14 ms·

Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming

123 points by edwintorok 14y ago

biofox 14y ago
More interested by the title... I had no idea unicode emoticons existed. Found a complete list here: http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/emoticons.html http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/emoticons.html
- frou_dh 14y ago
  Not sure how standard they are, but there are a several hundred you can browse in OS X by selecting Edit > Special Characters... > Emoji in Finder. 🐈
  - ygra 14y ago
    They have been standardised in Unicode 6.
- INTPenis 14y ago
  I don't know how but the Homebrew project print a pitcher of beer somehow in my iTerm2. Most likely unicode but it was not listed in the page you linked.
  - Zirro 14y ago
    🍺 Beer Mug - Unicode: U+1F37A (U+D83C U+DF7A), UTF-8: F0 9F 8D BA You can find all of them in the Emoji section of Special Characters through the Edit-menu, as described in another comment. They work in the classic Terminal application as well, along with most other applications using standard OS X API:s or ones that have specifically added support.
  - bergie 14y ago
    There are more symbols in http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/miscellaneous-symbols-and-pictographs.html http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/miscellaneous-symbols-and-pi...
  - snowwrestler 14y ago
    I have an emoji apple in the Terminal prompt on my Mac. If I don't see that splash of red I know I'm on one of my Linux servers.
creamyhorror 14y ago
I've seen a bunch of companies start to use icon/emoticon characters in their email subjects to get attention - Newegg, LinkedIn, etc. It certainly works on me. I'm afraid soon every mail will have an attention-grabbing icon and we'll just get inured to it. I have to admit, if I launched an email campaign, I'd use them too...
- Evbn 14y ago
  Very easy to spam detect on non-alphanumeric chars in subject.
xentronium 14y ago
Why is unicode support so bad in 2013?
- ygra 14y ago
  Because every implementation of anything has certain assumptions and when you're not someone who regularly juggles different scripts at once it's easy to miss a lot of things (e.g. blindly assuming that everything is ASCII). Also part of the problem was U+0027 and its use as a quote character in shell scripts. So that was not a Unicode issue but rather a shell script injection issue and programmers do that all the time (although usually with SQL, I guess).
- roel_v 14y ago
  Because it's so much work for so little return.
- zokier 14y ago
  You might ask why shell scripting and string escaping are so bad in 2013 as well. Those have couple of decades more history behind them after all.
- edwintorok 14y ago
  Not all Unicode characters are indexed by search engines, for example the 😻 is not indexed apparently: http://lwn.net/Articles/545993/ http://lwn.net/Articles/545993/
- Millennium 14y ago
  It's basically Y2K without the sense of urgency. People assumed ASCII, or at least single-byte supersets of ASCII, would pretty much be the norm, so they never bothered with anything else. And since there are no apocalypse nutters breathing down people's necks to fix it, it often gets deprioritized. Plan 9 actually tried to do something about this: it assumed Unicode for everything, and invented their own encoding for the process. The OS didn't work out so well (regrettably), but we still use their encoding: it's called UTF-8 now. Still a superset of ASCII, I guess, but at least we've gotten beyond the single-byte assumption.
- 14y ago
h2s 14y ago
While disappointing, it's perhaps not surprising that the umlaut in "Schrödinger's Cat" caused trouble. The fact that the apostrophe was ruled too risky as well, however, is an indictment on software engineering as a profession. If people are scared to put basic punctuation marks in the names of things, out of fear that badly-written software might break as a result, then that is a sign of just how far we still have left to go.
- heja2009 14y ago
  I'd argue it is worse that almost all languages can not be used to name things. A pain that many computer users in non-English speaking countries feel regularly. As a German I set all my devices to US English for this reason -although this causes other problems. The apostrophe is really just related to shells and scripting and should be a bit easier to fix.
  - praptak 14y ago
    I agree and disagree. If everything had unicode support, we'd still probably want to limit the codepoint set used for identifiers that are supposed to be unique. Lots of characters have visually indistinguishable glyphs ('x' could be cyrillic kha as well as plain old x) and this already causes problems - see homoglyph attacks.
