shadowspar

First thing. For those who use vim but might not have known about it: vim has a feature called digraphs which gives you a way to enter letters with diacritics (eg ä), symbols (eg ✓), and other characters that aren't on your keyboard. It does have its idiosyncracies, but it's fairly reasonable once you start to toy with it a bit.

How it works: first, enter the compose key, which by default is Control-K. Then enter the two characters of the digraph, and you'll get the single character that's defined in the digraphs table for that particular combination.

So, for instance:

• Ctrl-K + o + - ⇒ ō
• Ctrl-K + e + : ⇒ ë
• Ctrl-K + c + , ⇒ ç
• Ctrl-K + o + C ⇒ ℃
• Ctrl-K + P + d ⇒ £
• Ctrl-K + 1 + 2 ⇒ ½

The command :digraphs will show you everything in the digraphs table.

Last thing and the point of all that preparatory context above: there is a terrible problem with the set of digraphs as it ships with vim. Clearly the sequence < + 3 should compose to the character ♥, but it doesn't by default. To remedy this horrible shortcoming, add the line

digraph <3 9829

to your vim config file. (9829 is the unicode decimal identifier for the character ♥.)

So this happened to swim by in my Twitter feed:

New Approaches To Designing Log-In Forms

This kind of thing makes me want to metaphorically grab hold of the field of User Experience Design, tell it "Here, I have someone I'd like you to meet," and drag it over to the field of Security. The converse goes for Security when (for instance) its practitioners come up with an amazing new security procedure that no user will ever follow. In fact, a great many problems would be solved if we could but make a few more introductions between disciplines. Getting Software Development acquainted with fields like Ethics, Sociology, and Social Justice and concepts like privacy, identity, diversity, and accessibility would be a good start.