jack: (Default)
[personal profile] jack
Wow, that was some typo! "): em tsuj ebyam ,yas I sA" I'm sure that must have been a technical thing -- I don't think even my brain could have managed to type that. But it was very surreal.

The computer was locked up for a second as I was typing, normally if that happens the text appears fifo the next second. What happened?

Date: 2007-09-13 01:08 pm (UTC)
simont: A picture of me in 2016 (Default)
From: [personal profile] simont
Best guess is some sort of buggy application which is designed to process keystrokes by inserting them into a queue in one part of the code and taking them off the queue again in the other part of the code. Someone might easily have absentmindedly implemented a stack instead of a queue, and never noticed because in normal usage the system response is fast enough that you never have two things queued at the same time anyway. (Or, perhaps, it might have transposed a couple of letters once or twice and they wrote each instance off as typos.)

What application/OS/etc?

Date: 2007-09-13 01:13 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com
Hm, that sounds likely. I was typing in FireFox under win XP. But malicious people (the central IT department) have installed some background applications, so *something* might be watching keys. I wonder if I can get it to happen deliberately.

Date: 2007-09-13 05:56 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] pseudomonas.livejournal.com
What was the page you were typing in? something that runs javascript per keystroke?

Date: 2007-09-14 03:07 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com
It was livejournal, I don't know.

Date: 2007-09-13 01:27 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] woodpijn.livejournal.com
I've had this happen too. I can't remember what app it was in. Could well have been Firefox.

You know when you type in an input box that's not the first one on the page (e.g. the body of an email) and the page hasn't fully loaded, and when it finishes loading fully it moves the cursor into the first field (e.g. the To field) and the rest of your sentence ends up in there if you're typing fast? Presumably there's an onLoad event that moves the cursor to the first input field, and I wonder if this phenomenon might be something vaguely similar (a bug is triggering the event every time you press a key, and it moves the cursor to the beginning of the field you're typing in, thus reversing your text).

Date: 2007-09-13 01:44 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com
Oh, hm, that makes sense too.

Date: 2007-09-13 07:02 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] d37373.livejournal.com
A less likely (but more fun) answer is that you managed to type a capital F

‪‫‬‭‮‪‫‬‭‮F It makes stuff go backwards!
‪‫‬‭‮‪‫‬‭‮
‪‫‬‭‮‪‫‬Explanation at http://forums.worsethanfailure.com/forums/thread/128877.aspx

Date: 2007-09-14 02:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com
Wow, that's really fucking weird. I don't think I combined any cryllic millions, but you can never be sure.