Monthly Archives: April 2008

Did wordpress upgrade destroy all your unicode posts ?

devanagari, Internet, , ,

I upgraded wordpress software for this blog to version 2.5.2. After that none of the posts that had devanagari (unicode) text looked okay. After comparing the configuration files, I discovered that the troubling variable is DB_CHARSET. The default config setting is 'utf8'. But if you have been updating the software versions, your database table is probably in 'latin-1' charset, though wordpress has been saving unicode data to the tables. Once you remove the DB_CHARSET setting (or setting it to latin-1 or ''), things return to normal.

The setting is in the file wp-config.php in the wordpress install directory.
The value before change:
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

The value after change:
//define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_CHARSET', '');

So maybe I should try to recreate the tables with correct charset defined in mysql some day ?

Google jumps into custom hosted application bandwagon!

Internet, , , , ,

Google has launched appengine which provides developers with a platform SDK (python based!) and hosting with access to own Google BigTable database! This competes with Amazon.com's SQS , S3 (storage) and EC2 (hosting) services which are used by many startups... The applications will get google's massively scalable infrastructure, failover. Apps would also be able to easily use google's user authentication, analytics and other google API's.

The applications gallery points to some cool goodies... The applications would get a subdomain under appspot.com. So it is possible to run a search on google to find the existing applications.

Here is a python shell web app. You can see the loaded modules, enter and run some small programs...

Both companies are trying to entice developers from hot startups into using their infrastructure, so just in case they start getting bigger, it is easier to assimilate them! Let there be competition!