[Dixonary] OT: More new/old google curiosities

[Jim Hart]

Now here's another curious thing. When I opened Google groups today it
somehow defaulted back to the old style, but more curious was the display
of the current definitions: they were all numbered 1. Like this (hoping you
see it like I see it):


1.

a folkloric creature adapted to living on hillsides by having legs on
one side of its body shorter than those on the other side.

1.

a kind of domestic pigeon.

1.

a shop-girl.

etc....
I was all set to vote for 1 and 1, confident of getting two points while
wondering why Dick had voted for 4 and 9, but as soon as I logged in the
view changed to new Google and the numbers were correctly consecutive as
usual.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Jim

[Dodi Schultz]

On 4/4/2012 8:49 PM, Jim Hart wrote:
> Now here's another curious thing. When I opened Google groups today it
> somehow defaulted back to the old style, but more curious was the display
> of the current definitions: they were all numbered 1. Like this (hoping
> you see it like I see it):
>
>
> 1.
>
> a folkloric creature adapted to living on hillsides by having legs on
> one side of its body shorter than those on the other side.
>
> 1.
>
> a kind of domestic pigeon.
>
> 1.
>
> a shop-girl.
>
> etc....
>
> I was all set to vote for 1 and 1, confident of getting two points while
> wondering why Dick had voted for 4 and 9, but as soon as I logged in the
> view changed to new Google and the numbers were correctly consecutive as
> usual.
>
> Curiouser and curiouser.
>
> Jim

Have you considered just using e-mail???

[thejazzmonger]

Holy cow! That's not the way the email looks to me, but I see that it is
formatted in the same screwed up way on the Tapcis Forum site.

I will try to post again. In the mean time, hopefully this gives you
something to work with:

Vote for TWO by replying to this message, (you can hit “Reply” this time)
before the deadline, which is 6:30 AM EDT on Friday, April 06, 2012, or
3:30 AM PDT .



1.

a folkloric creature adapted to living on hillsides by having legs on
one side of its body shorter than those on the other side.



1.

a kind of domestic pigeon.



1.

a shop-girl.



1.

of or pertaining to emerald green; of a gem-like, lustrous green color.



1.

prone to extreme anger.



1.

_obs_ Having a musical aspect or quality, usually said of a speaking
voice. From Skt. raga-s "harmony, melody."



1.

talentless.



1.

the sadness or bitterness of being old [fr.Heb _mara_ bitter].



1.

the cloth in which a haggis is boiled.



1.

multivariate to the point of absurdity; describing a system with many
branches or possible results, most of which are impractical or nonsensical.



1.

an astringent ointment used in the late 19th century in France.



1.

a decorative technique for ceramics, in which a painted design is
smeared with a cloth before it is dry.



1.

the strongly scented deposit left on tree trunks and other vegetation by
certain animals to mark territorial boundaries.



1.

a type of coarse alabaster, fire-hardened for use as flooring or tile.



1.

margarine which has been subjected to extreme heat.



1.

muddy.



1.

possessing irregular or distorted features.



1.

orach; saltbush.



1.

in India, a student who endures a bullying initiation with pride and
good humor.



1.

[Dan.] an informal dinner consisting mainly of herring prepared in a
variety of manners.



1.

a blend of almond paste and sugar.



I am also attaching the post as a Word document.

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 8:49 PM, Jim Hart <jfshart (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

> Now here's another curious thing. When I opened Google groups today it
> somehow defaulted back to the old style, but more curious was the display
> of the current definitions: they were all numbered 1. Like this (hoping you
> see it like I see it):
>
>
> 1.
>
> a folkloric creature adapted to living on hillsides by having legs on
> one side of its body shorter than those on the other side.
>
> 1.
>
> a kind of domestic pigeon.
>
> 1.
>
> a shop-girl.
>
>
>

[Jim Hart]

Steve - for me it's only wonky when I look through the old GGroups lens.
With new GGroups it's OK and clearly with email it's OK too.

It seems either Word Google has coded each def as an auto-numbered
paragraph, not just a line of text that happens to start with a numeral.
And it seems that new groups and emails understand this but old groups
doesn't get it right and doesn't increment properly.

Maybe it would be ok if you save into a plain text format where numbers are
just numbers. Or not worry about it because we'll still understand and
after all it's only a game.

Jim



On Thursday, April 5, 2012 12:04:37 PM UTC+10, Steve Dixon wrote:
>
> Holy cow! That's not the way the email looks to me, but I see that it is
> formatted in the same screwed up way on the Tapcis Forum site.

[Tim B]

,
> and clearly with email it's OK too.

Not for me, with Thunderbird - all I see is ones.

Best wishes,
Tim Bourne.

[Guerri Stevens]

I also use Tbird, and it looked fine to me. However, my version of Tbird
is very old.