- estebank 14y ago
  Notice that the fix was to use "Schrödinger’s Cat" instead of "Schrödinger's Cat". The fix was removing the single quote, as the script checked if there were characters that would run afoul of string escaping. The problem as it is has nothing to do with Unicode and was actually fixed by using a Unicode character. That doesn't mean that there aren't any Unicode bugs in other tools, but that wasn't the issue in this particular case.
  - j-kidd 14y ago
    Handling of special character is usually a bigger problem than unicode. Just today, I tried to name a file with both a single quote and an exclamation point from bash shell. Ended up doing that with a GUI file manager.
Jakob 14y ago
For me in Chrome on Mac OS 10.8 instead of an emoticon it just shows a sqare. Safari showed the cat. The square looks like the qed symbol, I thought the article was about a proof or a box. Both worked fine in my mind :)
- omaranto 14y ago
  It sounds like something weird is going on, I would expect the following behaviour: if you have a font with the cat glyph installed on your system all browsers display the cat, if you don't have a font with the glyph then no browser displays the cat. Why does Safari show the cat while Chrome doesn't? I can think of two explanations: (1) Mac OS doesn't actually have a designated place to put fonts for all applications to find (I don't use Mac OS so I have no idea how it works, but this sounds unlikely), (2) Mac OS does have a central location for fotns but Chrome doesn't use them and just uses some fonts it comes bundled with. Is either of those two explanations correct? If not, what is going on?
  - dragonwriter 14y ago
    > Why does Safari show the cat while Chrome doesn't? I can think of two explanations: (1) Mac OS doesn't actually have a designated place to put fonts for all applications to find (I don't use Mac OS so I have no idea how it works, but this sounds unlikely), (2) Mac OS does have a central location for fotns but Chrome doesn't use them and just uses some fonts it comes bundled with. Is either of those two explanations correct? I suspect its an OS-related issue, as the cat shows in Chrome on Kubuntu 12.10 for me.
jakub_g 14y ago
In fact, some participants in the mailing list discussion proposed adding non-alphanumeric characters to future release names just to see what happens. (...) Peter Robinson proposed the project go right for the goal and choose "DROP table *;". We need a courage like this! ;)
- johnchristopher 14y ago
  That part of the article made my day :)
- lmm 14y ago
  Who's really going to use os-release in an SQL database? Real courage would be 'Fedora 20 ; rm -rf / #'
  - deafbybeheading 14y ago
    Don't forget --no-preserve-root
  - pjscott 14y ago
    I believe this release name would combine the best of both: Fedora 20 ; rm -rf / # '; DROP table *; --
moron4hire 14y ago
:( the cat glyph worked in Chrome on my phone but not on my desktop.
- pavlov 14y ago
  Oh, it's supposed to be a cat glyph? Chrome on OS X 10.8 shows me a square, and so I assumed that the joke is that it represents Schrödinger's box -- you know, where he keeps the cat which may or may not be dead.
  - moron4hire 14y ago
    Heh, that's actually kind of a neat, serendipitous, not-really-neat-because-this-shit-should-fucking-work-by-now-it's-2013-fer-chrissakes fallback.
    - ygra 14y ago
      To be fair, Emoji are a fairly recent addition to Unicode and they're not really ubiquitous outside of mobile phones (they started as a formal encoding of various pictograms used predominantly by Japanese carriers for SMS). No OS supplies enough fonts to cover 100 % of Unicode out of the box. That being said, Emoji seem to work at least on Mac OS X (current) and Windows 8. Alas, Chrome doesn't render them within a page (but in the tab/title bar, maybe because the OS' rendering takes over there). Firefox and IE show them both, apparently (presumably because both are DirectWrite-based by now).
      - joelwilliamson 14y ago
        Firefox on Linux (where I assume DirectWrite isn't used) also displays it fine.
  - meatsock 14y ago
    mine only showed up as a box until i observed it.
  - evanb 14y ago
jonnyscholes 14y ago
Hmm, is there a reference of who actually designed all these unicode chars anywhere? I remember looking a while back to no avail - these more 'graphic' ones resurfaced my interest. Did one poor sod do the whole lot [of Emojis] or...?
- ygra 14y ago
