The spam level for January is roughly unchanged from December. December was a month in decline, and January saw a sharp rebound. This is after Congress passed the extremely ineffective CAN-SPAM Act. The name of the act is an acronym for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing. It is a misguided attempt at spam-control by well-meaning politicians.
I have continued to file reports for every spam recieved with SpamCop, the FTC and the Internet Fraud Complaint Center.
I recieved a total of 259 spams in January. This compares to 270 in December and 356 in November. Overall, spam continues to be in decline at the rate of 1.4 spams per week. Spam levels have dropped significantly in February, so these statistics should improve.
In the State of the Freenet address, Ian Clark announced a fix for the Freenet slowness problem. Ironically, it seems the network was being overloaded with messages about it being overloaded.
Now that the Freenet software is back to some workable state, the finances of the project are in dire straits. Even with payroll only being £850 ($1587), the project is broke and asking for donations.
If you’ve wondered how you can correctly enter special characters like curly quotes or dashes in a website, this guide is for you. Unicode is the solution. “Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.” This entry covers only a few typographical characters used in English.
The image in the left column is the Unicode reference glyph. This is just a sample character. Every font displays this character slightly differently. The image’s link shows the character in four common fonts.
The next column shows how the character displays with your browser and font configurations. Most browsers will be able to display the characters correctly.
The third column includes the characters that would be typed in HTML in order to display the desired Unicode characters. All unicode characters are entered in the form of &#x{hexadecimal number}; or &#{decimal number};.
The fourth column is the character name. A few characters have multiple names.
The last column describes how the characters should be used and provides examples.
The link for each Unicode reference glyph shows how the character appears in four common fonts.
Depreciated ASCII Characters | ||||
' |
| ASCII Apostrophe or Single Quote | These characters are typically used to set off quotes or mark feet and inches because they appear in all standard key mappings. The backtick shares a key with the tilde (~) on standard US keyboards. These characters should only be used when proper characters are unavailable or when it is necessary to interoperate with old systems. For example, "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." --Albert Einstein or ``There are two types of people--those who come into a room and say, `Well, here I am!' and those who come in and say, `Ah, there you are.''' --Frederick L. Collins. | |
` |
| Backtick or Grave Accent | ||
" |
| ASCII Double Quote | ||
- |
| ASCII Hyphen or Hyphen-Minus | ||
Quotes and Apostrophes | ||||
‘ |
| Opening Single Quote | These are the preferred characters for marking quotations. For example, “If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read ‘President Can’t Swim.’” —Lyndon B. Johnson. The closing single quote character is the preferred character for an apostrophe, even when it is the leading character of the word, as in “’Tain’t worthwhile to wear a day all out before it comes.” —Sarah Orne Jewett. See Rules of Typography: Part II, number three for more details. | |
’ |
| Apostrophe or Closing Single Quote | ||
“ |
| Opening Double Quote | ||
” |
| Closing Double Quote | ||
Primes | ||||
′ |
| Prime | Used in mathematics, as a shorthand for derivative. Bessel’s differential equation can be written as y″ + y′/x + (1 − α2/x2)y = 0. There is also a triple prime ( Primes are also the correct symbol to use for feet and inches: Quigley Motor Company sells a full-size postal van that is 18′ 6″ long, 6′ 6″ wide and 6′ 8″ high. See Rules of Typography: Part II, number four for more details. | |
″ |
| Double Prime | ||
Dashes and Hyphens | ||||
– |
| En Dash | These are the preferred hypen-like characters. The Unicode hyphen ( The En Dash is the correct symbol for ranges as a substitute for the words “to” or “through.” It should be as wide as an “N” for any particular font. The em dash is twice as wide as an en dash, and gets its name because it matches the width of an “M” for any particular font. It is used to mark an abrupt change in thought, and should not have spaces on either side. An en dash with spaces on either side is the next substitute, followed by two adjoining ASCII hypen-minuses without spaces. The minus sign is a mathematical character. Its width matches the plus and equals sign. The minus sign is very similar to the en dash, and this character should be substituted when the minus sign is unavailable. In all cases these characters should be replaced with the ASCII hyphen-minus only as a last resort. For example, “But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.” (I Corinthians 1:27–29). See the Rules of Typography: Part I, number two for more details. | |
— |
| Em Dash | ||
− |
| Minus Sign | ||
Ellipses | ||||
… |
| Horizontal Ellipsis | The ellipsis is used to indicate an omission or a pause. For example, 1, 2, …, 10. Sometimes an em dash will be used in place of an elipsis. When the elipsis character is not available, three consecutive periods can be substituted, but the elipses is preferred because it has the dots spaced a little more. See the Rules of Typography: Part IV, number eleven for more details. | |
There are many other websites with additional information regarding the use of Unicode characters in HTML.
