priw8's recent activity
-
Comment on Why it’s time to stop worrying about the decline of the English language in ~humanities.languages
-
Comment on When using the wrong shell causes weird bug reports in ~comp
priw8 LinkLinking my blog post about a pretty... interesting issue to debug, since I'm curious if anyone here had similar things happen to them. Here's also the full content, in case reading it directly on...Linking my blog post about a pretty... interesting issue to debug, since I'm curious if anyone here had similar things happen to them. Here's also the full content, in case reading it directly on Tildes is what you prefer:
Microsoft Pain™: the UTF16 beam
There are times when you're dealing with a bug so weird and ridiculous, that you begin to question reality itself, and wonder whether some higher entity is intentionally fooling with you. This is one such story.
This is going to be about a program called thanm. It's not really relevant what it does here, so just keep in mind that it has a few things it can do, and 2 of them are:
- extract metadata from an ANM archive,
- recreate the archive from scratch using metadata extracted earlier.
Generally, freshly extracted metadata should always be valid and usable for archive creation. If it wasn't, that'd be a pretty serious bug. A small caveat here is that the metadata extraction has no feature to specify the output file, and so it just writes to
stdout. Though that isn't an issue, since every shell supports output redirection.The bug report
A person I know reported an issue where they weren't able to recreate an archive, and were getting the following error:
syntax error, unexpected invalid tokenA bit of a confusing error - is there an error in the error message that prevents the character from being printed? Or is it some sort of whitespace character?
Either way, the first thing to figure out was whether the issue was coming from an edit to the file, or the file being bad immidiately after its creation. So,
I asked them to run the following 2 commands:thanm -l filename.anm > filename.txt thanm -c filename.anm filename.txt...and that still gave the same error. That's concerning, since as I said earlier, it'd be a pretty serious bug if an archive can't be recreated. So I went and checked the same file on my machine, and naturally it worked fine. Huh. In this case, maybe it's a bug that's already patched? My next question was about the version the bug happened on, and it turned out that it's the exact same one as the one I have locally. You know, the one that worked without errors :D
At this point, it's getting pretty confusing. How would the exact same executable yield 2 different results for 2 people?
Running out of ideas, I asked the person to send me the file created by the first command. And at last, with that one I was able to reproduce the issue. Finally some progress! Somewhat, at least; this still doesn't explain what's actually wrong with this file, as it looks just like the valid one in the text editor. But clearly, I must be missing something, so I checked with
diffto be sure:Binary files filename.txt and filename-broken.txt differHold up, what do you mean by "binary files"?!
Somebody touched my text encoding!
thanmonly accepts and outputsASCIIencoded files. And yet, somewhere along the way, there was something that reencoded the file into UTF16, even when the 2 commands were ran with nothing between them. So... what? when? how?This was back when I still used Windows, and so was the person getting the error - that's how I knew the exact same executable worked for me. And Microsoft sure loves UTF16, so that's a small clue we have. That was when I realized, the terminal screenshots I was being sent showed a
PSprompt, which comes from Powershell by default. So, I tried to run the commands with it instead of usingcmdorbash, and sure enough - the issue has finally been reproduced from scratch.When using output redirection to a file, Powershell for some unfathomable reason decides that it's a wonderful idea to reencode everything as UTF16! What encoding does it even assume the original text is in? No idea, it's probably based on system locale, just to make things extra spicy. Anyway, after figuring out the cause, we had a good laugh about it.
...to this day,
thanmis still missing an option to write the output to file instead ofstdout. Every once a while, someone runs into the encoding issue because they use Powershell. I think the last one I saw was 2 or 3 weeks ago, but realistically not every instance of this happening comes to my attention, so there's bound to be a few cases I did not hear about.So please, do not implicitly reencode text output of unrelated programs in your software, save others the pain. Until next time!
-
When using the wrong shell causes weird bug reports
26 votes -
Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
priw8 LinkI've made a very simple blog for fun. I'd link to the post where I wrote about how I did things, but the site is still... A bit scuffed in terms of features, and I haven't actually made posts have...I've made a very simple blog for fun. I'd link to the post where I wrote about how I did things, but the site is still... A bit scuffed in terms of features, and I haven't actually made posts have their own pages yet. But there's only 2 for now, so just scrolling is still an option. I am hoping to find time to implement some things soon to make it a bit more functional
-
Comment on Tildes Minecraft Survival Weekly Thread in ~games
priw8 LinkSince some time I've been building a hotel-thing, which I intend to make really, really tall (a skyscraper, essentially). And recently I also got the idea that it'd be pretty cool to let different...Since some time I've been building a hotel-thing, which I intend to make really, really tall (a skyscraper, essentially). And recently I also got the idea that it'd be pretty cool to let different people design different floors however they want, to make it a cool place to visit and explore once enough floors are made. Let me know if it's something you'd be interested in!