  The ones you are seeing come from a font you have installed. There should be a copyright somewhere in there. For those in the Unicode code charts they come from several people and prototype fonts, usually.
  - jonnyscholes 14y ago
    Ah, of course. Thanks :)
gbhn 14y ago
Next release name: "' && rm -rf /"
Chris_Newton 14y ago
There are two big lessons from this discussion, IMHO. Firstly, broad character sets are all very well, but they have limited value if you can’t rely on everyone using your text being able to see them. Something like the ö (o-umlaut) is a reasonable thing to expect in modern Western fonts, but what about the emoticons I’m increasingly seeing in e-mails, or more advanced mathematical operators, or the cat in the title of this very article that many people commenting here can’t see in some contexts? We need much better standardisation and prioritisation of sets of related glyphs that are, for example, permitted by the coding standards for a software project or supported by a font file. ASCII is too small, all of Unicode is too big, and picking glyphs for inclusion in fonts one at a time is too fine-grained for this purpose. Secondly, it is crazy that with literally a million code points available in Unicode world, we don’t seem to have new control characters for “begin literal” and “end literal” to mark a range of text that should be interpreted verbatim regardless of context. Instead, we’re still using horrible hacks like quoting and escaping in environments like command lines and source code, and in text file formats like comma- or tab-separated values. These kinds of techniques are, invariably, horribly error-prone and terrible for usability; after all, in the case we’re discussing, it seems to be the apostrophe that is causing more problems than the ö! I think the computing world would be a much easier place for many, many people if there were one universal standard way of saying, “This is plain text”.
- Jabbles 14y ago
  Is it too much to expect that every device should be capable of rendering every unicode point (latest version at release) in at least one font? With the option to fall back to that font if it tries to render something in a font that doesn't have that character? Obviously there are issues with unicode phishing of domain names and other cases where you might want to signal that a character is "strange", but surely the memory and processing requirements for this are low enough now. It doesn't have to be a good font!
  - Chris_Newton 14y ago
    Is it too much to expect that every device should be capable of rendering every unicode point (latest version at release) in at least one font? Yes, I think it probably is. Unicode is vast, and the 100,000+ characters specified in the latest standard include numerous obscure, specialised, or downright gimmicky ones. The effort required to create just one font that supports even a crude version of each and every character is probably measured in human lifetimes. Imposing that kind of burden as a barrier to entry for any new platform seems unrealistic.
unabridged 14y ago
There is a reason the latin alphabet is the most used in the world, and why 7bit ascii is the standard for computing. Simplicity. They are highly distinguishable characters consisting of mostly straight lines and simple curves. Diacritical marks (training wheels) and unicode break this simplicity, you cannot program in a language with many characters that are hard/impossible to distinguish. Or with crazy characters that can switch direction of text and other nonsense. Unicode is a luxury to pretty things up for end users, not something to do serious work in.
- Dewie 14y ago
  >, and why 7bit ascii is the standard for computing. The US. > Simplicity. Oh... > Diacritical marks (training wheels) and unicode break this simplicity, you cannot program in a language with many characters that are hard/impossible to distinguish. Many languages get by with their communication in spite of having things like "spots over the o's" or whatever. I have no problem distinguishing them. Do you have experience with reading such languages? Or are you simply blowing hot air? Ever looked at typewriter font for l and 1? Yeah, these things are not historical accidents at all... > Unicode is a luxury to pretty things up for end users, not something to do serious work in. It's a luxury for end users... yes, non-English users should count their blessings when they are able to use their whole alphabet. Part of this issue was correctly spelling the name of an Austrian physicist, not someone trying to write "cat" with some esoteric Unicode that looks like a cat.

