Skip to main content

Latin1 vs UTF8

Latin1 was the early default character set for encoding documents delivered via HTTP for MIME types beginning with /text . Today, only around only 1.1% of websites on the internet use the encoding, along with some older applications. However, it is still the most popular single-byte character encoding scheme in use today. A funny thing about Latin1 encoding is that it maps every byte from 0 to 255 to a valid character. This means that literally any sequence of bytes can be interpreted as a valid string. The main drawback is that it only supports characters from Western European languages. The same is not true for UTF8. Unlike Latin1, UTF8 supports a vastly broader range of characters from different languages and scripts. But as a consequence, not every byte sequence is valid. This fact is due to UTF8's added complexity, using multi-byte sequences for characters beyond the general ASCII range. This is also why you can't just throw any sequence of bytes at it and ex...
Post a Comment

Lists

Lists are appealing because they give structure to otherwise unwieldy information.

Information security people frequently repeat the adage that defenders "think in lists" and hackers think in graphs. But a graph is just a list of lists. And it seems obvious that this useful observation extends far beyond the domain of computer security.

The reason lists and graphs are powerful is because they provide us a fair idea of what concepts are all about. Lists are tools, just like metaphors. They can let us quickly organize data and view ideas from various vantage points, which is both useful and efficient.

The brain has a natural tendency to think in lists. The brain has only a small bag of tricks, like pattern matching and repetition, and it can augment the feedback loop of consciousness in various ways—experimenting with the information it receives from the world in tandem with repeated experimentation.

An example is the history of paleontology, where every few hundred years, someone remarked, "I think some of the stuff on land was once under water. Look at these fossils." That idea was repeated over and over again, with occasional variations over time.

Today, an entire field of testable, verifiable knowledge exists, built on the foundation of what began as a mundane observation.

The paleontology parable, however, does not encompass all forms of great thinking. There are also instances of genius where unique discoveries emerge, defying the predictability of list-based heuristics.

Here are some Wikipedia lists (and timelines) that I find interesting, fun, and/or useful:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

yt-dlp Archiving, Improved

One annoying thing about YouTube is that, by default, some videos are now served in .webm format or use VP9 encoding. However, I prefer storing media in more widely supported codecs and formats, like .mp4, which has broader support and runs on more devices than .webm files. And sometimes I prefer AVC1 MP4 encoding because it just works out of the box on OSX with QuickTime, as QuickTime doesn't natively support VP9/VPO9. AVC1-encoded MP4s are still the most portable video format. AVC1 ... is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distribution of video content, used by 91% of video industry developers as of September 2019. [ 1 ] yt-dlp , the command-line audio/video downloader for YouTube videos, is a great project. But between YouTube supporting various codecs and compatibility issues with various video players, this can make getting what you want out of yt-dlp a bit more challenging: $ yt-dlp -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best...
Post a Comment
Read more