by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/10/17 17:11 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/10/17/5499362.aspx
So I attended Tex Texin's How to be a CSI (Encoding Crime Scene Investigator) and although I would have named it differently (preferring CSI: Unicode to go with the theme of the shows), I really did love the entire presentation.
It's description:
Join the CSI team, Grissom, Willows, Sidle, Stokes, et al. in the forensic analysis of character encoding crimes. This presentation will elaborate on the techniques of CSI forensic analysis and its application to debugging character encoding problems in software and web applications. Several example problems will be diagnosed.
It is amazing how far he took the metaphor here, and how effectively he did it!
So much of my job has been working with people to try and fix those same encoding issues, and puting myself in the mindset of being like an investigator who knows that the witnesses lie ("my code is fine, it is IE that is broken here!") and so on is really fun to contemplate....
Hell, many of m blog posts have been about these problems, like Do not adjust your browser, a.k.a. sometimes two wrongs DO make a right, a.k.a. dumb quotes and Linguistic and Unicode considerations (or Language-specific Processing #4) and What's the encoding, again? and Consistent garbage text can be incorrect encoding identification (or detection), and the list goes on!
Of course, I always preferred Crossing Jordan to the various CSI franchises, part of why it was so sad to see it go off the air.
Crossing Jordan just always seemed like more of a character-driven drama, much moreso than any of the CSIs....
On top of which, the image I will always have will be Jill Hennessy needing to bend like a GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA while her father has to look like a bunch of strangling smart quotes so they can re-enact the encodoing crime against characters!
This post brought to you by α (U+03b1, a.k.a. GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA)
# Mihai on 17 Oct 2007 7:26 PM:
I can withes that the presentation was really captivating, although I have never seen an episode of CSI :-)
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