123 points by edwintorok 14y ago

More interested by the title... I had no idea unicode emoticons existed. Found a complete list here: http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/emoticons.html http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/emoticons.html

frou_dh 14y ago
Not sure how standard they are, but there are a several hundred you can browse in OS X by selecting Edit > Special Characters... > Emoji in Finder. 🐈
- ygra 14y ago
  They have been standardised in Unicode 6.
INTPenis 14y ago
I don't know how but the Homebrew project print a pitcher of beer somehow in my iTerm2. Most likely unicode but it was not listed in the page you linked.
- Zirro 14y ago
  🍺 Beer Mug - Unicode: U+1F37A (U+D83C U+DF7A), UTF-8: F0 9F 8D BA You can find all of them in the Emoji section of Special Characters through the Edit-menu, as described in another comment. They work in the classic Terminal application as well, along with most other applications using standard OS X API:s or ones that have specifically added support.
- bergie 14y ago
  There are more symbols in http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/miscellaneous-symbols-and-pictographs.html http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/miscellaneous-symbols-and-pi...
- snowwrestler 14y ago
  I have an emoji apple in the Terminal prompt on my Mac. If I don't see that splash of red I know I'm on one of my Linux servers.

creamyhorror 14y ago

I've seen a bunch of companies start to use icon/emoticon characters in their email subjects to get attention - Newegg, LinkedIn, etc. It certainly works on me. I'm afraid soon every mail will have an attention-grabbing icon and we'll just get inured to it. I have to admit, if I launched an email campaign, I'd use them too...

Evbn 14y ago
Very easy to spam detect on non-alphanumeric chars in subject.

xentronium 14y ago

Why is unicode support so bad in 2013?

ygra 14y ago
Because every implementation of anything has certain assumptions and when you're not someone who regularly juggles different scripts at once it's easy to miss a lot of things (e.g. blindly assuming that everything is ASCII). Also part of the problem was U+0027 and its use as a quote character in shell scripts. So that was not a Unicode issue but rather a shell script injection issue and programmers do that all the time (although usually with SQL, I guess).
roel_v 14y ago
Because it's so much work for so little return.
zokier 14y ago
You might ask why shell scripting and string escaping are so bad in 2013 as well. Those have couple of decades more history behind them after all.
edwintorok 14y ago
Not all Unicode characters are indexed by search engines, for example the 😻 is not indexed apparently: http://lwn.net/Articles/545993/ http://lwn.net/Articles/545993/
Millennium 14y ago
It's basically Y2K without the sense of urgency. People assumed ASCII, or at least single-byte supersets of ASCII, would pretty much be the norm, so they never bothered with anything else. And since there are no apocalypse nutters breathing down people's necks to fix it, it often gets deprioritized. Plan 9 actually tried to do something about this: it assumed Unicode for everything, and invented their own encoding for the process. The OS didn't work out so well (regrettably), but we still use their encoding: it's called UTF-8 now. Still a superset of ASCII, I guess, but at least we've gotten beyond the single-byte assumption.
14y ago

h2s 14y ago

While disappointing, it's perhaps not surprising that the umlaut in "Schrödinger's Cat" caused trouble. The fact that the apostrophe was ruled too risky as well, however, is an indictment on software engineering as a profession. If people are scared to put basic punctuation marks in the names of things, out of fear that badly-written software might break as a result, then that is a sign of just how far we still have left to go.

