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Updating Mojibake to Unicode 18.0.0
I’ve updated Mojibake to Unicode 18. The beta period is over, and I don’t think there’s any need to wait for the latest summer fixes. My library generates all the files automatically, so I’m confident the generator script will not crash in September. New emojis, like the U+1FADD (PICKLE), a meteor, and others, you say.…
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Being on Hacker News after years of work
Last night, I had the courage to publish the Mojibake C library I’ve worked on for years on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48941123 +15 comments and +15 stars on GitHub after one day? Wow, such a great achievement, you might say. After years of work, a number with two letters? Well, it is a great one for…
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AIs are the new computers
I’ve heard a lot of parallels: “the advent of AIs is like the advent of X back in the days”. I think that is simply the advent of computers. Do you remember what people were saying about the first computers? Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. Pablo Picasso 196x But: Any sufficiently…
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Don’t hate AI
People hated books when they first came out. They hated horseless carriages. So any new disruptive technology will take a little while for society to digest it, also to evolve. Matt Mullenweg, 2026 I’ve seen people hating a lot of things when they came out. Like credit cards, crypto, JavaScript private elements syntax, or even…
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Prefix compression of thousands of similar strings
In the Mojibake library I use the data of the Unicode standard UnicodeData.txt file. That file is automatically generated and full of similar strings. The aim of Mojibake is to be as small as possible, and the name column of the unicode_data table is by far the largest piece of data in my SQLite database.…
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A new BibLaTeX WordPress block
I found that BibLaTeX nowadays supports URLs, Unicode characters, and all the modern stuff. I’ve always been a great LaTeX fan, since my university days. My book had a very complex millimeter-precise pagination such as: So, why not create a WordPress plugin that generates a BibLaTeX entry of the current post? But, even more funny,…
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When a software project needs to stop
Some years ago, I was at one of those shops where you can buy useless, but funny, objects that you can forget in one of your desk drawers. There was one hand-made of wood, that kind of pretty, creepy one, you can move parts, and that 99% of the time has been positioned to flip…
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It’s Not Wrong that (for HN) “🤦🏼♂️”.length == 36
Hey! Unintentional clickbait! I am not talking about how a space character has length 36 in Hacker News! If you are coming here from HN the above 🤦🏼♂️ emoji have been replaced with a space! Edit: Success! HN has renamed my entry to It’s Not Wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36. At least…
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Unicode, buffering and printf
One day, during a weekend, I was writing some code for my Mojibake library when I saw a strange output in my CLI for the U+10C0 codepoint chosen by random. Uh? The Unicode Georgian block (MJB_BLOCK_GEORGIAN) has ID 36, and not 0. Even stranger the name of the block was correct. Just the ID was…
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Shrink SQLite amalgamation
In Mojibake, the low-level Unicode library I am writing the first rule is: be small. I am using the SQLite amalgamation to index the hundred of thousands on codepoints/characters/etc. These are the numbers on SQLite 3.50.2, standard amalgamation. Once built with a very basic run of clang: We can do better because in Mojibake I…