[[!meta  title="ʇxǝʇ uʍop-ǝpısd∩"]]

[Upside-down text][] (actually, rotated by π) appears to have been a
hit last summer, but I've been seeing a bit on [#python][] recently:

    15:21 < lieuwe> dash: so how should i call decode on a possibly unsafe string?
    ...
    15:25 < kerio> lieuwe: ɯǝןqoɹd ɐ ǝq ןןıʍ sıɥʇ ǝʞıן buıɥʇǝɯos

I though that was slick, so I looked around a bit today to see what
people were doing in this regard (see the Wikipedia page for a list).
Turns out to be a bit more complicated than I'd initially expected.
The Unicode people apparently didn't see a need to methodically rotate
characters, so while many have official "turned" forms (e.g. ɐ
(U+0250) LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED A), many others do not.  The
solution seems to be hunting around through the unicode tables looking
for [homoglyphs][] (which turns out to be an interesting [phishing
scheme][] in its own right).

Anyhow, none of the implementations I found addressed conversion of
ASCII characters with the scope and formality I felt this important
topic deserved, so I put together [[my own converter|180.py]] ;).
¡ʎoɾuƎ

Update: It seems that ikiwiki [doesn't like UTF-8
filenames](http://ikiwiki.info/todo/should_use_a_standard_encoding_for_utf_chars_in_filenames/).

Update: As an April Fools joke this year, [kernel.org][] [rotated its
entire main page][rotated].

[Upside-down text]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_of_text#Upside-down_text
[#python]: http://www.python.org/community/irc/
[homoglyphs]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyphs
[phishing scheme]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack
[kernel.org]: http://www.kernel.org/
[rotated]: http://userweb.kernel.org/~warthog9/april1/2010/

[[!tag tags/fun]]