heja2009 14y ago
I'd argue it is worse that almost all languages can not be used to name things. A pain that many computer users in non-English speaking countries feel regularly. As a German I set all my devices to US English for this reason -although this causes other problems. The apostrophe is really just related to shells and scripting and should be a bit easier to fix.
- praptak 14y ago
  I agree and disagree. If everything had unicode support, we'd still probably want to limit the codepoint set used for identifiers that are supposed to be unique. Lots of characters have visually indistinguishable glyphs ('x' could be cyrillic kha as well as plain old x) and this already causes problems - see homoglyph attacks.
estebank 14y ago
Notice that the fix was to use "Schrödinger’s Cat" instead of "Schrödinger's Cat". The fix was removing the single quote, as the script checked if there were characters that would run afoul of string escaping. The problem as it is has nothing to do with Unicode and was actually fixed by using a Unicode character. That doesn't mean that there aren't any Unicode bugs in other tools, but that wasn't the issue in this particular case.
- j-kidd 14y ago
  Handling of special character is usually a bigger problem than unicode. Just today, I tried to name a file with both a single quote and an exclamation point from bash shell. Ended up doing that with a GUI file manager.

Jakob 14y ago

For me in Chrome on Mac OS 10.8 instead of an emoticon it just shows a sqare. Safari showed the cat. The square looks like the qed symbol, I thought the article was about a proof or a box. Both worked fine in my mind :)

omaranto 14y ago
It sounds like something weird is going on, I would expect the following behaviour: if you have a font with the cat glyph installed on your system all browsers display the cat, if you don't have a font with the glyph then no browser displays the cat. Why does Safari show the cat while Chrome doesn't? I can think of two explanations: (1) Mac OS doesn't actually have a designated place to put fonts for all applications to find (I don't use Mac OS so I have no idea how it works, but this sounds unlikely), (2) Mac OS does have a central location for fotns but Chrome doesn't use them and just uses some fonts it comes bundled with. Is either of those two explanations correct? If not, what is going on?
- dragonwriter 14y ago
  > Why does Safari show the cat while Chrome doesn't? I can think of two explanations: (1) Mac OS doesn't actually have a designated place to put fonts for all applications to find (I don't use Mac OS so I have no idea how it works, but this sounds unlikely), (2) Mac OS does have a central location for fotns but Chrome doesn't use them and just uses some fonts it comes bundled with. Is either of those two explanations correct? I suspect its an OS-related issue, as the cat shows in Chrome on Kubuntu 12.10 for me.

jakub_g 14y ago

In fact, some participants in the mailing list discussion proposed adding non-alphanumeric characters to future release names just to see what happens. (...) Peter Robinson proposed the project go right for the goal and choose "DROP table *;". We need a courage like this! ;)

johnchristopher 14y ago
That part of the article made my day :)
lmm 14y ago
Who's really going to use os-release in an SQL database? Real courage would be 'Fedora 20 ; rm -rf / #'
- deafbybeheading 14y ago
  Don't forget --no-preserve-root
- pjscott 14y ago
  I believe this release name would combine the best of both: Fedora 20 ; rm -rf / # '; DROP table *; --

moron4hire 14y ago

:( the cat glyph worked in Chrome on my phone but not on my desktop.

pavlov 14y ago
Oh, it's supposed to be a cat glyph? Chrome on OS X 10.8 shows me a square, and so I assumed that the joke is that it represents Schrödinger's box -- you know, where he keeps the cat which may or may not be dead.
- moron4hire 14y ago
  Heh, that's actually kind of a neat, serendipitous, not-really-neat-because-this-shit-should-fucking-work-by-now-it's-2013-fer-chrissakes fallback.
  - ygra 14y ago
    To be fair, Emoji are a fairly recent addition to Unicode and they're not really ubiquitous outside of mobile phones (they started as a formal encoding of various pictograms used predominantly by Japanese carriers for SMS). No OS supplies enough fonts to cover 100 % of Unicode out of the box. That being said, Emoji seem to work at least on Mac OS X (current) and Windows 8. Alas, Chrome doesn't render them within a page (but in the tab/title bar, maybe because the OS' rendering takes over there). Firefox and IE show them both, apparently (presumably because both are DirectWrite-based by now).
    - joelwilliamson 14y ago
      Firefox on Linux (where I assume DirectWrite isn't used) also displays it fine.
- meatsock 14y ago
  mine only showed up as a box until i observed it.
- evanb 14y ago

jonnyscholes 14y ago

Hmm, is there a reference of who actually designed all these unicode chars anywhere? I remember looking a while back to no avail - these more 'graphic' ones resurfaced my interest. Did one poor sod do the whole lot [of Emojis] or...?

