International Electrotechnical Commission : World Plugs

International Electrotechnical Commission has a very handy (especially before travelling to a foreign country) list of different plugs (a total of 14 at the time of this writing), mapped to countries of the world.  So if you don’t have one of these:

adaptor

make sure you check the list of adapters & converters worth buying before you fly out.  And while on the topic of this great variety, IEC also explains why there are so many and if this annoyance will ever be sold:

The IEC issued its International Standard for a universal plug in the 1970s; so far it has been adopted by Brazil and South Africa. It is unlikely that there will be a run on the standard in the near future. Literally hundreds of millions of plugs and sockets have been installed and who would convince a country to invest now in changing its whole infrastructure?

Most likely the future will lie with solutions such as the USB plug or possibly a multi-plug that can accommodate many different plugs, or even new technologies such as LVDC (low voltage direct current) or wireless charging mechanisms.

Modernizr – JavaScript library that detects HTML5 and CSS3 features in the browser

Modernizr – JavaScript library that detects HTML5 and CSS3 features in the browser.

Phake – PHP task management software

Phake – PHP task management software.  This Phake is a clone of Ruby’s rake, not to be confused with Phake – PHP Mocking Framework.  Think Phing, not PHPUnit.  Use Phake for process automation such as, for example, project deployment.

ftfy – fixes text for you

ftfy – fixes text for you

ftfy makes Unicode text less broken and more consistent. It works in Python 2.7, Python 3.2, or later.

The most interesting kind of brokenness that this resolves is when someone has encoded Unicode with one standard and decoded it with a different one. This often shows up as characters that turn into nonsense sequences