1. Ever seen those messages by ssh where it complains about its
inability to establish the authenticity of a host? Well, it recently
complained to me about localhost. Up until then, I thought you couldn't
get more authentic than that. I wonder whether it doubted the locality
of localhost or its hospitality, but it didn't say.
2. It is widely known that GNU loves `backtick-tick' quoting. This is
presumably better than "this" or 'this' because you can mechanically
tell an opening quote from a closing quote, and the ability to do so
greatly pleases GNU people despite the fact that this happens inside
sentences in natural language like documentation or error messages which
either can't be mechanically parsed anyway or they can based on the
assumption that they are formed from fixed format strings, the exact
spelling of which is thus of no importance for the ability to parse the
messages anyway.
Well, recently some of those people decided that it wasn't good enough,
likely because 'this' or `this` quoting can be used in text near `this'
style, so you can't mechanically tell an opening quote from a closing
quote after all. So they upgraded the GNU C compiler to print what I
think is some UTF-8 quoting characters instead. Which looks like quotes
on my terminal, but not necessarily in, say, GNU emacs which assumes it
gets ASCII and shows garbage around your undefined identifiers and
what-not. The garbage is alphanumeric enough to blend well with the
quoted text.
However, since UTF-8 support is The Right Thing and so is `this' quoting
style, this obviously isn't a problem.
3. And for a dessert: suppose you use a background color #44ffaa, or any
other color for that matter, on your web page. You take a screen shot of
what your browser displays and embed a region from that screen shot into
the web page - for example, to display an e-mail address. In most
graphical browsers, the result will look just like the surrounding text.
However, in one particular browser the color of the image will be
slightly but noticeably different from the page background color. I fail
to see how that can happen unless there's code inside the browser
written specifically to make this not work.
Guess the brand name of that browser, given the hint that the number of
its version that I tested is 8.
Bon Appétit!
- a three course hate meal Yossi Kreinin
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