Ordinary Times Technical Notes

Michael Cain

Michael is a systems analyst, with a taste for obscure applied math. He's interested in energy supplies, the urban/rural divide, regional political differences in the US, and map-like things. Bicycling, and fencing (with swords, that is) act as stress relief.

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12 Responses

  1. Brandon Berg says:

    So that’s what happened to Major Zed.Report

  2. Brandon Berg says:

    Apparently you did mention it before. I must have missed it:

    https://ordinary-times.com/2021/02/06/one-step-backwards-two-steps-forward/Report

  3. Slade the Leveller says:

    Bring back the WYSIWYG comment box!Report

    • Brandon Berg in reply to Slade the Leveller says:

      I’m not a huge fan of WYSIWYG, but I do miss the convenience buttons that inserted HTML tags, which are a real pain to do on mobile.Report

    • TTBOMK, there are no WYSIWYG comment boxes that reliably produce flat text that the WordPress back end won’t sometimes mangle. WP dropped their own attempt. WP’s classic editor for writing posts has a WYSIWYG view and a flat text with markup view. Copy, paste, and switching back and forth between views will often result in something that renders peculiarly when you preview the page.

      I’ve occasionally toyed with the idea of writing such an editor. The continuous lexer/parser/rewrite engine that keeps users from doing stupid things is the kind of finicky software I used to be good at. And processors are fast enough that the soft real time aspect probably isn’t a big problem. But boy howdy does it look like a lot of work to get it right across browsers and JavaScript versions.Report

  4. North says:

    Thanks for all you do.Report

  5. Brandon Berg says:

    I dug up a comment that I had saved after being unable to post it, and confirmed that it had a word ending in “zed.” Not sure about the other, but probably the same story. Thanks for fixing this!

    By the way, what is going on in that cartoon? The machine is shredding papers and…sending the pulp out the firewall?

    I think I can see the other side of the page, but it’s too faint to make out. Possibly source code?Report

    • After I had figured out what was happening and skimmed through the trash comments, I was surprised by how many words there are: amazed, blazed, recognized, realized, crystallized, unfazed, resized, etc.

      I drew the cartoon when I had to (definitely had to, not got to) give a talk to a bunch of senior managers, in hopes of getting the idea that there are no small holes in firewalls, only slow ones, to stick in their heads. Especially if someone’s got code running on the inside. I used to get asked to set up technology demonstrations that sometimes required bypassing the firewall. At the meeting where such a demo for business analysts was being discussed, the CIO (who was new and didn’t know me) said at one point, “That can’t be done, our firewall would stop it.” I leaned out over the table so I could face him and asked, “Want to bet?” The CTO (who did know me) almost literally jumped between us and told the CIO, “Don’t take the bet. When he asks that question in that tone of voice it means he not only thinks he can do it, he already knows how he can do it.” Corporate IT in those days was not fond of me.

      Yes, a source listing. Dated July 3, 1995. I’m such a pack rat.Report

  6. Burt Likko says:

    Thank you for doing the tedious but very important technical work that keeps the site running smoothly. It’s a quiet but indispensable part of what keeps OT one of the remnants of the Golden Age of Blogging.Report

    • Most of the stability should be credited to senior management’s approach of simply leaving things well enough alone. New writers, not new widgets! However, WP is starting to complain a little bit more strongly that there are new versions available for everything: PHP, WordPress, the theme, all of the plug-ins… One of these days Will Truman will decide we need to update and things will be more “interesting” for a while.Report