Spring Festival, stay at home with some movies. The Celestine Prophecy is not so attractive, even a little bit boring. Until the end, when I saw the nine insights, I begin to understand what it means.

Insight 1. We are discovering again that we live in a deeply mysterious world, full of sudden coincidences and synchronistic encounters that seem destined.

Insight 2. As more of us awaken to this mystery, we will create a completely new worldview - redefining the universe as energetic and sacred.

Insight 3. We will discover that everything around us, all matter, consists of and stems from a divine energy that we are beginning to see and understand.

Insight 4. From this perspective, we can see that humans have always felt insecure and disconnected from this sacred source, and have tried to take energy by dominating each other. This struggle is responsible for all human conflict.

Insight 5. The only solution is to cultivate a personal reconnection with the divine, a mystical transformation that fills us with unlimited energy and love, extends our perception of beauty, and lifts us into a Higher-Self Awareness.

Insight 6. In this awareness, we can release our own pattern of controlling, and discover a specific truth, a mission, we are here to share that helps evolve humanity toward this new level of reality.

Insight 7. In pursuit of this mission, we can discover an inner intuition that shows us where to go and what to do, and if we make only positive interpretations, brings a flow of coincidences that opens the doors for our mission to unfold.

Insight 8. When enough of us enter this evolutionary flow, always giving energy to the higher-self of everyone we meet, we will build a new culture where our bodies evolve to ever higher levels of energy and perception.

Insight 9. In this way, we participate in the long journey of evolution from the Big Bang to life's ultimate goal: to energize our bodies, generation by generation, until we walk into a heaven we can finally see.

The most impressive one, insight 4, "humans have always felt insecure and disconnected from the sacred source, and have tried to take energy by dominating each other". What a truth! We are always seeing country against country, company against company, people against people... All those great guys, showed their power of intelligence, fighting against their enemies, controlling their partners, cheating their followers, created the history of human being. Colleagues become competitors, friends betray each other, couples fall apart, even brothers and sisters, farther and son, become enemies... All of them, or I should say, all of us, tried and are trying to control others. All of these struggles are caused by fear of losing, losing of power, money, love, safety, chance of education... No matter what kind of relation between them, people will become competitors of each other, in the face of scarcity of resources.

The solution of this situation is evolution. Here seems the science and religion combined :-) The evolution is that reconnect with the divine, extends perception of beauty, and lift awareness, releasing pattern of controlling, share energy with others, involve more and more people, and finally created a heaven on the Earth.

What a beautiful picture! And sounds familiar, to me, a Chinese guy born under the red flag. We will see.

Today I am facing another set of Chinese character issues, web application development using Ruby on Rails.

Environment:

• RedHat Enterprise Linux AS 3 (cat /etc/redhat-release)
• Ruby 1.8.4
• Rails 1.1.2
• MySQL 5.0.19

1. Chinese characters in source code (.rhtml, .rjs, .rxml)

• Convert all source code to UTF-8 encoding, pls refer to here, or in RadRails, set project
• Modify ApplicationController:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  before_filter :set_charsets
  def set_charsets
    content_type = @headers["Content-Type"] || 'text/html'
    if /^text\//.match(content_type)
      @headers["Content-Type"] = "#{content_type}; charset=utf-8"
    end
  end
end

2. Chinese characters read from/write to database

• Modify MySQL configuration file: my.ini/my.cnf, set default-character-set=utf8, restart MySQL
• Modify config/database.yml, set encoding

      encoding: utf8

• Restart RoR

3. Other tips about Chinese character

• Calculate string length or characters number

require 'jcode'
"你好".size # 6
"你好".jsize # 2

• Sub string

"你好"[0,1] #Not recognizable characters
"你好".scan(/./)[0,1].join # "你"

Seems only Chinese programmers like Unicode and UTF-8 encoding. Again, a batch of Ruby source code files written in Windows default encoding need to be converted into UTF-8 encoding, to make Chinese characters applicable. Why don't they use UTF-8? I mean the author of these source code files.

