Declare character encoding in HTML

Writing documents in english, german and norwegian leaves you with a mess of different character encodings in documents and also webpages.

Just wrote a plain HTML page with norwegian special characters and Firefox, did not show the characters correctly, so I had to find out how to specify that the encoding of the norwegian æøå’s is UTF-8.

Fortunately there is a good explanation on the W3C Blog.

The code to specify the encoding is

http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"


I have no illusion about some browser (IE?) getting it wrong anyway. At least Firefox seems to comply…

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Installing RODBC with Ubuntu/Debian amd64

Trying to install RODBC in Ubuntu with
install.packages("RODBC")
failed throwing an error message
ODBC headers sql.h and sqlext.h not found

A glance at the r-help showed that it had to do with something called unixODBC – an ODBC driver manager.

The package was installed, but not the development package and thus not the headers which R complained about.

Again a not-so-obvious-for-the-newbee-Linux-Unix-Shell-goblish thing. The fix is
sudo aptitude install unixodbc-dev