Comments on: What’s up?

By: Vitruvius

Vitruvius — Fri, 25 Dec 2020 08:42:41 +0000

Good to see you! How ya doin’?

By: RL

RL — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 14:29:02 +0000

I will see if I can fix it with a post….

By: podrock

podrock — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 03:46:27 +0000

Clever subject lines are one of the things that attracted me to the Zone. It’s tradition.

I hate not being able to edit my comment subject line. But there was a time we couldn’t edit anything, so there is that.

The thread in question also has a number of self-deleted comments. Way out of the ordinary. Fine by me, I delete my comments sometimes, usually after taking a deep breath after posting. I wonder if that is triggering something.

By: podrock

podrock — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 03:38:20 +0000

Why not, it’s 2020

check with Robert, I’ll get the snipping tool open

By: podrock

podrock — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 03:37:48 +0000

You cannot use the same subject line twice in the same thread.

By: RL

RL — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 03:37:45 +0000

May I do a temporarily disruptive demonstration that may help troubleshoot?

By: ER

ER — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 03:33:48 +0000

…in coming up with pithy, or profound banners for my posts. But occasionally I forget to compose one and post without typing one in. If its in a post, no problem, I can add one in editing. But if its in a comment, there is nothing I can do, the first few lines of my post are crammed into the banner.

A few days ago, I noticed this was happening, but I assumed I was just careless or had forgotten to enter a banner. I noticed it happening to others, too. But today I noticed that no matter what I tried to put in the banner, the Zone ignored it and picked up the first few lines of my post and placed that in the banner instead. Then I noticed the problem seemed intermittent–it didn’t happen every time.

As usual, it looks like our software creations are beyond our understanding, and sometimes it takes long study and experimentation to figure out why they exhibit peculiar behavior. We call this “troubleshooting”, or “debugging”, as if it were some rational procedure. But it is more of an art, and relies heavily on luck and intuition.

Still, this comes at a good time. I was trying to make a point that terraforming a barren planet was a completely unpredictable and complex task probably doomed to failure, not because we didn’t have the right science, but because our engineering simply wasn’t up to the job. Just because a task violates no physical law doesn’t necessarily mean we can make it happen. Sometimes the system is just too complex for us to completely understand.

If our software exhibits peculiar behavior we can’t predict or control, can we really expect that tinkering with an entire planet won’t wind up with it blowing up in our faces?

By: podrock

podrock — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 03:29:21 +0000

On V’s post on Mysteries of the Universe, comments once posted are stripped of the text entered into the title box (subject line, banner, etc…) and the first lines of the body text get promoted to the subject line. An error message appears upon pressing post. The thread does not go to the top of the page after update. Table of contents doesn’t update. Also believe it happened on another thread, that was my test on your thread about the reboot. Have to look back and find it.

Tried various things. Thought it was V’s elaborate HTML tags. Tried that, thought it was a page break tag, now not sure.

By: RL

RL — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 03:05:41 +0000

But a few weeks ago I discovered I can make a post that forces the zone to display in whatever font I want for everyone…

Late one evening I turned the zone font to comic sans, and then unreadable wingdings font…

I am pretty sure I could make it so it only impacts a certain time range of posts…

I promise to use my powers only for good…
But such power in the hands of one person… its a scary thing…