Plaxo is Eating Safari’s Cookies

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.

Kadie and His Ears

Today I was sitting in the living room and Kadie came and hopped into my lap purring and rubbing against me. Eventually she got comfy and sat there purring for a bit. Every so often Kadie would shake his head and I at this point remembered the ear mites, and that we had some stuff for it.

I asked my mom to get it out for me so I did not have to get up and displace Kadie. I needed to look at the back for the directions, and as I was reading them Kadie sat up and started sniffing the package, still purring. Slowly with some intense sniffing Kadie stopped purring and started looking for an escape. He knew what was coming and jumped down and wandered away. I followed him around till he got in my bed, and then was finally able to administer the drops. I rubbed his ears for a bit when done. Kadie is now somewhere upstairs shunning his usual spot on my bed to sleep/hang out.

And that is my livejournal post for the week :).

Judging for SkillsUSA Video Production Competition.

Bryan Doug Jon David sitting at the judges table for the 2008 SkillsUSA video production competition

Today I was a judge for the SkillsUSA regional state competition in Wisconsin. Doug asked me to do it on Monday during video production class. I was quite honored to even be asked. The 4 judges were Doug, myself, Jon, and David. Doug and David being teachers at MATC and Jon being a fellow student who also works in the video field.

I think things went well, I learned more about the world of video and how people start out in it, along with thinking critically about video pieces. I hope I brought a unique perspective to the judging.

MATC Chicago Trip ’08

Group of Visual Communications Students in front of the metal bean in Chicago

This past thursday was the annual MATC Art Club trip to Chicago. In general the Graphic Design students go, but these past 2 years Emmalee has gotten a group of Visual Communications students to come along.

ViComm students crossing a street - sam looks the most bad ass

This is my third year going on this trip, my first was while I was still in the Graphic Design program, and must have been in Fall ’03. And now ’07, and ’08. This year ended up being the least time spent in The Art Institute of Chicago Museum. At one point while walking around we saw a poster advertising the Field Museum and an exhibit of mythical creatures. When Emmalee saw that she went nuts and decided we should check it out. The day was half over at this point, so most of the rest was used there. Partly looking for Issac, but I won’t get into that.

Bryan Emmalee and Sam

Speaking of looking for someone, I was the doofus who made the busses late to leave this year. The past 2 years they loaded and unloaded in the same spot, this year they had to load in a different spot and I did not catch the notice. I went to where the map said and previous years had gone. I felt so stupid.

vicomm students spelling out vicomm with their bodies

All in all it was a good trip though!

Photo Credits: 1 & 2 – Lucinda, 3 & 4: Emmalee

View YouTube in H.264 with an Easy Bookmarklet

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.