This will be my collection of Unicode symbols. Feel free to copy and paste.

Note: For some reasons, my IE 6 failed to display most of the characters/symbols. Opera and Firefox have no problem. It also depends on the O/S you used.

Symbols in Unicode

Symbol	Unicode Codepoint	Name
✓	U+2713	CHECK MARK (tick)
✔	U+2714	HEAVY CHECK MARK (bold tick)
✗	U+2717	BALLOT X (cross)
✘	U+2718	HEAVY BALLOT X (bold cross)
☐	U+2610	BALLOT BOX (square)
☑	U+2611	BALLOT BOX WITH CHECK (square with tick)
☒	U+2612	BALLOT BOX WITH X (square with cross
“	U+201C	Open quote
”	U+201D	Close quote

Don't be surprised with all those chinese characters appearing all over the main page. I'm just performing a test to see how well my template engine can handle with multibyte characters.

The main content/layout will still be in Engish (well, technically speaking, ASCII). I'll probably use some chinese in some of the blog entries if needed.

Oh ya, Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn

The MySQL database dump seems to be working fine. However, in server-side, I haven't tried to restore the data from the dump file yet. I'll try it later or tonight since I have something else to do right now =)

Running Unicode test on server-side... If you see gibberish below that means your browser doesn't support the font... or just simply my code isn't working like what I expected...

English
You kidding me?

Chinese (Simplified)
花间一壶酒，独酌无相亲
举杯邀明月，对影成三人
月既不解饮，影徒随我身
暂伴月将影，行乐须及春
我歌月徘徊，我舞影零乱
醒时同交欢，醉后各分散
永结无情游，相期邈云汉

Chinese (Traditional)
子曰：「學而時習之，不亦說乎？有朋自遠方來，不亦樂乎？
人不知而不慍，不亦君子乎？」
有子曰：「其為人也孝弟，而好犯上者，鮮矣；
不好犯上，而好作亂者，未之有也。君子務本，本立而道生。
孝弟也者，其為仁之本與！」

Russian
По оживлённым берегам
Громады стройные теснятся
Дворцов и башен; корабли
Толпой со всех концов земли
К богатым пристаням стремятся;

Ancient Greek
Ἰοὺ ἰού· τὰ πάντʼ ἂν ἐξήκοι σαφῆ.
Ὦ φῶς, τελευταῖόν σε προσϐλέψαιμι νῦν,
ὅστις πέφασμαι φύς τʼ ἀφʼ ὧν οὐ χρῆν, ξὺν οἷς τʼ
οὐ χρῆν ὁμιλῶν, οὕς τέ μʼ οὐκ ἔδει κτανών.

Sanskrit (should be right-aligned)
पशुपतिरपि तान्यहानि कृच्छ्राद्
अगमयदद्रिसुतासमागमोत्कः ।
कमपरमवशं न विप्रकुर्युर्
विभुमपि तं यदमी स्पृशन्ति भावाः ॥

Tamil
ஸ்றீனிவாஸ ராமானுஜன் ஐயங்கார

Czech
Dejte mi libru kávy Java, dvě libry Rio, šest liber kouskového cukru a paklíček cikorie.

Korean
비겁한 사람은 죽기 전에도 여러번 죽는다.
그러나 용감한 사람은 한번 밖에 죽지 않는다.

Japanese
コンビニエンスストア全国大手のファミリーマートの道内１号店が７月７日に札幌市東区本町１で開店することが９日、明らかになった。これによりファミリーマートは全都道府県出店を達成し、７月１４日には同市清田区美しが丘４に２号店も開く。

ps: The font works fine in my Opera 8.50 browser. Firefox 1.0.7 is rendering the text a bit smaller making some of the characters look weird. Internet Explorer 6 is displaying bigger text size, but the Ancient Greek part is partially gibberish. In other words, Opera still rules ! ^^

Serving my site content in XHTML in Unicode has already been on my to-do list for quite a while. I have read alot of articles on how to implement it. Sadly, 90% of the hosting companies are still using old PHP, old MySQL server and not having Multibyte String Functions enabled in PHP. They are not aware of , or just don't like the idea of "Internationalization" eh ?

After checking the specs of my hosting server, PHP seems to be OK but I am not sure about MySQL. It would be waste of time if the server is running a older version of MySQL that completely treats Unicode as something that came from outter space. Anyhow, I'll spend some time on this weekend to work on it. I just love the idea of having having Chinese characters on my site on top of English. Unicode will be my only option to do that. I don't like to serve the page with content="text/html; charset=gb2312", I just need something that can do all the things - Unicode.

By the way, I changed the top horizontal navigation menu on my site. I haven't upload it to this server though. Everything is still on localhost =) The one that's still on this site, it's too "heavy" and runs too slow. It consumes a noticeable amount of CPU performance. The new one will be alot more lightweight and most important thing is, it's still cross browser compatible.

Site will be updated pretty soon... hopefully...