Solving the UTF-8 problem

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Mon, Jul 02, 2007 at 08:19:17AM -0700,
 Doug Ewell <dewell at roadrunner.com> wrote 
 a message of 26 lines which said:

> 1. The human who runs the conversion program forgets to run it at
> the appropriate time.
> 
> 2. The human runs it against an outdated source file.
> 
> 3. The program runs correctly, but the new file is not copied or
> FTP'd to the appropriate location.
> 
> etc.  Notice that these scenarios tend to involve human error.

OK, I do not have a silver bullet to eliminate *all* errors but,
certainly, there is a long experience in our field in automatic
processes. For instance, issue 1) should be addressed by using a
program, not a human, to run the conversion (humans forget, software
schedulers do not).

Yes, cron can crash, the disk can be full, programs have bugs, etc,
but more 21st century techniques, involving software, could certainly
help to address some of these issues.