Git on Windows

Yes I still develop on Windows and even run my main home server on Windows. I of course also use Unix and always have, currently Debian, Ubuntu, and Cygwin. I'd be very happy to use some nice Apple computers and OS's if someone gave me them (I'd like an iPhone, a MacBook Air, and an iPad, please). Anyway, silly and lame as it may seem, I still spend most of my time on Windows. I also use Flash a lot and don't recycle a lot of trash. I'm a bad person!

But I still like to be cool and (more seriously) I prefer to use nice tools, so I want to start using git as my main source code management tool. At home and at work, I've mostly used SVN, but lately I haven't been using any kind of version management system. I'm so bad! (see above).

Another reason to use git vs. SVN is I don't do backups (I'm bad! etc.) and I use a variety of old PCs, so a distributed system to manage all my stuff in a convenient and fault-tolerant way seems like a good idea.

So anyway here are two tutorials that I'll be checking out:

Windows Git Tutorial: Cygwin, SSH and Projectlocker
http://www.cforcoding.com/2009/09/windows-git-tutorial-cygwin-ssh-and.html
An Illustrated Guide to Git on Windows
http://nathanj.github.com/gitguide/tour.html

Questions I have are: how can use my home Windows server as a git server (git daemon?), should I use Cygwin git or msysgit.

And I'll also be checking out TortoiseGit
http://www.cforcoding.com/2009/09/windows-git-tutorial-cygwin-ssh-and.html

some advice seen on the way
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/233421/hosting-git-repository-in-windows
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1449179/github-noobian-should-i-install-msysgit-or-cygwin
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/690502/can-i-use-msysgit-and-cygwins-git

git cheatsheets:
http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2007/09/git-cheat-sheet.html
http://help.github.com/git-cheat-sheets/

How to reference a Unicode character?

What useful ways are there to look up and reference Unicode characters?

I love Unicode. OK it's a big unwieldy bureaucratic compendium that I will probably never come close to understanding fully, but come on! It's got all of (most of) the characters used by humanity!

(Yup, Unicode even has Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'll note Unicode lists about a 1000 hieroglyphs, apparently based on Gardiner's list, while the Aegyptus font list 7000... OK according to Wikipedia, "In the era of the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom, about 800 hieroglyphs existed. By the Greco-Roman period, they numbered more than 5,000." So maybe the Unicode standard has enough for most ancient Egyptian texts.)

Sadly, a lot of good Unicode information is not conveniently accessible on the Web. The Unicode consortium buries the info in PDF, ugh. So what are good ways to reference Unicode characters on the web?

1. Richard Ishida has a rather nice, if over-designed and a bit hard to use, web page called Uniview for looking up characters, ranges of characters, and no doubt more. After searching through the help, I figured out ways to link to a character: U+0950 or range of characters:
http://rishida.net/scripts/uniview/?range=13000:1302F
There's also a version of Uniview for mobiles, which is better in some ways, but still not great:
http://rishida.net/scripts/uniview/lite?range=13000:1302F
The full range is 13000:1342E, but I am only linking to the first 48 characters because I don't want to hammer his server, which can be a bit slow. Anyway he displays the character range in a non-intuitive way. The Unicode consortium PDF displays it in an even more inconvenient way. See below a (probably illegal) picture I made of all the hieroglyphs in a sensible table structure.

2. The Unicode web site has a sort of official-looking (ut see 5. below) web-based lookup feature, that doesn't have all the information for each character, and regrettably seems like it's only for Unihan characters: 唵 U+5535 though it also works to some extent for any Unicode character: ॐU+0950, A U+0041.

3. The easiest to use is and most informative I've found so far is a modest, ad-sponsored web site, FileFormat.Info:
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/5535/index.htm
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00950/index.htm
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0041/index.htm
But though it calls itself "The Digital Rosetta Stone", it regrettably doesn't give much info for Egyptian hieroglyphs.
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/13052/index.htm

4. I should mention Wiktionary's per-character pages
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/唵
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ॐ
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/A

5. Which points me to the most official-looking link resource (why do I find it last?):
http://unicode.org/cldr/utility/character.jsp?a=5535
http://unicode.org/cldr/utility/character.jsp?a=0950
http://unicode.org/cldr/utility/character.jsp?a=0041
http://unicode.org/cldr/utility/character.jsp?a=13052 (lacks pictures for hieroglyphs).

As an annex, below is a picture of the 1070 Egyptian hieroglyphs of the Unicode standard, all visible at a glance.

Ah I should probably make it a  client-side image map so each character can be linked. Also nice would be colors to see what belongs to which group, e.g. Woman and her occupations, Mammals, Anthropomorphic deities, etc. And displaying a bigger version of a hieroglyph (is this hieroglyph "giving birth"? yup) on hover would be nice too. Fun stuff!

Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Unicode standard

PS: I need this map / poster: decodeunicode - Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) Map.

It's made by the German decodeunicode.org web site, which though interesting, since it has graphics for many (all?) characters, and allows contributions via a wiki, seems not to be terribly active, and continues the apparent tradition of poor usability for Unicode sites.