1. Manually Wrangling Unicode in Perl

    The best advice I can give about Unicode and UTF-8 in Perl is: don’t worry about it. Just do what you need to do, read up on some basics, and it’ll mostly all work out. When you’re getting odd results, make sure your I/O is UTF-8, and perhaps sprinkle a “use utf8;” at the top of your source files.

    And most of the time, this is just fine. Perl … read more.

  2. The Emperor’s Favourite

    From the IRC archives of #crypt, originally from February 2008:

    [16:32] <halcyon> tio: tell us a story

    [16:35] <tio> okay

    [16:35] <tio> once upon a time

    [16:36] <tio> there was a rich emperor, the ruler of a great land

    [16:37] <tio> as befitted his status as leader of such a wealthy land, he had everything he could want, and was a royal pain to buy birthday presents for

    [16:37 …

    read more.
  3. Building a UPS, Part II: Monitoring

    In my last post, I described how I built my lovely (and massively overpowered) network UPS system. But it was missing something: a way to monitor the charge of the UPS. In principle, you’d use this information to tell equipment when it needs to gracefully shutdown.

    In practise, I’ve tried to avoid ever needing to shut down equipment by sizing it such that it can cope with any likely outages, but given that … read more.

  4. Building a UPS with LiFePO4 cells

    Power cuts have become a common occurrence around here, under the glamorous title of “load-shedding“. The local electrical utility has, for some years, and for many historical reasons, experienced periodic trouble meeting the demands placed upon the electricity network. It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does, my area tends to go dark for about two hours, once or twice a day. This has led to a number of equipment failures; most … read more.

Back to top…