cat /proc/claus | java

Today I was talking to a friend in Gmail chat, and when I tried to put * around a japanese emoticon : *^_^* - for blushing, the asterisks misteriously dissapeared.

We quickly noticed that there was a pattern that any pair of asterisks in a gmail chat session would dissappear, without any change to the internal text. After a lot more of digging, we finally found out that ** makes the text in the middle to become bold, altought just slightly so.

We decided to play around more, and found out that _ _ around some text makes that text italic.

This is one of the nifty things about gmail chat - the many undocumented smilies that sometimes take you by surprise. Some of them are listed at their help center, but there are many unlisted ones. Try these:

>.<
+/’\
}:-)

Cheers!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.