Ok, for the past many months I have been having an issue with Safari losing all of it’s cookies randomly. The Cookies.plist file would go empty thus losing all my logins for websites. I was not able to figure out what was eating Safari’s cookies until just recently.
There never seemed to be a pattern to what was causing it. Not a specific site. Nothing l could seemingly track and reproduce. I always had a feeling it was caused by Mac OS X 10.5. The issue also appeared to be separate from a recent cookie issue that was fixed. But I might have found the real reason.
Plaxo.
The desktop software Plaxo provides to sync the Mac OS X Addressbook appears to set tracking cookies in the Cookies.plist. It does this without even visiting the site. And it seems to have a habbit of destroying the Cookies.plist when it tries to update sometimes. This might be due to not using the Cookies.plist API, or it might conflict with an update from a website happening at the same time, thus nuking the file.
Either way, for the longest time my cookies would disappear multiple times a day. But now after removing the Plaxo software (partly a seemingly evil input manager) no more cookie destruction. If you have Cookies disappearing, and Plaxo for Mac installed. Do an uninstall of Plaxo and see if your problem goes away.
05/17/08
So today I was playing with new social networking sites, and I signed up for Bebo, like all new sites it lets you look for people you know with your address book… Most don’t go ahead and spam each and every email address in your address book. They just show you who you know that has the service, and THEN has ANOTHER option to email other people.
Well Bebo decides it is cool to just by default spam everyone. Fuck them.
I apologize to anyone who might have gotten that email from them/me. I did not intend to send it. I look like a fool now. It ain’t so bad when it might have been a few people, but this was 290+. Some random friends online, some friends in real life, lots of work / school contacts some were phones email addresses!
Again, fuck Bebo. DO NOT sign up with them…
And I do know I was stupid for using my addressbook to find contacts. But I have not had other sites do this; I guess I am too trusting.
03/16/08
Here is a list of some media I am regularly looking forward to consuming currently. I can’t stress enough how cool Skins is.
TV
Podcasts
03/07/08
Just spent some time fixing errors causing my site to not be Valid XHTML. I found lots of tiny things all over, and was able to go from 145+ errors down to about 5. Those last 5 I just can’t quite get. This is not to say that is true for my whole site. I did the work with the front page of the blog.
Why did the dudes in charge of XHTML not include a simple alternative to the center tag?
01/10/08
I just spent an hour playing with CSS to fix the layout on Vicomm.org to look right in IE 5.5 and 6.0. It don’t even look like it does in Firefox and Safari. It is just slightly off, and now useable. Designing for multiple browsers should not be an issue too, since there are strict standards.
Browsers like Safari, and Firefox strive to follow them to the letter. While Microsoft seems to care less when it comes to IE. Internet Explorer 7 seems to getting things better though. At least is does transparent PNG files properly. Now if only it was easy to get everyone to upgrade to it.
I started working on this because I popped onto the forums and saw that there were some crazy errors and layout issues regarding the theme. Turns out the host Emmalee is using finally got around to moving us to a new server like he said he would about 2 months ago. Seems it does what he promised though, finally have access to write privileges on the server and it seems a bit faster. And the fix to the theme was just telling it where things were on the new server. It Coulda been worse. He could have nuked our databases.
Once I fixed the issues I decided it was time to fix the errors I saw when the site was used in IE 6. I saw these for the first time when Emmalee was showing the site to some people telling them I made it etc. It was rather frustrating to find out since I had the site looking fine in both Firefox and Safari, and people had told me it looked fine in Internet Explorer.
Well, enough of this rant, I should go to sleep. Seems most of my blog posts are always made at night, when I should be sleeping.
01/07/08
Here is a PSA I made for Video Production. The goal of the project was to make a 60 second spot that was a PSA advocating a call to action on a chosen subject. I picked phishing because I thought it was a new and fresh topic that would be unique, and I knew pretty much how to explain it. This also gave me a chance to work with Motion for the first time. Let me know if you learned anything from it in the comments of this post, or the video’s YouTube page.
12/12/07
Anyone else suspect Mac OS X 10.5 will come in black? It just seems like all the new styles and designs of late from Apple are headed this way. And their design is always reflected in the OS.
The whole WWDC website is dark, and has the same blue we see in the newer iTunes.
Worldwide Developers Conference 2007 - Sessions
The whole Final Cut website is even more White on Black, with fancy white on black tooltips.
Apple - Final Cut Studio 2
Not to mention the advertising style they are using on the Leopard site.
Apple - Apple - Mac OS X - Leopard Sneak Peek
The way Time Machine looks.
Apple - Apple - Mac OS X - Leopard Sneak Peek - Time Machine
The iTunes website has also gone all Black.
Apple - iPod + iTunes
MacPro too.
Apple - Mac Pro
The iPhone uses White on black in lots spots, and it also uses the same blue we see in the current iTunes.
Apple - iPhone
I think the current UI appearance we see in the Dev builds is just a prepping for a full overhaul.
Shiny Black is the new Pinstripes.
I also posted this on the MacNN Mac OS X Forum
04/18/07
We just got a new XBox 360 for chirstmas. And when setting it up I found out I seem to have lost the gamertag “OwlBoy” to the void from letting my account lapse. So my new one is ‘OwlBoyDotCom’. Add me!
01/03/07
Snazzy?
Update: This is what it is for: http://www.perian.org/
09/24/06