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While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

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Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#81

> the same site that then fixed that bug and forced all blog descriptions to be utf-8, but then implemented size limits as a number of bytes. > so they truncated mid-utf-8 character, which made parsing the XML A REAL FUN TASK LET ME TELL YOU How is this a problem unless you do UTF-8 validation when parsing the XML, in which case stop doing that for data you don't control.

If you truncate a UTF-8 string mid-character, then can’t that sequence swallow the next byte, such as <, which would break XML parsing completely?

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#82
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get into a similar state on MacOS by pressing a key multiple times in a row (option I think). It just quietly disables a large number of keys. I figured it out by accident one day because I assigned the key as my "push to talk" on Discord. That was a fun hour trying to figure out what had happened.

On MacOS if you remap your capslock to control there is a race condition on the login screen. If you use the control/capslock key to wake up your laptop and manage to time it right, you can enable capslock but not have a way to disable it (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?)).

> (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?))

When I first started doing caps-lock-to-control, I mapped my physical control key to caps lock. Eventually, I stopped bothering and kept it as control.

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#84

> the same site that then fixed that bug and forced all blog descriptions to be utf-8, but then implemented size limits as a number of bytes. > so they truncated mid-utf-8 character, which made parsing the XML A REAL FUN TASK LET ME TELL YOU How is this a problem unless you do UTF-8 validation when parsing the XML, in which case stop doing that for data you don't control.

Right, Postel's law: validating the data you receive reduces the interoperability, so don't do that.

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#85
post #22

These hotkeys in websites are an utter curse. So many times I've started typing in Jira, then something weird happened that caused my keystrokes to be interpreted by the page instead of entered into a comment box ... then the ticket gets reopened, unassigned, etc.

Squarespace's "ESC to go to Squarespace login" is a huge pain for me as well. I think it's on by default. I CTRL+F pretty often. I press ESC to clear it. I get redirected to Squarespace if I'm on a Squarespace site that hasn't turned off this "feature".

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#86
post #33

True story: One day, Windows wouldn't let me type the letter p. I was trying to log back in from the Windows lock screen. Typed my password, got it wrong. Typed it again, got it wrong. Eventually got locked out of my account, despite being extremely careful to type my password correctly. Went to IT and had them unlock my account... Went back to my PC and tried to log in again. Typed my password very carefully, letter…

Windows 10 has this funny bug where sometimes for some reason your individual windows don't get focus any more. You can click at their title bar, and they'll be drawn as-if they have focus (darker shadow and foreground titlebar), but no window actually accepts or processes any user input (while updating normally in the background, and also redrawing). The only way I know how to fix this is to go into the Ctrl+Alt+Del…

MacOS has had a similar issue as far back as 10.7. In 10.6 and before if you see a window with red, green, and yellow buttons in the corner, that window has focus, period. It was an enforced invariant.

In later versions it's pretty common to see such windows that don't actually have focus. Clicking again on the title bar usually fixes the problem but I find it very annoying. There's a race condition in the system somewhere that Apple doesn't recognize as a bug.

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#87
post #22

These hotkeys in websites are an utter curse. So many times I've started typing in Jira, then something weird happened that caused my keystrokes to be interpreted by the page instead of entered into a comment box ... then the ticket gets reopened, unassigned, etc.

Gmail shortcuts are great, until focus jumps away from the search field while typing in it. This happens if you try to search before the page has fully loaded.

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#88
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get into a similar state on MacOS by pressing a key multiple times in a row (option I think). It just quietly disables a large number of keys. I figured it out by accident one day because I assigned the key as my "push to talk" on Discord. That was a fun hour trying to figure out what had happened.

On MacOS if you remap your capslock to control there is a race condition on the login screen. If you use the control/capslock key to wake up your laptop and manage to time it right, you can enable capslock but not have a way to disable it (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?)).

Funny, I just had a version of this happen to me this morning on iPad OS using a folio keyboard.

I had just upgraded to iPadOS 15 and the caps-lock-as-control setting reverted to the default. I went into settings and changed it back, but I did so with caps lock accidentially enabled.

This left the folio keyboard stuck in caps lock. I had to go back into settings, set caps lock back to caps lock, press the caps lock key to disable, then I could make it a control key. But trickily, the setting change didn't seem to take effect until I swiped out of the screen where you change that setting.

ANYWAY, I'M JUST GLAD I FIGURED IT OUT.

BTW, why does caps lock even still exist?

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#89

> the same site that then fixed that bug and forced all blog descriptions to be utf-8, but then implemented size limits as a number of bytes. > so they truncated mid-utf-8 character, which made parsing the XML A REAL FUN TASK LET ME TELL YOU How is this a problem unless you do UTF-8 validation when parsing the XML, in which case stop doing that for data you don't control.

    if (c & 0b10000000) continue;

Re: While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

#90
post #44
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many times I've started typing in bash, and then realised that my focus has been on a website instead, which starts doing some ridiculous stuff in response. There's no way to discover hotkey functionality otherwise, of course, because "thou shalt not discover" is a modern UX guideline.

Underlined hotkeys for menu context and for thought to be hot-path actions dedicated keyboard combinations outside of the menus. Aside from auto-complete searchbars, I think UI functionality peeked in the mid to late 1990s.

Peak usability was when chrome started hiding zoom buttons for PDFs. I remember at one point to increase the size of a pdf there was no visual indication at all. You had to stumble upon the buttons on the bottom right of the page and they would magically appear.

Ever since then designers have decided that looking cool is better than being easy to use and it’s been shit.

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