The reason what that back then this would fail (but worked in Firefox and Safari, and because I was in a hurry I didn’t research further): [Wayback/Archive] https://www.office.com/
This site can’t be reached
The webpage at https://www.office.com/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.
Every now and then I want to check how a URL redirect, for instance when checking out why a domain failed loading in browsers a while ago because of certificate problems:
The thing was that back then, the site officially did not have a security certificate, but somehow the provider had installed a self-signed one. Most web-browsers then auto-redirect from http to https. Luckily the archival sites can archive without redirecting:
When querying [Wayback/Archive] redirect check – Google Search, you get quite some results. These are the ones I use most in descending order of preference and why they are at that position:
functionGetAlphaSubstr(const Str: string):string;
const
ALPHA_CHARS = ['a'..'z', 'A'..'Z'];
var
ActualLength: integer;
i: Integer;
begin
SetLength(result, length(Str));
ActualLength := 0;
for i := 1to length(Str) doif Str[i] in ALPHA_CHARS thenbegin
inc(ActualLength);
result[ActualLength] := Str[i];
end;
SetLength(Result, ActualLength);
end;
but this will only consider English letters as “alphabetical characters”. It will not even consider the extremely important Swedish letters Å, Ä, and Ö as “alphabetical characters”!
Slightly more sophisticated is
functionGetAlphaSubstr2(const Str: string):string;
var
ActualLength: integer;
i: Integer;
begin
SetLength(result, length(Str));
ActualLength := 0;
for i := 1to length(Str) doif Character.IsLetter(Str[i]) thenbegin
inc(ActualLength);
result[ActualLength] := Str[i];
end;
SetLength(Result, ActualLength);
end;
Back in 2011 I added a comment that for more than a decade would redirect to the most current documentation on the IsLetter method:
The above breaks the help integration from older Delphi products which is bad. It is also bad because it makes it harder to port legacy Delphi code to more modern Delphi versions.
Hopefully the above gives you a bit insight how the docwiki help system was designed and what is left of that design.
It works perfectly fine without URL encoding and demonstrates the JavaScript backtick feature for template literals for which you can find documentation at [WayBack/Archive] Template literals – JavaScript | MDN.
For quite some time now, Chrome (think years) refuses to prompt for saving passwords whereas Firefox and Safari do prompt and save them, even for site types that it used to save passwords for in the past.
It has been annoying enough for too long now that I tried to do better than the Google searches I used back when I saw this happen first.
/**
* This allows errors to be skippped by typing a secret phrase into the page.
* @param {string} e The key that was just pressed.
*/
function handleKeypress(e) {
var BYPASS_SEQUENCE = 'badidea';
if (BYPASS_SEQUENCE.charCodeAt(keyPressState) == e.keyCode) {
keyPressState++;
if (keyPressState == BYPASS_SEQUENCE.length) {
sendCommand(SecurityInterstitialCommandId.CMD_PROCEED);
keyPressState = 0;
}
} else {
keyPressState = 0;
}
}
Yesterday and today, he is maintaining a Twitter thread on things that have broken.
Quite a few things have, including some versions of curl, on which a lot of infrastructure relies (the certificate for it got fixed later on 20120930), see:
Yes, I know the pluimers.com web server is rated B from a TLS perspective. Will be working on it, but I’m still recovering from rectum cancer treatments, and have an almost 1.5 year backlog to get through.
Let’s Encrypt has done loads of work over the past lustrum to prevent trouble like cross-signing, issuing the successor certificates, and more.
The problem is that people like you and me have refrained from keeping their clients and servers up-to-date, so some security issues will occur. Hopefully they are limited to non-functioning communication and not leaking of data.
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 