Jeff Atwood points to an entry in the jargon file about ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers
It should solve the following problems:
Many of these things are possible today if one likes to tweak and script things. A few things on this list I've tried myself.
This looks more like a packaging/distro-creation task than a coding one to me.
Well, probably some of both.
Is there any distro (or customized spinoff) that focuses on making these things easy by making sane assumptions and by introducing sane conventions, if necessary at the expense of some flexibility?
Bruce Schneier about the special way of thinking about things that security professionals (should) have.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ggbaker/reference/characters/
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/06/Unicode
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/03/24/95235.aspx
(via http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001084.html + comments)
And here is (maybe) why.
Interesting read: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by Paul Graham. And some criticism from codinghorror to put it back into perspective.
Joel Spolsky on how the binary MS Office file formats became so crappy and on some workarounds to avoid having to deal with them.