Been a while since my last post, no?

Anyway, over on Michael Kaplan's blog, he's got a post titled "What is the name of that character?" where he answers a question from the MSDN Forums. Basically, someone was asking "How can you get the name of a particular Unicode character, in Windows?".

Michael's answer was that Windows (and .NET) don't provide any public methods to do this. So I decided that I'd write up a quick .NET application which does it the "hard" way.

Download UnicodeName.zip, which contains both a .NET 1.1 binary and source code for a program which downloads the NamesList.txt file from the Unciode Character Database, parses it into an easy-to-use array and then lets you query it for the names of various characters.

Now, my code is really simple, and there's probably plenty of bugs, but it should be a decent starting point. It even caches the results so that the next time you run it, it doesn't have to go through the trouble of downloading the list all over again (it takes a while to process - you'll notice the first time you run it, there's a couple of seconds delay while it parses the file).

So feel free to use my code in your own apps, though I wouldn't mind a quick email or comment below letting me know what you're doing with it :)

In a case of rather bad planning, my return flight to Sydney wasn't scheduled to fly until 10pm tonight. However, my mum's flight was at midday. So my choice was either to spend the day in London and come out to the airport after my mum, or wait at the airport for some 10 hours before I could check in. I didn't much feel inclined to walking around London with all my baggage (I suppose I could have left it at the hotel) so I decided to come to the airport.

Having never been to Heathrow before (at least, not outside the departure lounge) I just assumed it was somewhat like Sydney airport which has plenty of shops and places to eat outside the departure area, so I figured "no worries, I'll have plenty of shops and stuff to look in to keep me occupied," but no such luck, apparently.

It seems the outside of Heathrow (at least Terminal 4 where my flight leaves from, I can't speak for the other terminals) is not much more than a couple of uncomfortable seats and the check-in line. So here I am, with some 7 hours left until I can even check-in, and nothing better to do than finish up my travel diary. There doesn't even seem to be any wireless internet to speak of...

Oh well, let's just see how I go until I get home. My laptop's battery is going to run out long before I can check-in, and I don't see any convenient power outlets that I can plug it into, so perhaps I'll have to head over the WHSmith and buy a book or something, but I can't imagine reading a book for 7 hours straight. At least I can break up the monotony by buyng a coffee every few hours... *sigh*

[Update: 5pm] Well, it's not so bad after all. I managed to find a nice restaurant and bar and so 3 pints of Heineken later, I'm feeling pretty good about my whole predicament :) I have just 2 hours or so until check-in time which I'm rather looking forward to (3 pints of beer or not, it's still rather boring sitting around an airport...). Though I rather feel that I'll be going to the bathroom an aweful lot while on the plane - especially considering I still have enough Sterling for two more beers and my dinner. Don't tell my mum :p

Well, I slept until 9am this morning. Breakfast was quite unusual, I think. The French don't seem to eat cereal in the morning, and if we had wanted cereal, it wouldn't not have been inclucded in the "free" breakfast we were supposed to have. It didn't worry me too much, since I was in Paris to experience the culture and part of that is eating how the French eat (I know, Sushimi for lunch is a bit out of character there, but I saw it yesterday, and just had to have it!). I think my mum was a bit upset, but she made do with some croissants. What the French do eat for breakfast, it seems, is cold meats and hard boiled eggs. So I ended up having very rare slices of cold beef, smoked salmon and some scrambled eggs (they had a whole bowl full of hard boiled eggs, but it was too early in the morning for me to tackle something so complicated...). It was quite nice, actually. I think it would take a while for me to get used to eating meat in the morning though!

Since the tour of the Louvre yesterday was so short, we decided to go through it again for a few hours to take a slower look. I got an audio guide so that I had something to explain the origins of some of the painting, but it's not as good as a live guide. For one thing, the audio guide was a lot more politically correct and didn't mention any of the more "controversial" ideas about some of the paintings. I also noticed that for Da Vinci's "Madonna on the Rocks" piece, the audio guide said the child on the right was Jesus and the one on the left was John the Baptist, while our live guide had said it was the other way around. I guess it just goes to show that it's still a hotly debated topic. It's difficult to say really, since the symbology of the two seem to be so mixed up. For example, it was convential in those days to put Jesus higher up than John, and in the Maddona on the Rocks, the left-hand figure is higher. But it's also convention to have it so that Jesus is blessing John, but in the Madonna on the Rocks, it's the right-hand figure that is doing the blessing. Mary is supposed (again, by convention - the church liked their paintings to all have a very clear meaning, the common people in those days weren't particularly bright, and the church wanted the message to be quite clear) to be laying a comforting arm on baby Jesus, but in the Madonna on the Rocks, you could take either baby as being "comforted" by Mary. So it's all a bit of a mystery.

