One of the great things about human communication is that we keep finding so many new ways to do it. One medium is emoji—little picture characters you can embed in your text. The pictures include everything from smiley faces, to buildings, to piles of poo; and they really do help liven up casual communication.

One of the great things about Unicode is that it has lots of room to grow, and the Unicode consortium regularly adds new things to the standard. As part of Unicode 6.0 they added code points for emoji. This was great because previously there were multiple, incompatible, encodings for emoji characters. Making it standard was great.

One of the grew things about Apple is that when they see a standard that makes sense, they adopt it early, and decisively. When iOS 5 was release back in 2011 it included full support for Unicode 6.0 and started using the new standard emoji code points rather than the old incompatible non-standard code points.

It was at this point that the pile of poo hit the fan—neither of those emoji would show up in our app any more. While the rest of the technological world had gotten on the Unicode bandwagon (sometimes kicking and screaming), the JavaScript world had not. The JavaScript standard still mandated an internal representation of text that could not express all of Unicode. In fact, it could only encode a little more than 65,000 characters in what is known as the Basic Multilingual Plane. The technology on which our servers are based use JavaScript, and as such, mangles any non-BMP characters because it has no way to represent them. Grrr.

[ Before you start mocking node.js or JavaScript for its lack of full Unicode support, please note that I really wanted to insert an emoji frowny face at this part of the narrative—but I can't. You see, MySQL, the DB which backs this blog, didn't become fully Unicode compliant until version 5.5 which came out in December of 2010. My provider is using a pre-5.5 version. ]

So anyway, earlier this year I wrote a really detailed email at work explaining the issue to all of our folks who, it turns out, are not big text geeks like I am. The email spelled out the history of Unicode, described how text encodings worked in layman’s terms, and then gave details about the shortcomings of our server technology in this area. Well, by a amazing piece of luck, our CTO ran into Brendan Eich at a conference. Brendan is the guy who invented JavaScript. Lots of talking happened, emails were exchanged, tweets happened, danders were raised, and bugs were filed, etc. It seems that the JavaScript community had been aware of this problem for quite a while, but had never really had much reason to care because, until recently, there were almost no characters outside of the BMP.

As of Unicode 6 there are a lot. There will be a lot more. Pretty much every new character created for Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and lots of other scripts, will go into the extra-BMP space. Plus, you know, you gotta be able to send smiley faces and piles of poo.

I’m happy to say that JavaScript is changing. The technical committee that manages the evolution of ECMAScript, the standard on which JavaScript is based, has said that full Unicode support will be part of ES 6. V8, the JavaScript engine on which node.js is built has already updated, and version 0.7 of node.js will include this shiny new V8 and soon all of our users will be able to send each other emoji birthday cakes through Voxer again.

If you ever think that you’re just a small voice in a big industry, or that big giant international technology consortia don’t care about the needs of users, well, you’re still mostly right. But sometimes, just sometimes, everything works out the way that it should, and smart people work really hard to fix big problems on short schedules, and it makes the world a better place for all of us.

Apathy gets you nowhere.

“iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual”

by Craig Hockenberry

Marco Arment put this book on his list of iOS books to read, so I gave it a shot. I figure that I had read all the manuals, but maybe I missed something.

The book is really well written, and the content is top-notch—which is what you’d expect from Craig Hockenberry. This is a book that I wish I had had three years ago when I was setting up my first app for sale in the App Store. The overview of iOS software development is solid, but covered better in other books. Where this book shines is in describing the process around setting up your develop account, getting your app configured for App Store submission, and managing the process of shipping. It then describes how to track your sales and support data after the app is released. The book is worth it for that material alone.

Well, getting submerged and dragged along the side of the boat was a good excuse to give all of my gear a good cleaning and fresh-water rinse. It turns out that seawater is really, really dirty.

Well, it’s all clean now and dripping dry in my shower.

Some day I hope that I am accomplished enough of a sailor that I’ll warrant having a shore crew to do this job for me.

“Polyglot: How I Learn Languages” by Kato Lomb

Kato Lomb was a Hungarian woman who was famous in the language world for several reasons. She was one of the first simultaneous interpreters ever. That in itself is amazing. But what interested me about her was that she could read, write, and speak 16 languages—all of which she taught herself as an adult learner. I love languages but have struggled over the years to try to learn new ones, so she has been an inspiration to me.

