dfbills.com blog

Well, it was bound to happen.  I found a fairly severe Safari 3 beta bug.  If you’re a web developer or blogger I’ll bet you’ve seen it too.  Have you ever noticed odd characters like: ? & or html entities like &lt &gt appearing in your data? 

The bug has to do with the way Safari submits forms containing data in textarea fields- it randomly corrupts form submissions. 

It really sucks to have to check for randomly changed characters. I think I’m uninstalling safari 3.

I’ve submitted this bug as radar #5470536:

——-
09-Sep-2007 08:25 PM David Bills:

Summary:
The Safari 3 beta corrupts form data submissions from textarea fields.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load a webpage containing a form with Safari 3 beta
2. Submit data using a textarea field
3. Check submitted data
4. The data will begin to show corruption
5. This may take several tries as it seems to happen at random

Expected Results:
I expect the data to be clean with no extra characters inserted.

Actual Results:
I’ve found the appearance of odd characters my data since begining to use the Safari 3 beta at public launch. Most often, I see a ? at the top of the textarea data field. Occasionally, I notice that a double quote turns into a semicolon and that certain characters like a “greater than” get encoded into html entities.

Regression:
Submitting data to blogs seems to be a good way to trigger this bug. I see it on and off while working on several blogs I’ve developed.

Notes:
This bug has been reported across the web, but I was not aware of the severity until this evening.
——-

I wonder if Apple sees this bug appearing in their own radar forms.

Photos from Labor Day 2007

I’ll admit, found the announcements of 4 new iPods at Apple’s “The Beat Goes On” event confusing.  So many price points and capacity differences…

Looking on Apple’s site, I count 36 different styles on the “Identifying iPod models” chart.  Who knew Apple had released so many iPod models over the past 6 years? 

We’ve come a long way from “iPod (5 GB scroll wheel)!”

I’ve often predicted that Google will buy Apple in the near future.  As of today, my prediction has changed.

A bit of quick math has shown me that Apple’s stock has surpassed a price of $138 with 869,640,000 shares reflecting a market capitalization of 120 billion. Meanwhile, Google’s 312,140,000 shares were valued at $515 totalling a market cap of $160 billion.

As of today, it looks more like a merger. 

Apple is selling refurbished iPhones online at the Apple Store for the first time.

Both the 4GB and 8GB models are available at $100 off their normal price- would you snap one up for $399 or $499?

When you reload a Web page in Safari 3 (by clicking the Reload icon or by pressing Command-R in Mac OS X or Ctrl-R in Safari Beta 3.x for Windows), cache files are bypassed. You don’t need to hold Shift or any other modifier keys. What a breath of fresh air!

I’ve been using the excellent CrashPlan software from Code42 pretty ever since I saw it demoed at MacWorld.  CrashPlan allows you to do nearly effortless secure, offsite backup. 

Each release of the software brings more control to the operation of the backup engine, but I wanted more control.  I wanted to completely turn it off while I was at home so that it wouldn’t be using any of my precious bandwidth.

After a bit of investigation, I found that the java engine was controlled with SystemStarter.  By issuing certain the following commands, I was able to start and stop the engine at will.


sudo SystemStarter start “CrashPlanService”

sudo SystemStarter stop “CrashPlanService”


Using this knowledge, I put together my final system crontab:

30 7 * * * root SystemStarter stop “CrashPlanService”
30 9 * * 1,2,3,4,5 root SystemStarter start “CrashPlanService”
0 18 * * 1,2,3,4,5 root SystemStarter stop “CrashPlanService”
30 23 * * * root SystemStarter start “CrashPlanService”

It seems that there are no current NES emulators on MacOSX that can play the NES verison of Super Mario Brothers.  I just spent nearly 3 hours trying to get it to work.  I finally resorted to some very old versions of RockNES in order to play.  ugh..

Yiles- like yikes, but more refined.