News archive 2008 site home

11-Dec-2008
Japan 2008 logo

We've returned from our 5-week visit of Yuko's parents / Hannah's grandparents in Japan. The sun was shining every day, so we enjoyed a warm escape from the dreary autumn weather in Germany. Though we stayed at home most of the time (and watched Hannah grow, play, eat her first rice cookie and mash), we went sightseeing to Kyoto, Himeji, Osaka and Kobe.


30-May-2008
umlaut characters in receipt

It is 2008, and non-ASCII characters are still causing problems and workarounds (in Germany, where the native language includes the äöüß characters). Let's have a look at this receipt from a large discount supermarket chain: We see

  1. An ü character which was rendered as ▒; it should read Müller. I've seen these funny characters when DOS and Windows codepages got mixed up.
  2. A correctly rendered ö, proving that principally, umlaut characters are supported by this system and can print just fine.
  3. A workaround: ö entered as OE and ü entered as UE. (Why some products are all-caps is another mystery; they probably come from different data sources.)

12-May-2008
Hannah Karkat

Our daughter Hannah Karkat is born!