I take that back. SmartyPants works okay, but not perfectly. It’s refusing to escape characters properly. Backslash-dash-backslash-dash should produce two dashes. But instead it produces this: \-\-. No help found yet. Oh well.

What’s going on with the Finnish operators? Yesterday, I switched to DNA’s Onni subscription plan, in which all calls, to any number at any time of the day, costs 0,069 euros. The same goes for text-messages. And the fixed monthly price of the plan? Sixty-nine cents. I can’t see anywhere that this is a limited-time offer. So where’s the catch?

This same mad scramble for customers is going in broadband. When we first moved into our apartment in the beginning of 2004, we were paying HTV 55 euros a month for a 512Kbps connection. Now, for 55 euros you can get a 8Mbps ADSL line from Saunalahti!

The end doesn’t seem to be in sight: according to a story in Helsingin Sanomat, telecoms regulator Ficora expects the broadband prices to fall 20–40 percent next year.

While iIm certainly not complaining about paying less (or getting more), I do wonder how far this is going to go and will this cut-throat competition kill off players and drives prices back up?

I just integrated PHP SmartyPants into my home-grown publishing system. So now I ask: “Does it work?”

“One can only hope. If it doesn’t, will one bother to fix it—or will one just leave it alone, broken and all? And if it does work, will one clean out the silly markup rules one has used so far?”

Answer: Yes, it does, indeed, seem to work. And no, one has not been inclined to clean up the old code that cumbersomely did what SmartyPants so elegantly does better.

Another interesting plug-in is PHP Markdown, though I shudder at the notion of learning yet another markup style.