First of all, I wanted to send a thank you to everyone who ever sent me an email or a message. I read all of them, but can’t always respond timely – and sometimes at all – but I enjoy receiving those, and learn a lot from them.

I wanted to excerpt a few things I received in recent months, so that you can enjoy them, too!

---

Gabriel Roth pointed an obvious flaw in the Ishmael editor’s Ghost Cut implementation that completely eluded me:

You didn’t mention perhaps the worst thing about the Ghost Cut feature in Ishmael — sometimes I want to move text between apps! If I cut something in Ishmael and I want to paste it into BBEdit, I’m out of luck. The “solution” is to copy it first, but the idea of changing cut + paste to copy + cut + paste in certain cases but not others makes me shudder.

---

Ben Zotto sent in a 2006 essay by Joel Spolsky that covers the just-mentioned February 29, 1900 bug on a different occasion.

“So, it’s a bug in Lotus 123?”

“Yeah, but probably an intentional one. Lotus had to fit in 640K. That’s not a lot of memory. If you ignore 1900, you can figure out if a given year is a leap year just by looking to see if the rightmost two bits are zero. That’s really fast and easy. The Lotus guys probably figured it didn’t matter to be wrong for those two months way in the past.

Spoiler: Bill Gates makes an appearance.

---

A while back, I ended a post saying “Who would ever benefit from it behaving this way?” A reader wrote with this fun anecdote:

My work buddies coined an absurd acronym for those absurd UI misses: HCTPBWIW

How Can This Possibly Be What I Want

---

I received a letter from Pierre-Luc Gagné, explaining in some detail the mysterious Canadian keyboard with unique symbols I wrote about last month.

The answer to the mystery: this keyboard was used by Canadian government, which for a while mandated both this specific layout, and these specific icons. The layout originated by the province of Québec trying to improve French keyboards, and was meant to find a balance between the original American-centric layout, and the needs of French language:

[The previous layout] prioritized English by putting every accented letter except é under two keystrokes. Glyphs that are far less commonly used like « and < were their own keys, but è and à needed two keys to be written. Francophones write à all the time. This was basically a remnant of typewriters’ operations brought forward to computers. The [new layout] moved most accented letters to their own key. Only the circumflex (^) [requires] two keystrokes, but that accent is the least used.

The effort started in the 1990s. Gagné reports that by 2006 it was deemed okay to use the layout, but forgo the special icons – that explains the disappearance of those unique symbols from Apple’s keyboards – and some time after that, the federal government withdrew the order forcing the layout, as well. (It is now only a “guidance.”)

Shining more light at the mystery, Gagné writes: “The anglophone majority in Canada never adopted this keyboard, so it’s seldom talked about in English.” (If you are interested in researching this more, the keywords are CAN/CSA Z243.200-92, SGQRI 001, and ISO 9995-7.)

---

From social:

The argument that rounded corners reduces the clickable area of a button reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke that Kit Kat carving their name into each bar is robbing you of chocolate.

---

Lastly, Kevin Smith wrote this à propos updates, but it is also a good anecdote to follow the more recent post about Linear’s zero-bug policy:

I missed the deadline to submit mine, but here’s my folklore.org-type anecdote from my days at Apple: I personally wrote the novice-friendly Terminal warning about the sudo command in OS X. For the longest time, users were greeted with the 90s-vintage warning about properly using sudo: “We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local Systems
Administrator…” As an AppleCare support drone, I guided customers through a sudo command at least once per week, and always needed to reassure them about what this geeky text even meant.

Finally one day I filed a Radar (arguably something that was above my pay grade!) and provided a suggested revision to the sudo warning that was way less inside-baseball. To my utter shock, the Terminal team used my language word-for-word in an OS X update a few months later. I was never even notified that my change was used, it just appeared in Terminal!

As far as I know, the sudo warning was removed entirely from Terminal at some point. But as a low-level employee who never even worked in Cupertino, it was an honor for a few of my own words to live inside the OS for a number of years.

---

Thanks again!