Wasting my energy on impossible things...

Storing unicode texts in MySQL with phpMyAdmin

Today, I've received a personal mail/request from Sivanantham Hemamalini, working for IT leisure in Singapore. Since I was in company when received the mail, I couldn't answer immediately. If I understand the question right, it is about inputting Unicode texts especially Tamil in phpMyAdmin. PhpMyAdmin 's default characterset is iso-8859-1 and so if we enter anything in the form, browser will convert it into numerical html entities. Say for example, if we enter தமிழ் and submit the form, it will convert it to & #2980;& #2990;& #3007;& #2996;& #3021; . Because of this browser's behavior, it will be difficult to store the Unicode text as it is. Solutions Immediate solution I could think of is changing or forcing the browser's character encoding into utf-8. In Mozilla Firefox, it can be set via View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) Another elegant solution might be changing the phpMyAdmin configurations so that it send...

Amazon India Prime Offer - A scam or a bug?

TLDR; Amazon.in shows and sends me a Prime offer that I can't avail (it leads to an error message) I have escalated this issue to Amazon India through various means, but the team wants screenshots (even after sharing them through Twitter) and so here's the post explaining that... 1. Amazon India sends me an email: Your Prime membership ends soon - Renew early to lock in old price of ₹999 1499 for another year of Prime. The newsletter comes like this: Rajesh, Renew Prime early and save ₹500 Your Prime membership ends soon Renew today Expiring soon DON'T GO A DAY WITHOUT PRIME! Your Prime membership ends soon - Renew early to lock in old price of ₹999 1499 for another year of Prime. Continue enjoying uninterrupted Prime benefits. Renew today Kindly ignore if you have already availed this offer. Please note that pro...

Who is S.P. Udayakumar, (Koodankulam anti-nuclear) activist of the year

I greatly admired S.P. Udayakumar ( Koodankulam anti-nuclear activist) for his calm and composed response; it is usually not easy to reply moronic Narayanasamy and moronic Ponraj (advisor of Abdul Kalam) who're always blabbering irrationally. By wrongly judging from his sober and humble look, I'd thought that he's an illiterate villager from Koodankulam. But, recently I came to know that he's studied in USA and worked as a professor there. My respect for him greatly increased when I compared him with other exhibitionist NRIs. Here are the details that I collected... Name: S.P. Udayakumar Age: 50 Native: Nagercoil Family: Wife Meera running SACCER primary and middle school, 2-sons Education M.A. (Peace Studies) from Notre Dame University in the United States (1990) Ph.D. (Political Science) from the University of Hawaii (1996) (Past) Occupation Research fellow at Kirwan Institute Professor at Governor's School of Public Issues and the Fut...