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.

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