Messages

1

2007 / Daylight Saving Time

« on: March 05, 2007, 03:57:02 PM »

QUOTE(Xairbusdriver @ Mar 5 2007, 04:21 PM) [snapback]120994[/snapback]

What makes you jump to the ( additional, erroneous ) conclusion, that the second "s" is a capital?

I meant the initial caps. I have a small pamphlet on mind-reading available, for a small gratuity.

QUOTE

( Please put your email address on all twenty dollar bills you send to me. Name only on smaller bills. Thanks! )

You won't thank me when you find out my 20 is your 17.01.

QUOTE

And, don't forget to set your non-computer controlled clocks forward late next Saturday night for Daylight Savings Time ( the official name, btw )!

Oh, sure. Go ahead and laugh at my clock like it made a wheels-up landing, just because its time has passed. Thaaaat's okaaaay.

Daylight-saving time is like the seasons of the year that should be down. Or president/President, or prime minister/Prime Minister. Politicians *grumble grumble* —  any excuse for a self-important cap.

[S]

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2007 / Daylight Saving Time

« on: March 05, 2007, 03:06:06 PM »

QUOTE(Xairbusdriver @ Mar 5 2007, 12:52 PM) [snapback]120966[/snapback]

BTW, it's not Daylight SavingS Time.

When spelled out, it shouldn't have capitals. And there should be a hyphen between daylight and saving. Hurrumph.

(Otherwise, saving refers to time, as in, I'm saving time and money. But it's not time supposedly being saved, it's daylight supposedly being saved. "Daylight saving" is a double modifier — a single unit — referring to the word time. As such, a hyphen is required.)

The lecturer requests nothing less than folding money be dropped into the passing hat (and no Confederate notes and/or Continentals). Thank you.

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2007 / Daylight Saving Time

« on: March 05, 2007, 02:15:29 PM »

Later that night when the man and his family were absent, krissel, for the first time exibiting those traits that later would turn her into a Mac hacker, sneaked into their room and turned the clock ahead two hours.

The next morning, great fun was had by all.

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2007 / Board Statistics?

« on: March 04, 2007, 12:41:39 PM »

QUOTE(jepinto @ Mar 4 2007, 10:21 AM) [snapback]120875[/snapback]

. . . . we haven't had time to go through the various wrappers to find where that shows up. One day....one day.

When you find it, turn it on and change the count to 256,112, then turn it off again.

[such as this one]

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2007 / Firefox 2.0.0.2 problem

« on: March 04, 2007, 11:10:09 AM »

Long, but an AppleScript at the bottom.

There's quite a kerfluffle going in a Mozillazine thread or two, such as this one, about the password bug. The change that causes the trouble is to prevent work-arounds at log-in sites that won't allow the computer to remember the password.

I worked around this restriction by using a bookmarks-toolbar javascript bookmarklet called Remember Password. It still works at sites such as my Yahoo throw-away-email address. But Remember Password no longer works at my ISP when I view or retrieve mail via the web.

Apparently thieves had exploited a security hole at MySpace to swipe passwords. MySpace fixed it, but according to angry posters in one of the Mozillazine threads, the Firefox coders care more about one site's now-fixed vulnerability than all the users adversely affected by the change. So it's torches-and-pitchforks time.

But even when the bug causing the passwords to disappear en masse is fixed, those sites that won't allow the computer to remember the password will still have the last word.

So rather than laboriously typing in my email address and password again and again, I put an AppleScript together and saved it as a click-on application. I stuck it under the apple in my OS X Classic Menu application.

The log-in page chiefly affecting me has only two fields to fill in, and the cursor goes to the first automatically as soon as the page appears. The script can be edited for any number of blank fields, however. Each field switch requires another line saying, tell application "System Events" to keystroke tab

The length of the time delay depends on the speed of the computer, and balances whether the page must be created rather than quickly hauled up from the cache.

The script, of couse, reveals the password.

