The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Sunday, January 02, 2011

The inexorable march of technology

From
Steve Crane <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
To
Sean Conner <spc@conman.org>
Subject
Re: @siwisdom twitter feed
Date
Sun, 2 Jan 2011 10:53:12 +0200

Hi Sean,

I see you blogged about this, stating that the problem occurs in Twitter's own web client too. I found that interesting as I don't see the problem in the Twitter web client. As shown in this screenshot it all looks fine.

[SiWisdom on Chrome]

I'm using Google Chrome and I wondered if the browser may be playing some part so I opened the same page in Internet Explorer, which I only use under duress, and what a difference.

[SiWisdom on Crack—I mean on IE]

There's the problem, as large as life, but the UI looks different. I recall that I opted to use the new UI a while ago and not being logged in Twitter must showing me the old UI, presumably still the default. So I log in and voila, the same UI I see in Chrome, with all characters represented correctly.

[SiWisdom strung out—I mean on IE]

So we can conclude from this that there was indeed a problem; it was Twitter's fault; and they have addressed it in their new UI. This leaves only third party clients to fXXX things up for you.

Cheers.

Oh, now he tells me, after I make sure mod_blog works with UTF-8 (it handled a post written in a Runic alphabet just fine), reconfigured the webserver to serve up the appropriate headers and converted the data file for Silicone Wisdom to UTF-8.

Okay, it didn't take me that long, and as my friend Jeff said:

It is no longer an ASCII world, it's a Unicode one. I have run in to this a lot and anything that uses XML, like a Twitter feed is going to be encoded into UTF-8. It is profoundly annoying, but spreading.

And progress marches on …

Update a few seconds later …

The automatic posting to MyFaceSpaceBook revealed a similar issue. It is to laugh.

Obligatory Picture

Trying to get into the festive mood this year

Obligatory Contact Info

Obligatory Feeds

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

Obligatory AI Disclaimer

No AI was used in the making of this site, unless otherwise noted.

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.

Copyright © 1999-2024 by Sean Conner. All Rights Reserved.