-
Comment on Evennia 2.20 released now with AI support in ~games
priw8 LinkOne thing that worries me about using LLM for NPCs is being told something that's not true (for example, where some treasure supposedly is because the AI hallucinated it), which wouldn't really...One thing that worries me about using LLM for NPCs is being told something that's not true (for example, where some treasure supposedly is because the AI hallucinated it), which wouldn't really feel too great once you realize you've been fooled. Though I suppose it might depend on the implementation and measures taken to prevent this kind of things from happening. I'm definitely pretty excited for what games could by utilising LLMs, though.
-
Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
priw8 (edited )LinkI recently finished playing through Chrono Trigger for the first time and had a blast with it. The story behind how I started playing it is that I wanted to get into jrpgs a bit more after beating...I recently finished playing through Chrono Trigger for the first time and had a blast with it. The story behind how I started playing it is that I wanted to get into jrpgs a bit more after beating Octopath Traveler, and I just happened to remember that I heard about Chrono Trigger being very good. And good it was, I played the SNES version and it honestly aged very well. Battle menus were basically the only thing that felt a bit awkward with how cramped they were, but you couldn't really do much better with snes resolution. I was expecting it to be a bit more difficult than it was though, but that could just be because I was right after fighting the true final boss in Octopath Traveler (which requires pretty decent preparation beforehand and knowing what you're up against), while the final boss in Chrono Trigger wasn't that bad. On the other hand, the rest of the game was more challenging than most of Octopath (which I really wish had difficulty options), so that's nice
But hey, I heard that Octopath Traveler 2 has a harder final boss than the 1st one, so I'm looking forward to getting absolutely destroyed once I get to playing that game!
-
Comment on Lets talk roguelikes! in ~games
priw8 LinkSomehow I knew Noita was going to be brought up once I read this sentence (which may or may not have reminded me the dangers of a certain purple liquid). For anyone who haven't played it, I...like when you get transformed into a cute mushroom
Somehow I knew Noita was going to be brought up once I read this sentence (which may or may not have reminded me the dangers of a certain purple liquid). For anyone who haven't played it, I definitely recommend giving it a shot!
As far as other games go, other roguelikes/lites I played include:
- Nuclear Throne - the gameplay is pretty simple but engaging nonetheless, it gets really satisfying when you get a good run going. But you can never really get to a point where you're too powerful to die, because there are next to no defensive upgrades, so your best bet is killing enemies before they kill you.
- Crypt of the Necrodancer - definitely a game that's very close to me, because I actually got to work on the development of the 2nd official DLC, Synchrony! It's a pretty standard roguelike at first glance, but the twist is that your every action has to be done to the rhythm of the music. It may make the learning curve different depending on how well you can "feel" the beat, but I personally started without any rhythm/music game experience and it worked out just fine, so don't worry about it too much.
- Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the Necrodancer featuring the Legend of Zelda - (okay no one actually calls it the full name) it's definitely a roguelite and not a roguelike, since it's missing a few components like permadeath (though there IS a permadeath mode). It's essentially Crypt of the Necrodancer and A Link to the Past fused together in a way. It's also unfortunately a switch exclusive title, and I wouldn't really count on Nintendo allowing their IP on a different platform. But if you do own a switch, I definitely recommend it. I also spent way too much time with it (mostly speedrunning story mode, which I find very fun).
-
Comment on What password management solution do you use and why? in ~tech
priw8 LinkI use the same setup that you described, KeePassXC + syncthing. I also have a small, multipurpose personal vps, which has syncthing configured as well. This ends up working really nicely since...I use the same setup that you described, KeePassXC + syncthing. I also have a small, multipurpose personal vps, which has syncthing configured as well. This ends up working really nicely since it's a always running, so there's at least 1 device to sync to/from at all times. As a bonus, I also have the keepass database automatically backed up each day.
My only issue is that the mobile KeePassDX does not work very well on my phone - I have only 2gb of RAM, so the system regularly kills background apps, sometimes almost as soon as I leave them. I've had it close keepass after I put the login and password on a site, but before I grabbed the authentication code, forcing me to unlock the database twice. Oh yeah, and the system keeps killing syncthing too. I hope these problems go away after I upgrade to a more recent device...
"writing exams" and other weird phrases can be a result of people translating sentences from their native languages to English a bit too directly. For example, in polish, "pisać egzamin" translates to "to write an exam" if you translate word after word, but what it really means is "to take an exam".
Another example that comes to mind is "making photos", since in polish it's "robić zdjęcia", and "robić" means "to make" (or "to do", depending on context). But the way you actually say it in English is "taking photos". This is actually a mistake a made myself a few years ago.
I think in the end it just comes down to people not using English enough in practice to know that, compared to their native language, certain phrases use a word that means something else on its own to convey the same information.