We had lunch today in a little road-side café. I couldn't stay in Paris without going to a road-side café, and it was definately worth it. Our waitress didn't speak much English, so it was a little difficult, but we managed OK. The food was amazing (I haven't had one bad meal in Paris; the portions are much smaller than in England, but that's OK, since the English seem to feel that quantity over quality is an alright trade-off).

After lunch we went to the Champs Elysée, for a bit of a walk. It's a beautiful part of Paris, and the shops are all quite expensive. In fact, the Louis Vuitton store there was more like a night club than an actual shop. There were bouncers out the front, and a rather long line to get in. We weren't famous enough to get straight in, and I was quite sure that I wouldn't have been able to afford anything in there anyway, so I didn't bother lining up. Maybe next time :)

In fact, there weren't many stores there that we could have affored to shop at. The cafés and food shops were a broad spectrum (all the way from McDonald's to places where it was 20€ for a coffee). But it's definately an experience I would recommend to everyone. In fact, anything in Paris is an experience I would recommend to everyone.

We had to back at the train station by 6:30pm for our return train ride back to London, but we were a little early. After two days on the move, and not much sleep last night (especially since on Thursday we were up at 5am and not to bed until 2am the next morning!) so we just had a bit of a rest at the train station. The ride home was pleasant, though the train was a lot fuller than the ride over, so I never got a seat to myself. But it's really over before you know it, and I was snug in my bed in London by 11 o'clock (Paris is one hour in front of London, so that would have been 12am Paris time). A very long couple of days, indeed!

I woke up at 5am this morning to catch the train for Paris. My mum and I will be staying in Paris for 1 night and 2 days - my grandmother didn't want to come - she'd been to Paris before, and didn't like the idea of waking up at 5 o'clock in the morning. So we got to the train station without too much bother (though the northen tube line was down, so we had to catch a bus most of the way...). The train ride across the Channel is just amazing. The Eurostar train travels at some 190 miles per hour (or 300km/h for us metric people)!! It doesn't really feel all that fast when you're in it, until you realise those flashes out the window are telegraph poles going past faster than you can see. Not to mention that the cars on the highway that runs alongside the train in France look like they're standing still, even though they're probably going at least 100km/h!

Once in Paris, we had a coach tour around the streets, where we saw all the major sights. The Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, we drove up the Champs Elysée. It's a beautiful city. I mean, compare to London, they're both quite old (though I believe Paris is older - London was founded by the Romans, who called it Londinium or something, while Paris was around a few hundred years BC) but where London has just sort of built new buildings however it seemed to fit, Paris has sort of tried to keep everything matching. In London, you'll see plenty of 10th century buildings or whatever, but they'll be right next to modern offices and apartments. In Paris, you'll see lots of duality. Two buildings on either side of the Seine will be mirrors of each other, or at either side of the Champs Elysée, the Arc de Triomphe is mirrored. They're not afraid to rip up whole sections of the city to make improvements eithers. The Champs Elysée is a good example - it was put in during the 1800s, I believe, and they basically just cut a big swath through the city and put this giant road through. It looks amazing, because starting from the Louvre, you have the courtyard (with the somewhat controversial glass pyramid), further on is the Tuileries garden, past that is the Concord, containing a 3,200 year-old obelisk that comes from the temple at Luxor (it was given to the French king Charles X by Mohammed Ali, Viceroy of Egypt), then further on again is the Champs Elysée, then after that is the Arc de Triomphe, then after that way in the distance is the tall office buildings of commercial district of Paris, complete with the arched building (also controvisial in it's time). It's a breath-taking view.

Speaking of controversial buildings, Paris seems to be full of them. The one everybody knows about (certainly if you've read Dan Brown's rather predictible [in my opinion] "The Da Vinci Code") is the glass pyramid outside the Louvre. But so many of the buildings in Paris seem to have caused quite a stir when they first go up. In the end, I think, everybody gets used to them thouugh, and they seem to enjoys pointing out how controversial everything was when it was first put in :)

A funny thing about the roads in Paris - there's no lanes marked! I was used to people driving pretty much where ever they felt like, from my trip to India, but at least they still had lanes marked. In Paris, you might gets lines on the road to divide the oncoming traffic, or sometimes at a traffic light, but most of the time there were none! It was quite amazing sitting in the taxi going around a four-lane roundabout with no lines marked and people weaving in and out where ever they felt like!

I was told when I bought my Peugeot that I was basically buying a "French Taxi" (I didn't care, Peugeots are sufficiently rare in Australia that they're still pretty special), and now that I get here, I can see that's pretty true. A lot of the taxis are either 406/407 or 607s. Unfortunately, I never got a ride in a 607 (and I've driven a 407 before) so that was unfortunate, but I was quite relieved when I saw that it wasn't only Peugeots which made up the taxi fleet in Paris. There were Renaults, Citroëns, and even Mercedes Benz taxis! Try as I might, though, I never managed to catch a Benz taxi.

