So I left work early to combat a vicious cold. When I got home I scanned once again
1) the recent discussion with Justeren and BoSD on VeriSign's i-Nav plugin, and how the entire OS should just support unicode from the ground up. BoSD mentions
2) Joelonsoftware's Unicode rant. I had read that before, but now had time to read it again. I also had time to catch up on Joel's writing in general and found
3) a favorable review of
4) Eric S. Raymond's Art of Unix Programming which looks like a fun, if ideosyncratic, read. Part of that book is
5) the telling of the story of Plan 9, the planned replacement for Unix from "The Makers of Unix". Buried among the anecdotes was
6) the story of how UTF-8 came into existence as the native character set of Plan 9.
And thus we come full circle: Yes, all the clever guys agree (that group includes by the telling of this story at least Ken Thompson, Rob Pike and Dan Bernstein) that Unicode should not be a hack but just a basic fact of the operating system. They came to that conclusion years ago and here we are still fighting vendor and application specific plugins for DNS/Unicode integration.
How's that for fortuitous circular linkage?