To finish this boring task, I decided to find a tool from the Internet. I believe there must be somebody else has been bothered about it. Here is a simple Python script to fix this problem:

#!/usr/bin/python

import os,sys

def convert( filename ):
    # read the file
    content = open( filename ).read()
    # convert the concent
    try:
        new_content = content.decode().encode( "UTF-8" )
        #write to file
        open( filename, 'w' ).write( new_content )
    except:
        print " error... "

def explore( dir ):
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk( dir ):
        for file in files:
            path = os.path.join( root, file )
            print "convert " + path,
            convert( path )
            print " done"

if __name__ == "__main__":
    nargs = len(sys.argv)
    if not nargs == 2:
        print "usage: %s path" %os.path.basename(sys.argv[0])
    else:
        path = sys.argv[1]
        if os.path.isfile( path ):
            convert( path )
        elif os.path.isdir( path ):
            explore( path )

Chinese character issue is always a stone on the way, which prevent Chinese developers from finishing their tasks on time. It eats up plenty of happy time one could spend with their friends and family otherwise... Who could give the average cost per year by the Chinese character issues?

This time, the devil appears in J2ME development.

Problem:

Environment: Windows XP English, JDK 1.6.0, Eclipse 3.2 + EclipseME 1.6.2 + Ant 1.6.5/1.7.0

Purpose:

Packaging a J2ME application with Ant script:

• copy JAD file from source code to distribution folder
• generate MANIFEST file from JAD
• generate JAR file
• update JAD file to set the "MIDlet-Jar-Size" and "MIDlet-Jar-URL" properties.

The ant script as below:

<target name="jar" depends="preverify">
  <mkdir dir="${dist.dir}"/>
  <copy file="${sourcejad}" todir="${dist.dir}"/>
  <copy file="${sourcejad}" tofile="${dist.dir}/${manifest}">
    <filterchain>
      ......
    </filterchain>
  </copy>
  <jar destfile="${dist.dir}/${jarfilename}" manifest="${dist.dir}/${manifest}">
    <fileset dir="${preverified.dir}"/>
      ......
    </jar>
  <jad jar="${dist.dir}/${jarfilename}" jad="${dist.dir}/${jadfilename}"/>
</target>

There are some Chinese characters in the source JAD file as the value of "MIDlet-Vendor". After run the Ant script, these Chinese characters become unreadable characters in both JAD and MANIFEST file. (Here "jad" task is an external jad tool).

Analysis:

1. Ant "copy" task may cause some encoding issue

2. Ant "jar" task may cause some encoding issue

3. Ant external task "jad" may cause some encoding issue

Resolve:

1. Explicitly set "encoding" and "outputencoding" of Ant "copy" task as UTF-8.

2. Explicitly set "manifestencoding" of Ant "jar" task as UTF-8.

3. Use Antenna's "wtkjad" instead of external "jad" task.

Final Ant script as below:

<property name="wtk.home" value="D:\Dev\WTK25-Beta2"/>
<property name="wtk.cldc.version" value="1.0"/>
<property name="wtk.midp.version" value="2.0"/>
<taskdef name="wtkjad" classname="de.pleumann.antenna.WtkJad" classpath="${ant.lib.dir}/antenna-bin-0.9.14.jar"/>
......
<target name="jar" depends="preverify">
  <mkdir dir="${dist.dir}"/>
  <copy file="${sourcejad}" todir="${dist.dir}" encoding="UTF-8" outputencoding="UTF-8"/>
  <copy file="${sourcejad}" tofile="${dist.dir}/${manifest}" encoding="UTF-8" outputencoding="UTF-8">
    <filterchain>
      ......
    </filterchain>
  </copy>
  <jar destfile="${dist.dir}/${jarfilename}" manifest="${dist.dir}/${manifest}" manifestencoding="UTF-8">
    <fileset dir="${preverified.dir}"/>
      ......
    </jar>
  <wtkjad jarfile="${dist.dir}/${jarfilename}" jadfile="${dist.dir}/${jadfilename}" update="yes" encoding="UTF-8"/>
</target>