She wrote this book to formalizer her methods of self-teaching languages as an adult learner without access to an immersive environment so that others might learn from her successes. This book was first published in 1970 so doesn’t include any references to the amazing amount of resources now available via the intertubenets. Still, it’s an interesting read, and inspirational.

I started with a 3.5 pound beef roast that I got on sale the other night. First thing was to season the outside.

I then sealed it in a vacuum bag and let it sit in the fridge for 24 hours.

This afternoon I pulled it out and let it get to room temperature. Next came putting it in a 200°F oven until the internal temperature got to 110°F. I then cranked the heat up to 500°F until the internal temperature reached 130°F. This gave it a great crisp, caramelized exterior.

After pulling it from the oven I let it sit for half an hour. While sitting it continued to cook on the inside and reached a final temperature of 145°F. This was actually a wee bit more than I was shooting for—I wanted 140°F. More trial and error are needed. Still, the results came out great. Inexpensive cut of meat, incredibly simple cooking technique, extremely tasty results.

“The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande

The quick summary would be “checklists keep you from screwing up the easy stuff so you can focus your wit, experience, and creativity on the hard stuff.  This was a surprisingly interesting book; especially the case studies where simple checklists have made tremendous enhancements to health, safety, quality, and financial outcomes.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is my Voxer Walkie Talkie app appearing in the New and Noteworthy section of the iTunes App Store.  The app has been around for 18 months so I guess we’re not new—must be noteworthy!

It’s nice to be working on a hit again.  It’s been a while.

Let’s check out the Volvo crew’s Live Eye virtual reality presentation:

Wow, virtual haze, and virtual city behind the virtual boats.  At least the virtual water is more or less the right shade of virtual blue.  This is the same style of graphic display that professional yacht racing has been using since forever.  These types of displays evolved because yacht racing typically took place offshore and this was just the only thing you could do to show folks back on shore what was going on.  It’s boring as hell, and there is no reason to resort to this sort of thing for an in-shore race that is blanketed with live footage from helicopters and chase boats.  This sterile showing of stuff that isn’t the actual race just promotes the idea that the spectators are not really part of what is going on, that the race is not for them.  This display doesn’t even give the poor viewer any real information.  The teal boat is in front, the black boat is next, and the red after that.  How much space is between them?  How big is the time difference between them?  If you were a fan you could tell that these boats represent Telefonica, PUMA, and Camper—but if you’re new to the sport, or just flipping channels and happen to see it, there’s nothing there to draw you in.

Now, compare that to the work that Stan Honey is doing with his LiveLine system.

LiveLine is way more live than Live Eye.  Here we’ve got an incredible augmented reality display on top of live race video from a helicopter.  We can see the distance between the leaders, which leg of the race it is, the track each boat has been following.  We can see national flag for each team, and the team’s name.  We can see the (yellow) lay lines, and the rounding gates.  Very importantly, we can see the approach circles around the gates (the rules change slightly inside those circles).  We see the (red) course boundaries.  It’s phenomenal.

As one boat is overtaking another you can watch the distance counter  wind down—100m, 90m, 80m, …—and you get excited wondering if he’ll really pass.  You can get all jingoistic watching your country’s flag overtake some other country’s flag.  If you’re a racing sailor you have so much info that you can really geek out on watching the fine details of a race the same way a baseball junkie tracks the game stats.  More importantly, you see the real boats.  You also see spectator boats right there against the coarse boundaries.  In a lot of the footage you can see actual human spectators going nuts on shore—a shoreline that is just a few hundred meters away, and not three miles offshore like the last America’s Cup was.  Seeing this presents the event as a spectator sport.  It makes for interesting TV.

Also, as a software developer myself, I have immense respect for the LiveLine team for the ridiculous amount of 21st century technology they have in their system.  That is some seriously hard work.  Meanwhile, Live Eye is on par with what video games about boats were doing over a decade ago.  (screenshot from Sid Meier’s Pirates!)

But, you know, sometimes you just want to do one little bit really quickly.  I got really excited when I saw that Ziploc came out with their own vacuum freezer system.  They have a special line of their freezer bags that have a one-way valve in the corner.  I got the starter kit (which includes the pump and three quart-sized bags) and tried it out tonight on a chicken breast.  The whole process was about five seconds.  I’m thrilled.

It now suddenly makes sense to quickly vacuum seal left-overs, or a partially-eaten piece of fruit, or lunches that you’re packing, etc.  Heck, I can even see using it to seal up small toiletries and such so that they’re not banging around in bags when out for the day.

I give this product a definite thumbs-up.