ygra 14y ago
The ones you are seeing come from a font you have installed. There should be a copyright somewhere in there. For those in the Unicode code charts they come from several people and prototype fonts, usually.
- jonnyscholes 14y ago
  Ah, of course. Thanks :)

gbhn 14y ago

Next release name: "' && rm -rf /"

Chris_Newton 14y ago

There are two big lessons from this discussion, IMHO. Firstly, broad character sets are all very well, but they have limited value if you can’t rely on everyone using your text being able to see them. Something like the ö (o-umlaut) is a reasonable thing to expect in modern Western fonts, but what about the emoticons I’m increasingly seeing in e-mails, or more advanced mathematical operators, or the cat in the title of this very article that many people commenting here can’t see in some contexts? We need much better standardisation and prioritisation of sets of related glyphs that are, for example, permitted by the coding standards for a software project or supported by a font file. ASCII is too small, all of Unicode is too big, and picking glyphs for inclusion in fonts one at a time is too fine-grained for this purpose. Secondly, it is crazy that with literally a million code points available in Unicode world, we don’t seem to have new control characters for “begin literal” and “end literal” to mark a range of text that should be interpreted verbatim regardless of context. Instead, we’re still using horrible hacks like quoting and escaping in environments like command lines and source code, and in text file formats like comma- or tab-separated values. These kinds of techniques are, invariably, horribly error-prone and terrible for usability; after all, in the case we’re discussing, it seems to be the apostrophe that is causing more problems than the ö! I think the computing world would be a much easier place for many, many people if there were one universal standard way of saying, “This is plain text”.

Jabbles 14y ago
Is it too much to expect that every device should be capable of rendering every unicode point (latest version at release) in at least one font? With the option to fall back to that font if it tries to render something in a font that doesn't have that character? Obviously there are issues with unicode phishing of domain names and other cases where you might want to signal that a character is "strange", but surely the memory and processing requirements for this are low enough now. It doesn't have to be a good font!
- Chris_Newton 14y ago
  Is it too much to expect that every device should be capable of rendering every unicode point (latest version at release) in at least one font? Yes, I think it probably is. Unicode is vast, and the 100,000+ characters specified in the latest standard include numerous obscure, specialised, or downright gimmicky ones. The effort required to create just one font that supports even a crude version of each and every character is probably measured in human lifetimes. Imposing that kind of burden as a barrier to entry for any new platform seems unrealistic.

unabridged 14y ago

There is a reason the latin alphabet is the most used in the world, and why 7bit ascii is the standard for computing. Simplicity. They are highly distinguishable characters consisting of mostly straight lines and simple curves. Diacritical marks (training wheels) and unicode break this simplicity, you cannot program in a language with many characters that are hard/impossible to distinguish. Or with crazy characters that can switch direction of text and other nonsense. Unicode is a luxury to pretty things up for end users, not something to do serious work in.

Dewie 14y ago
>, and why 7bit ascii is the standard for computing. The US. > Simplicity. Oh... > Diacritical marks (training wheels) and unicode break this simplicity, you cannot program in a language with many characters that are hard/impossible to distinguish. Many languages get by with their communication in spite of having things like "spots over the o's" or whatever. I have no problem distinguishing them. Do you have experience with reading such languages? Or are you simply blowing hot air? Ever looked at typewriter font for l and 1? Yeah, these things are not historical accidents at all... > Unicode is a luxury to pretty things up for end users, not something to do serious work in. It's a luxury for end users... yes, non-English users should count their blessings when they are able to use their whole alphabet. Part of this issue was correctly spelling the name of an Austrian physicist, not someone trying to write "cat" with some esoteric Unicode that looks like a cat.