(You can choose or or both)

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Pretty girl ... elle est pas belle ma fille?


No comment.

A bit busy this evening, sorry. So here's a photo to keep you happy.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Excel CSV UTF-8 unicode accents characters


(Désolé, encore un article technique, en compensation - une photo de 'stinguette prise ce matin. J'expérimente aussi avec les 'catégories' dans ce blog - vous verrez que cet article est 'techno'; alors technophobes s'abstenir).

(Sorry, another technical post. But at least this time there's a photo of Little My, taken this morning. I'm also experimeting with 'labels' on this blog - you will notice that this one is 'Techno' - though not of the musical sort).

(UPDATE 2008-09-05: This is by far the most read post on my blog. Leave a little comment for me if you find it useful, I like to hear your stories)
Hello, welcome to my blog if you came here searching in desperation for a solution to a stupid problem.

The problem is that Excel won't correctly interpret accents in a csv file with utf-8 encoding. So the following csv:
id;name
4;Hélène

Looks like this when opened in Excel:
id name
4 Hélène

Do you want to know the solution?
Do you really really want to know?
Are you prepared to abandon all coding niceties and foibles about doing things the right way?

The solution (the only one that I have found/worked after trawling through lots of google) is to save your data as html, but to give the file a .xls extension.

Don't ask me why, but despite being flummoxed by the csv, Excel is smart enough to eat the html, accents and all.

Here is an example of the same data - with the necessary charset declaration.
<html>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html" charset="utf-8" />
<table>
<tr>
<th>id</th>
<th>name</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4</td>
<td>Hélène</td>
</tr>
</table>
</html>

You can even do a bit of styling on the results:
<style>
table, td, th {border:solid black}
table {border-collapse:collapse;border-width:0 0.5pt 0.5pt 0}
td, th {border-width:0.5pt 0 0 0.5pt}
</style>

[Postscript for Anonymous (in comments below) - if using Notepad or equivalent, you have to Save As UTF-8, otherwise it won't work.]

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Ick ... malade


J'étais malade dimanche et lundi. Kalia a commencé à vomir ce matin... On espère que Mama va échapper au virus...

I was ill on Sunday and Monday, Kalia started being sick this morning... We're just hoping that Mama manages to resist the nasty virus.

Monday, November 20, 2006

Frustration

J'ai mon nouveau jouet... mais c'est avec batterie et pas piles comme le précédent.

Et la batterie, il faut la charger...

Gngngngn

(Si jamais, le site dérrière le lien est de loin le meilleur que je connais pour tout ce qui concerne les appareils numériques, mais c'est in English...)

I've got my new toy, but it's got a custom battery, and not just AAs like the last one... And the battery has to charge before I can play with it.

Woe is me.

(By the way, the site behind the link is by far the best one I know of for all things concerning digital cameras.).

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Soon and very soon ... bientôt ?

L'absence prolongée d'appareil photo ne m'aide pas à être inspiré pour poster des articles sur ce blog. Mais ce sera peut-être bientôt résolu.

J'ai essayé plusieurs appareils ce matin en ville, dont aucun n'était concluant. Par contre il y a une action chez Swisscom (il ne faut pas chercher à comprendre !) pour des Sony DSC-W30 à 299F (avec memory stick 1GB), ce qui me paraît une bonne affaire.

J'en ai réservé un. Revenez bientôt pour voir si la mayonnaise prendra cette fois-ci.

(Pour ceux qui s'y intéressent, ce matin j'ai essayé des Nikon L5 et L6, et aussi les nouveaux Nikon ultra-fins avec 8Mpx etc. Mais vraiment pas impressionné par les performances à l'intérieur. Une petite fille c'est un excellent modèle pour pointer les faiblesses des appareils trop lents ! J'ai aussi essayé un Pentax bas-de-gamme, même constat...).

Not having a camera doesn't help my inspiration for posting to this blog. But this may soon be a thing of the past.

I spent a while this morning sampling several different models, none of which particularly impressed me, but there's one shop doing a sale for the Sony DSC-W30 at 299F (including a 1 gig memory stick), which seems like a barge-in to me.

They were sold out so I've reserved one for this week. Come back soon to see if I have more success this time!

(For those who like the juicy details, I tried the Nikon L5 and L6, as well as the new ultra-thin Nikons with 8Mpx. None of them were really up to scratch. Having a fidgety little girl indoors is a pretty good test for showing up slow cameras! I also tried a Pentax for about 250F, not much good either...)

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Pingu, riffler, rifloir


Savez-vous qui est Pingu ?

Sûrement que oui.

En tout cas, c'est la nouvelle découverte de Kalia (et de ses parents). Elle est juste assez grande maintenant pour comprendre plus ou moins ce qui se passe. Et en tout cas elle veut comprendre - il faut voir sa concentration quand la video tourne !

On doit juste essayer de faire attention qu'elle ne devienne pas accroc de l'écran comme ses parents...

//Savez-vous ce qu'est un rifloir ?

L'année passée, j'avais fait un petit cours de sculpture. Pour finir la pièce que j'avais commencer, il m'en faudra un ou plusieurs, de ces rifloirs. Je vous laisse découvrir par vous mêmes à l'aide de Google...

Have you heard of Pingu?

Most likely you have - it's a cross between telly-tubbies and Wallace and Gromit, with a bit of Just William thrown in for good measure (but better than that sounds).

Kalia loves it, in any case. She's just about old enough now to understand what's going on, and in any case she really concentrates to try and understand.

Now we just have to make sure she doesn't turn into a telly-addict, could be difficult given her genetic makeup!

//Do you know what a riffler is?

I didn't, until I started looking for one on the internet (always difficult to find something when you don't know what it's called). I did a one-day sculpture course, and I'm just getting round to thinking about buying some rifflers to finish what I started.

I'll let you find out more with Google...