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Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

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Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#61

Post by ak217 »

giberson wrote: post #8

Maybe I'm just a terrible programmer, but I think the author may be a little over emphasizing the seriousness of the bug. To me, this is one of those throw away issues that you keep in the back of your mind. Unless I'm coding something that is extremely datacentric and critical in that sense. But it's not like its on one of my "top 20 must run tests" or anything. It's always one of those issues I ignore or assume is…

Wrong. By neglecting to properly process encoding, you shut your application off from everyone except the English-speaking population of the world (and even so, with bugs like this one).

Such mistakes were excusable in the 90s. They're the sign of an amateur programmer today.

Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#62

Post by ak217 »

pak wrote: post #12

"This is SUCH a classic sloppy programmer mistake that I'm disappointed" Oh come off of it. This happens everywhere on the web on probably something like 25% of websites. And it's NOT always the consuming program's fault: very often somebody upstream, e.g. the hosting company, the person that wrote the HTML, the source of an RSS feed being inserted into the page etc. etc. forgot to encode something the way somebody e…

Really, it's not that hard. 99% of the job is done for you. Just use some UTF-8 encoded text to test your app before letting the president of the United States use it.

There is no excuse for not testing your app for basic i18n brokenness. It's 2011, not 1998.

Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#64

Post by joeyh »

ignifero wrote: post #20

You have to give it to Microsoft. They use Word even for 140 letter documents now! (I understand spelling is a reason, but browsers have spelling now)

Here´s my guess. This political tweet was one of many thought up by speechwriters, entered in a word document. It was passed around a few times to make sure it hit the right talking points, perhaps read to Boehner over the phone, and eventually someone copypasted it to the internet.

Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#65

Post by joeyh »

mgkimsal wrote: post #52
ben1040 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap shot - they also likely copy/paste screenshots in to Word and mail those around too, instead of just mailing the actual graphic file. :) When I was in consulting doing software integration work, few things infuriated me more than client "bug reports" arriving in the form of an email containing a 15 megabyte MS Word doc with a bunch of un-annotated screenshots. I really hope Google someday opens up the awesome b…

I almost wouldn't mind, except the screenshots are inevitably shrunk down so as to be unreadable. In OSX, the cmd-shift-4 (and 3) keystroke which screenshots right in to a file are near life-transforming. Snap, drag the file into an email, and it's done. I'm sure there are utilities in Windows which do this, but having it built in is great - no apps to start or install.

Be glad if you've not worked on a project where problem reports can take the form of a blurry, badly contrasted cell phone camera snapshot of the kernel oops that's partially scrolled off the user's screen. :)

Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#66

Post by pilif »

Errors like this is what me and my coworkers jokingly refer to as US-UTF8 (no offense meant). In a country that's dominated by ASCII, "supporting" UTF8 means "emitting the same data as usual but declare it as UTF8).

Sure there might be some misunderstandings with special punctuation characters as evidenced by the article, but such issues generally get low priority.

In countries where the language isn't representable in ASCII, we can't use US-UTF8, but have to resort to "real-UTF8" which means dealing with legacy systems that don't do UTF8 (which is what happened in the article we're currently commenting on), dealing with browsers who lie about encoding, and dealing with the fact that a string length isn't its byte length any more even if it doesn't contain "fancy" punctuation characters.

All that makes me wish I could do US-UTF8 too :-)

Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#67

Post by [deleted] »

efalcao wrote: post #60
efalcao wrote: post #58

Hey I work for the company responsible for the visualization behind the president and the content on http://askobama.twitter.com Let me take this very excellent opportunity to say that we are looking to hire a full time "front end" developer. You'll get to work on badass projects like the Obama Town Hall. Ideally, you'd be located in Austin. Find me on Twitter @efalcao to learn more.

FWIW, this was an intense project to pull off. 1000's of tweets per minute from Twitter, 8000 requests per second on http://askobama.twitter.com (where the same tweet was also delivered by us and rendered correctly). We're not lazy or sloppy... It basically boiled down to one server sent down the right header...the production one didn't. Unicode issues are sorta in the class of "gotcha" issue. They happen, you go "oh…

[deleted]

Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#68

Post by JonoW »

mgkimsal wrote: post #52
ben1040 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap shot - they also likely copy/paste screenshots in to Word and mail those around too, instead of just mailing the actual graphic file. :) When I was in consulting doing software integration work, few things infuriated me more than client "bug reports" arriving in the form of an email containing a 15 megabyte MS Word doc with a bunch of un-annotated screenshots. I really hope Google someday opens up the awesome b…

I almost wouldn't mind, except the screenshots are inevitably shrunk down so as to be unreadable. In OSX, the cmd-shift-4 (and 3) keystroke which screenshots right in to a file are near life-transforming. Snap, drag the file into an email, and it's done. I'm sure there are utilities in Windows which do this, but having it built in is great - no apps to start or install.

press "Print Screen" and paste into new email? Works well in desktop clients like outlook, less so for web-clients like gmail...

Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#69

Post by mgkimsal »

JonoW wrote: post #68
mgkimsal wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost wouldn't mind, except the screenshots are inevitably shrunk down so as to be unreadable. In OSX, the cmd-shift-4 (and 3) keystroke which screenshots right in to a file are near life-transforming. Snap, drag the file into an email, and it's done. I'm sure there are utilities in Windows which do this, but having it built in is great - no apps to start or install.

press "Print Screen" and paste into new email? Works well in desktop clients like outlook, less so for web-clients like gmail...

NO ONE DOES THAT ON WINDOWS OUTSIDE OF TECH GEEKS. EVERYONE pastes in to MS Word, then emails that document.

That said, from a geek standpoint, I still prefer having the raw image file that I snapped in a folder someplace so I can refer to it later without having to go through sent emails, but that's just a personal preference.

Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#70

Post by ignifero »

ben1040 wrote: post #47
mgkimsal wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvoted, understandably perhaps, but nearly every time I see this sort of bug it's because someone has copy/pasted something from MS Word instead of using whatever native client input method was provided (usually a textarea or input field). Yes, blame the rendering script for not encoding properly, but I suspect this was Boehner's team copy/pasting from some internal MS Word doc. Cheap shot - they also likely copy/…

Cheap shot - they also likely copy/paste screenshots in to Word and mail those around too, instead of just mailing the actual graphic file. :) When I was in consulting doing software integration work, few things infuriated me more than client "bug reports" arriving in the form of an email containing a 15 megabyte MS Word doc with a bunch of un-annotated screenshots. I really hope Google someday opens up the awesome b…

Actually the "send feedback" link in Google+ does exactly that: asking you to highlight parts of the page where the error occurs and then obscure any sensitive info.
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