Guerri

Tim B wrote:
> ,
>> and clearly with email it's OK too.
>
> Not for me, with Thunderbird - all I see is ones.

[Hugo Kornelis]

For me, also with Thunderbird, I see a normal numbered list in all
Steve's attempts.

Cheers,
Hugo

Op 5-4-2012 11:48, Tim B schreef:
> ,
>> and clearly with email it's OK too.
>
> Not for me, with Thunderbird - all I see is ones.
>
> Best wishes,
> Tim Bourne.
>

[thejazzmonger]

So, sometimes T-bird alters it, and sometimes not. I definitely saw the
change by switching Google Groups back to the old format. And Tapcis Forum
read it as the all-ones layout. Some weirdness going on.

Am I correct, that shortly Google Groups will ONLY be the new format?


On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 7:08 AM, Hugo Kornelis <hugo (AT) perfact (DOT) info> wrote:

> For me, also with Thunderbird, I see a normal numbered list in all Steve's
> attempts.
>
> Cheers,
> Hugo
>
> Op 5-4-2012 11:48, Tim B schreef:
>
> ,
>>
>>> and clearly with email it's OK too.
>>>
>>
>> Not for me, with Thunderbird - all I see is ones.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>> Tim Bourne.
>>
>>


--
steve "thejazzmonger" dixon

[Dodi Schultz]

On 4/5/2012 5:48 AM, Tim B wrote:


>
> Not for me, with Thunderbird - all I see is ones.


Now THAT IS weird. I'm also using Tbird (ver 11.0), and the list has come
through properly every single time it's been sent (I've now lost count),
starting with the first.

—Dodi

[Tim B]

,
> So, sometimes T-bird alters it, and sometimes not.

Another clue: In TBird, I normally have view set to plain text, and that shows all ones. When I
switch to view as HTML, I see a correctly numbered list. So Google Groups is using HTML to achieve
the numbering, rather than leaving it as the text that was (presumably) entered.

Best wishes,
Tim Bourne.

[thejazzmonger]

Aha! I think you may have nailed, Tim.

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 10:19 AM, Tim B <dixonary (AT) siam (DOT) co.uk> wrote:

> ,
>
>> So, sometimes T-bird alters it, and sometimes not.
>>
>
> Another clue: In TBird, I normally have view set to plain text, and that
> shows all ones. When I switch to view as HTML, I see a correctly numbered
> list. So Google Groups is using HTML to achieve the numbering, rather than
> leaving it as the text that was (presumably) entered.
>
> Best wishes,
> Tim Bourne.
>



--
steve "thejazzmonger" dixon

[Jim Hart]

Dodi, this is verging towards off-off-topic but in the matter of weird
characters on the Google Dixonary site when I see your name signing off
messages it is always preceded by three characters, like this:

�Dodi

which may look normal to you but I see an "i" with double dots, then an
inverted "?", then a "1/2" half fraction. In the email digest it seems to
be a long dash. So what did you type?

Jim

[Paul Keating]

Jim,

It’s an em-dash, as you suspected. Dodi sent her email in Windows 8-bit encoding (aka Windows 1252, aka Latin-1) in which the em-dash is a single character, 0x97 or decimal 151. In the old Google Groups, this character is silently dropped. In the new Google Groups, it appears as the three characters you describe, as the page is displayed by both Firefox 11 and IE9.

Google forwarded Dodi’s email to me verbatim, so I see the em-dash in my mail client, because my mail client honours the indication in the header of character set and file transfer encoding.

The i-diaeresis is the UTF-8 leading byte for a multibyte sequence, so if you treat those three characters as a UTF-8 three-byte sequence, it comes out to FFFD, which is the Unicode ‘replacement character’, used to replace an incoming character whose value is unknown or unrepresentable in Unicode. Its standard Unicode glyph is a white question mark in a black diamond.

So it appears that Google Groups is translating the text to Unicode on input, and is lazily substituting the replacement character for the em-dash, instead of interpreting the mail headers properly. And then to compound the problem, the programmers in charge of the display are assuming the text is Latin-1, not UTF-8, so they are interpreting the UTF-8 3-byte encoding of ‘replacement character’ as three characters.

I’ve reported this to Google Groups as a bug. I’m not sure how much good that will do.

P



From: Jim Hart
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2012 1:43 AM
To: dixonary (AT) googlegroups (DOT) com
Cc: DodiSchultz (AT) nasw (DOT) org
Subject: Re: [Dixonary] OT: More new/old google curiosities


Dodi, this is verging towards off-off-topic but in the matter of weird characters on the Google Dixonary site when I see your name signing off messages it is always preceded by three characters, like this:

�Dodi

which may look normal to you but I see an "i" with double dots, then an inverted "?", then a "1/2" half fraction. In the email digest it seems to be a long dash. So what did you type?

Jim