Puny and puns and wikis
All the stuff on the IDN thing intro’d me to punycode; here’s a wikipedia def. Okay, it took me a minute to see the pun. And another to see the irony of punycode making longer urls. Can’t use tinyurl because then you’re obfuscatin’ again.
Wikipedia quickly became my primary definition database: the quality is excellent, I’m usually finding what I want, it’s pretty to look at, and I get to spend a few more minutes in wikiland each day. I’ve even got direct location bar wikipedia searching using firefox keywords: I hook the ‘wp’ keyword to ‘http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s’ in bookmarks. Now at any time I can ctrl-l to the location bar, and
wp punycode
to the wiki page.
I’m putting some energy into wikis the last few weeks, but wikipedia’s own mediawiki needs php/mysql which is more than I want to do just now. Instead, I’m using moinmoin for the work wiki experiment, and just starting with the ruby instiki for my personal wiki. Ever closer to a dive into ruby–if I can’t quite tool up yet, I can at least sit next to it.