Monday 15th January 2007

I see far too much writing on the web using “--” instead of “—”. Most software out there now copes quite happily with UTF-8, so there's no technical reason not to use the “EM DASH” glyph. Actually, I lie, it's less convenient because most keyboards don't have a “—” key, but do have a “-” key. In vim, you can use the “-M” digraph, and in GNOME I find the Character Palette panel applet nearly as handy. Or in HTML-land just use “—” if you prefer.

So, this is a public service announcement: use a real em dash, not the ugly double hyphen. Thank you.

Unicode: it's not just for non-English speakers, it's for punctuation pedants too!

Linux.conf.au is huge this year. Much much larger than last time it was in Sydney. As usual, many of the highlights so far have been meeting and talking to people, rather than the talks.

I've spent most of today at the GNOME miniconf, but I think tomorrow the Gaming miniconf is looking surprisingly interesting...