FFFFF | F1..F3 | 80..BF | 80..BF | 80..BF |
| U+100000..U+10FFFF | F4 | 80..8F | 80..BF | 80..BF |
Sarah and I met up with Jon, Scott, Jesse, and Grib in Las Vegas last weekend and we had a fun time.
sequelguy posted a photo:
Why do security guards love Segway's so much?
sequelguy posted a photo:
Penn and Teller's stage before their Las Vegas show
sequelguy posted a photo:
On the bridge in front of Treasure Island just before the first show of 'Sirens of TI' that day.
Over the previous weekend Sarah and I got engaged. I had a limo pick us up and take us to a park that has a beautiful view of the Seattle
skyline where I proposed, then out for dinner and drinks including a bottle of wine for the ride back. What's the point of a limo ride if you don't drink while being driven around? It was a nice
night and only had a hint of rain when we came home. We don't yet have a date set.
Microsoft isn't completely shielded from our economies issues but I still have a job and
still get free soda. While that's all still the case, I decided to test Sarah's claimed ability to differentiate between Pepsi, Coke, and their diet counterparts by taste alone. I poured the four
sodas into marked cups and Sarah and I each took two runs through the cups with the following guesses.
| Drink | Sarah | Dave | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Guess 1 | Guess 2 | Guess 1 | Guess 2 | |
| Coke | Coke | Coke | Pepsi | Diet Pepsi |
| Diet Coke | Diet Coke | Diet Pepsi | Diet Coke | Diet Coke |
| Pepsi | Pepsi | Pepsi | Coke | Coke |
| Diet Pepsi | Diet Pepsi | Diet Coke | Diet Pepsi | Pepsi |
| Total (out of 8) | 6 | 3 | ||
As you can see from the results, Sarah's claimed ability to identify Coke and Pepsi by taste is confirmed. The first run through she got completely correct and on the second run only mistook Diet Pepsi for Diet Coke. Her excuse for the error on the second run was a tainted palate from the first run. I on the other hand was mostly incorrect. Surprisingly though my incorrect answers were mostly consistent between run one and two. For instance I thought Pepsi was Coke in both runs.
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