I dunno whether it would work in anything older than Tiger. System 9's Script Editor is a write-off.

tell application "Firefox" to Get URL "http//mileslongblahblahblahblahblahblah"
   delay 4
   tell application "Firefox"
      activate
      tell application "System Events" to keystroke "d76@acme.ca"
      tell application "System Events" to keystroke tab
      tell application "System Events" to keystroke "mypassword"
      tell application "System Events" to keystroke return
   end tell
end tell

6

2007 / Daylight Saving Time

« on: March 04, 2007, 09:35:20 AM »

. . . oh . . . yah.

Well, I just had ice cream and my brain froze. Yeah, that's it. My brain froze.

QUOTE(Xairbusdriver @ Mar 4 2007, 09:34 AM) [snapback]120872[/snapback]

The recent updates from Apple ( as well as most other computer and OS makers ) is to update that database since the law in the US changed this year.

Doesn't amount to a hill o' beans with OS 9. I ran 9's Software Update, and I wasn't disappointed — nothing happened.

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So, your choices are:

1. Can't be done.
2. Twice a year? Every year?!! @#$%^%$&*(^%$.
3. But if it's in a really deep coal mine, gravity is different, so the clock would be wrong. How am I supposed to know how deep the mine is and the time zone it's in? Congress didn't bother with the important stuff like that, did it?

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Without changing the local time, some programs may get confused by the 'time stamps' ( usually GMT ) that indicate that the file/doc is created in the 'future'.

A while ago I had a pile of spam dumped on me that was — will be — created in 2036 or thereabouts. And here I had blamed it all on John Titor.

7

2007 / Daylight Saving Time

« on: March 03, 2007, 09:25:01 PM »

Thanks, Gregg. I turned it off. But what's the point of it? If the clock is set to check with a network time server, it should match the thing whether DST is checked or not, shouldn't it?

8

2007 / Cannot log in to certain websites

« on: March 02, 2007, 05:16:43 PM »

QUOTE(Xairbusdriver @ Mar 2 2007, 03:58 PM) [snapback]120696[/snapback]

If it makes you feel any better, nothing I could do in FF 2+ would make the large map display anything.

It doesn't work on mine, either, so it isn't the fault of Mozilla in 9, which is good to know. Maybe Mapquest is stuck in the era of Active X.

QUOTE

BTW, when you spoof your browser type, I don't think it needs to be stopped and restarted. When I restart FF, it always reverts back to its own self, even if I had been spoofing another one.

Old restart habits resurrect with System 9, and I hardly ever use iCab, so I don't know its foibles, other than its overall clunkiness. It probably doesn't need a restart, though.

QUOTE

As for clipping off an edge of a page, that is probably pretty common with a screen resolution of only 832 pixels.

Bad as iCab is, it could handle all the screen resolutions, which was why I kept it around. But Lordy, it's slow. I'm glad I don't have to use it now even for the occasional site when I'm running 9, required for Quark because I'm sane enough not to climb back onto that outfit's money machine. I have little enough need for Quark, anyway. (Quark is almost unusable running in X under Classic.)

On my G4 machine, Mozilla 1.3.1 runs at light speed. Everything is instant. But JavaScript remains a problem, even on TS.

Posting here with 1.3.1 means jumping through a few hoops. I can't paste, for instance, and I can't click on Reply then log in. I have to log in first, click on Reply, then reload the page or I can't type. Quotes don't work because Reply To doesn't work. I can't post with iCab under any circumstances. So I rejoin the 21st century and boot into X.

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2007 / Cannot log in to certain websites

« on: March 02, 2007, 01:51:41 PM »

The map at the bottom won't show up in Mozilla or iCab. A notice at the top of the page tells me to turn on the cookes and JavaScript, but I had. The site recognizes the cookies, otherwise the page wouldn't work at all, so one notice covers both. iCab is much slower than Mozilla, though, and none of the pictures on the page show up. With Mozilla, everything shows up except the map at the bottom.