After the bus tour, we went up the Eiffel tower. The weather was quite clear, so we got a pretty good view, it was a little misty in places, though. We didn't go right to the summit, but I don't think it would have been worth it anyway. The 2nd level gives you a really good view, and I think much higher and everything would have been too hard to see anyway. We stayed up there for about an hour (which is really all you need, after all, there's only so much view to look at!)

We went on a boat cruise after the Eiffel Tower. It was down the Seine River, where we saw all of Paris' lovely brides. I never realized there were so many bridges across the river! In Sydney, we have the Harbour Bridge, and the Tunnel, and then nothing until the Anzac Bridge. Mind you, I suppose Sydney harbour is about 10 times wider than the Seine River, which is pretty miniscule in comparison. We got to see Notre Dame from the boat, which is a pretty spectacular cathedral (famous for it's hunchback, no less!). The girl who did the commentary did it in three languages (Franch, English and Spanish) but unfortunatly, her French and Spanish seemed much more fluent than her English so she was a little hard to understand. I could forgive her, though, since French accents are so wonderful :p

After a bit of lunch (I had Sushimi. No French food, it's been so long since I had some nice Japanese and I was having withdrawals! Though it was really nice Sushimi), we took a guided tour of the Louvre - easily the best part of the trip so far. In fact, in my opinion, the Louvre was the best part of this whole holiday! If I had to discribe the museum in one word, I think it would be "immense", but even that doesn't really give you much indication as to the size of the place. There are some 22 kilometres of galleries in the Louvre, the building itself is some three quarters of a kilometre long 4 levels (and the rooms all seem to have 10 metre ceilings somehow) and every wall is silled with paintings and sculptures. Naturally, given that we only had a couple of hours for the guided tour, we were pretty rushed. We somehow managed to fit in all the main pieces though, the Mona Lisa, the Maddona on the Rocks, the Venus de Milo and a few others. It's a bit of a shame that you're not allowed to take photos of many of the masterpieces (the poor security guards, all they seem to do is wave their finger at the tourists and say "no photos" over and over again... it must get very tedious). All of the master pieces there I'd seen photos of before, but truely until you actually go and see them in person, there really is nothing like it. You could seriously spend days and days in there, looking at everything. A true master piece, for me, is one where I can just stand there and look at it for hours without tiring of it. Something that I find you can't really do with a simple photograph.

We got a taxi to our hotel after the Louvre (it was a Renault, no Merc that's for sure!) - the tour company paid for it, which was nice. The hotel was a four star hotel, which was quite a departure from the Royal National we were staying in at London! Dinner that night was just had in the hotel restaurant, but it was the most delicious piece of steak I've ever eaten. It was seriously about 2cm thick, cooked to perfection, and so tender I could have cut it with a bread knife.

That night, we were booked in to go see the famour Lido Cabaret on the Champs Elysée. The show was simply spectacular, and while it's quite expensive (around 100€) it's definately worth it. They had this amazing act on ice that would have easily put olympic figure skaters to shame. Don't go if you don't like nudity, though, since a lot of the female dancers could out topless. It's all quite classy though, and I didn't feel too embarrased sitting next to my mum watching them :p

Of course, the show is quite late (we couldn't book for the 9 o'clock show, because we were too late: we had the 11 o'clock performance) so we didn't get back to the hotel until 2am. Something tells me I'll be sleeping in tomorrow!!

We went to the Tower of London today. I probably wouldn't recommend it, not for the £14.50 entry fee anyway. You get a short guided tour, which was good, but only lasted about 50 minutes. After that, pretty much all you could do is watch these performers re-enacting the life of Lord Nelson (who defeated the Spanish and French in the Battle of Trafalgar) or see the crown jewels (which were nice, but you couldn't take pictures of them...). One cool thing about the jewels is that they're in this special room, with these two giant doors that shut if the glass in any of the display cases is broken. It means you'd be able to touch the jewels if you broke the glass, but then all you could do is sit and wait for the guards to come and get you.

There's a lot of Ravens around the Tower of London, and the story goes that if the ravens ever left the tower, it would come crumbling down. Now, the English are a superstitious lot, so they actually keep the ravens caged at night, and their wings are clipped so they can't fly away. I guess the only problem would be a fox or if some bird-disease came and killed them all...

By the time we left, it was pouring rain so we had to buy these funny little plastic bag-looking ponchos so we wouldn't get wet. We met our cousins quite by accident at a souvenier shop near the tower - they had just arrived in London for the day and were going around on that bus tour we had been on. It was quite a surprise!