* * * * *
                                        
                       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] [1]
>  
> 
> 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] [2]
>  
> 
> 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] [3]
>  
> 
> 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 [4] works with UTF-8 (it
handled a post written in a Runic alphabet [5] just fine), reconfigured the
webserver to serve up the appropriate headers and converted the data file for
Silicone Wisdom [6] to UTF-8.

Okay, it didn't take me that long, and as my friend Jeff [7] said:

> It is no longer an ASCII (American Standard Code for Information
> Interchange) world, it's a Unicode one. I have run in to this a lot and
> anything that uses XML (eXtensible Markup Language), 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 [8] revealed a similar issue. It is
to laugh.


[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2011/01/02/a.png
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2011/01/02/b.png
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2011/01/02/c.png
[4] https://boston.conman.org/about/technical.html
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_alphabet
[6] http://twitter.com/siwisdom
[7] http://spinthecat.blogspot.com/
[8] http://www.facebook.com/

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

.