The missing map in both browsers means OS 9's JavaScript is too old, I guess.

I killed iCab's cache, history and everything else,  changed the setting so it would spoof IE 6 for Windows, then quit the browser, restarted it and returned to mapquest. It didn't make any difference. So I have to use Mozilla to find my way to the store on the next block.

By the way, for years Mozilla has been cutting a chunk off the left side of pages at some sites, such as Ars Technica's. I found out how to cure it, if you're having the same problem.

I changed the monitor setting from 832 X 624 to 1024 X 768. I also found out that because Mozilla was running when I did that, it made no difference. I had to quit the browser and restart it. It's such a simple cure for a problem I thought was unsolvable because of old code. Amazing.

I increased the minimum type size to compensate for the smaller image (I'm far-sighted, so small type is even smaller, one reason why I always had it set at 832 X 624 — computing with trifocals.)

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2007 / Cannot log in to certain websites

« on: March 02, 2007, 08:37:49 AM »

QUOTE(Gregg @ Mar 2 2007, 08:36 AM) [snapback]120631[/snapback]

I've run into several sites that used to work with my old OS and browser, but no longer do. Following suggestions, I checked all kinds of settings, but never found one that was set "incorrectly", so I gave up on those sites.

Do you still have a link to such a site that that doesn't need a password and that you would be comfortable posting, not a bank? I'd like to try one on my machine.

11

2007 / Mac App Alleged to be Malware

« on: February 28, 2007, 08:33:49 PM »

Stuffit Deluxe and Photoshop does, or did, too.

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2007 / OT: The military is breaking your garage door opener!

« on: February 27, 2007, 11:35:44 PM »

Only in Boston.

13

2007 / ClamX Reports a Virus

« on: February 27, 2007, 12:42:01 PM »

I ran ClamX before forwarding to Windows machines a couple of emails from other Windows machines. A couple of years ago — the last time I ran it — it found a virus in an email. Once I had it running, I figured I'd check the entire drive.

(Maybe I had dropped 100 IQ points because I was listening to Art Bell on the radio interviewing a guy abducted by space aliens, along with the show's 23 minutes of ads and station breaks every hour.)

I won't run ClamX again; Windows users can protect their own machines.

Thanks for the explanation and reminding me of that Symantec false-positive fiasco. But now I can't blame the aliens.

14

2007 / Spanish Spam in my inbox!

« on: February 27, 2007, 09:06:29 AM »

I was hit with more than the usual spam dump overnight, but the ISP filters it into a junk folder before it shows up in Thunderbird. I have to check the web version to see what's there, in case it routed legit mail into the junk pile, but it never does.

The spam included the usual paypal "emergencies" and the usual assortment of emails from a dozen or so U.S. banks bulging with all my billions.

Why is it that Canadian banks are ignored? How hard could it be to stick the name of a Canadian bank in spam routed to a Canadian ISP? This atrocious under-representation of Canadian banks must end!

Why should I have to phone long distance to New York — at my expense — to find out about my zillions when I could make a local call to Toronto? It's bias, pure and simple. Worse yet, I get Spanish spam, too, but never any in French, an official language here! How dare they!

There is no excuse for this insulting behaviour, and I'm going to write letters of complaint to the prime minister and the secretary-general of the United Nations. That'll settle their hash!

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2007 / ClamX Reports a Virus

« on: February 26, 2007, 11:42:16 PM »

ClamX claims to have found a virus in a zipped Firefox backup. So I unzipped it and ran ClamX on the uncompressed folder, and it came up clean. But the zipped file still comes up dirty.

Anyone have an idea what's going on? Do anti-virus programs show false positives? If so, why would anyone trust them — especially with Macs?

I could understand it if instead of Firefox it was SeaMonkey that could harbour a Windows virus in the email side. But Firefox? It's nothing but PPC code.