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
Rather recently people have figured out some ways to make YouTube display H.246 video on the site. That method is to add “&fmt=18″ to the end of the URL. That works well, but wouldn’t it be better if it could be done with a simple click? For all those who don’t use addons like Greasemonkey or the like, a bookmarklet would be ideal.
Drag the following link up to your bookmarks bar:
YouTube H.264
Click on it when ever you are on a YouTube video page and want some H.264 goodness. Thanks go to Beermatt # for the code.
Update 4.18.08: Wow, the code in the script got eaten by my post, it is now fixed and does actually work.
03/19/08
That old theme color scheme was not doing it for me. Thus, “Major Delay” is now 0.5. Less blue, more grey. What do you think? I secretly always hated the old blue color-scheme. Then again, I don’t seem to like many things I make. For some reason other peoples stuff is easier for me to feel is good.
03/17/08
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
Today in class I figured out how to Get a YouTube video on a Verizon Cell Phone for Sam. I thought I would create a little tutorial for him, and others and place it on my site. So here it is.
Requirements for this specific tutorial:
Part one
Get the video from YouTube.
- Using safari go to the page for the video you want.
- Open up the activity monitor in Safari. (Command-Option-A)
- Find the file in the list that is the biggest. This should be the only file that is over 1mb in the list.
- Hold down option and double click the link in the list. This will download the file to your default download location. It will be named “get_video”.
- Go into the Finder and rename the file to something ending in flv.
Part Two
Convert the file to a format you can use on your phone.
- Open the newly renamed .flv file in Quicktime Player.
- Using the timeline select 29 seconds of the video you want to use. (I say 29 since the limit is 30 seconds, and just 1 frame extra over that limit will cause it to be too long. Thus 29 seconds keeps you safe.
- Copy this selection (Command C)
- Create a new player from the file menu (Command-N) and paste (Command-V) the video into it. Go to the end of the video and verify that the time is indeed 29 seconds or less.
- Choose export from the file menu. (Command-E)
- From the Export format menu select “3G”. And then click options.
- Now you need to set up the specs for the video. I found that the default bit-rates and formats worked on the phone I was doing this with, so I recommend using those. I also found that the newest version of Quicktime updated the 3G capabilities and formats. So if you are using a version below 7.4 the dialogs might look a bit different than mine.
- Select ‘3GP’ or ‘3GPP (Mobile MP4)’ (depending on your quicktime version) from the File format menu at the top of the 3G Export Settings dialog. This should in both cases set all the default settings needed to export. Below I have a screenshot of the settings just incase.
- Click OK and then Click Save. Once finished encoding you should have a video file ready to send to the phone.
Part Three
Send the video to the phone.
- Head over to https://picture.vzw.com/ and click “Send a Message” over on the left.
- Click ‘Upload Media’ located at the bottom of the left column of the interface.
- Follow the dialogs to pick your exported video and upload it.
- Once uploaded drag the preview of your video over to the area on the right and enter any text you want to send along with it. Click Preview & send.
- On the next dialog you will enter the number of the phone you are sending to and an optional additional text message.
- Click send and it should send.
Part Four
The disclaimers and notes.
- This might work for sending to other carriers phones. You would have to test to see. It might be verizon only. And if that is the case there might be other services out there that let you send 3GP videos to phones on those carriers.
- This will work with other settings and 3g2 videos. Though this depends on the phone you are sending to some can’t play all file types, or bit-rates. So play with increasing the bit-rates and sizes and 3g formats to see what works and what don’t. Remember the Verizon site limits the file size to 3mb. So you might be able to get some clips looking really good. You never know. I just don’t have any phones handy to test with.
- There are other ways to get the FLV from YouTube. The method shown here is just a quick and easy one all Mac users can do. KeepVid.com is another way to download the FLV.
- There are other ways to encode to 3g other than Quicktime with Quicktime Pro. I don’t know them off hand, but this will work with those too as long as the produced 3g videos are of the proper specs.
- Remember there are fees related to messages and data on phones. So don’t go crazy with this unless you know what your rates are, or the rates of the person receiving the video.
I hope this tutorial is found to be useful in some way. Apologies if something is unclear. Ask in the comments and I might be able to help.
Remember that Perian is the only way you can open the FLV in Quicktime, and it needs ‘.flv’ at the end of the file to open it.
01/25/08
This Yahoo! Pipes pipe will look at the rss feed for your gamertag from 360voice.com and spit out just the entries where achievements occoured. And it will filter out weekly recaps. This is not an original idea, but it worked out well. And I set up the pipe to accept easy input of your gamertag to use. It is good for places on your own site where you want to bring in a feed of your XBox 360 achievements.
It requires that you are registered with 360voice.com.
Link: Pipes: 360voice Achievements Only
01/21/08
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 my first stab at making a theme for my blog that is not a modification of another one. I have made 2 themes previous, one for the Warrior World site and then one recently for Vicomm.org. So I thought it was about time I should make one fore my own site. I have been wanting one for quite some time. Though never sat down to do it.
Now I have, and I think it turned out ok. Nothing too amazing, but it has the footer style I have been wanting for a while, along with other simplifications.
Please let me know what you think, or if you find any bugs. Is the textured background a bit much for the content area? I am thinking about removing it.
01/04/08