whats the plot

i always used to get upset when i send a message or set a status on an english site in arabic, only to have the punctuation all messed up. well, thanks to two unicode control characters, \u200e and \u200f (for ltr and rtl, respectively), i can finally go from writing:

يحيى الإسلام!

to writing:

يحيى الإسلام!‏

much better thanks goes to this wikipedia article and adil allawi, whom i first heard about this from.

iconv rocks. so often do i find this command really useful:
iconv -f original_encoding -t utf8 file > utf8_file

i’ve been using vim 7 beta for a while (which, by the way, was just released as vim 7 a day or so ago), but i never really realized how easy they’ve made it to look at arabic text files now (compared to what it used to be… there used to be an intricate setup process and a set of patches to run for vim 6x as documented by nadim on arabeyes. now, all you have to do is :set encoding=utf8 and :set arabic and you’re set.

you can see a screenshot here.