There's been a lot of talk lately about Flash cookies and browser privacy. Recently, I was asked by darkuncle about my Flash settings, and he suggested I make a blog post about them, so here goes:

First of all, in order to change your global Flash settings, you must visit a web page. There is no direct way to manipulate them otherwise. There are 6 pages required to modify the settings. What's more, any settings changes you make in one browser on your machine affect all browsers, so be careful about doing this on your work machine in case you affect applications on your intranet.

By web page, here are the settings I currently use:

• Global Privacy Settings
  • Always Ask to use my camera and/or microphone
• Global Storage Settings
  • 0 KB of disk space
  • Checked "Never Ask Again"
  • Checked Allow third-party storage
  • Checked Store common Flash components
• Global Security Settings
  • Always Ask about using older security
  • For trusted file locations, verify each location as correct (for me, this is empty; I would imagine intranet sites would be OK)
• Global Notification Settings, aka the hidden panel (because there's no tab)
  • Checked for update notification
  • Every 7 days
• Website Privacy Settings
  • Delete all sites to clear both cookies and webcam permissions. The list should now be empty.
• Website Storage Settings
  • This should now be empty; if it's not, Delete all sites to allow your new settings to take effect globally.

Why set to 0 KB of storage, instead of denying? Many online flash applications (such as the Comedy Central video viewer) will refuse to work if your local storage is set to "deny". However, giving them 0KB of storage lets their buffer system work in memory without "storing" anything on your computer. This means the stuff you want to temporarily store (such as video buffering) will still work, while the stuff you don't (cookies) won't be saved.

Why set to "Never Ask Again" on storage? Because when these Flash videos start on your computer, they'll ask to expand how much space they can use from 0 up to whatever they want (ususally 10KB). This gets annoying quickly, so setting to "Never Ask Again" stops this.

What if there's a problem? Well, most of the time you'll never see a problem. One problem area I've seen is related to Facebook, and some applications there. If you open up a web page and don't see a Flash app that you expect, right click on the app, choose "Settings" and change the settings for that site. If that doesn't work, go to the settings page again and temporarily unset the "ask" checkbox. Once the app is running and you give it permission, you can go back and re-check the checkbox. Your permission will be saved for future reference. (For the record, the app was Zynga Poker; the app would never even display a splash screen. Enabling storage allowed the app to work. I've also had this problem browsing "Weekly Ads" at Meijer, with the same fix.)

While I'm not an expert on Flash settings, this is what's worked for me, and I'll try to answer any questions I can. If things happen unexpectedly, I suggest returning your settings to the defaults, which are generally "Always Ask" and 100 KB of storage. Remember to clear any saved settings to let your changes take effect.

From the fine print at https://www.tbrb-freedlc.com/gamestop/faq.html:

Your free DLC codes will not be available before October 20, 2009, when the first songs (from Abbey Road album) are posted to the respective online system (Xbox LIVE, PlayStation Network, Wii Shop Channel). If all or some of your songs you selected are from the Sgt. Pepper's album, those songs will be available sometime in November, 2009.

I'm surprised they're going to keep the extra content for a month and a half. I would have thought that they would have released at least the first album pretty quickly to capitalize on the publicity.

Unless they're planning on getting much more free publicity when it is released.

Meet Kevin Gregg, the Cubs 2009 closer.

His performance recently has reminded me of another famous relief pitcher. I think they were separated at birth. The resemblance is uncanny.

Or, as Harry Doyle would say...

Vaughn, a juvenile delinquent in the off-season, in his major league debut.
Vaughn, into the windup, and his first offering... just a bit outside. He tried the corner and missed.
Ball four.
Ball eight.
Low, and Vaughn has walked the bases loaded on 12 straight pitches. Boy, how can these guys lay off pitches that close?

I've been having a bear of a time connecting an external monitor to my MacBook while it's running under Windows Vista Ultimate, but I finally figured it out, and since a search didn't find anything, I'm posting it here for someone else to find.

The extra monitor I have (an Acer H223H, which is a steal for $219) worked just fine under Mac OS X, but wouldn't work under Vista, no matter what I tried.

The solution would up being to go to Intel and get the latest Mobile Intel 965 Express drivers. The version supplied with Boot Camp is 7.14.10.1437; the version on Intel's site (as of right now) is 7.15.10.1666.

Once the driver was installed and Windows rebooted, Vista was able to see the external display. By default, it starts in Mirrored Mode (aka Desktop Clone), but by going to Graphics Properties, you can set it to Extended Desktop, which is my favorite.

Who's the most famous, least recognizable person in America?:

Amir Blumenfeld invented a game that I’m going to steal:

Who is the most famous person (with some fame in America), living or dead but born after 1900, that the fewest people would recognize face-to-face?

Amir thought of a great answer, and his commenters thought of two better ones. Before you peek, reblog with your best answer.

Here’s an easy one to beat: Garrison Keillor.

via emptyage

My vote is Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat. Yes, I know his identity was secret for over 30 years, but we now know who he was.

Other good suggestions have included Neil Armstrong, Theodore Geisel and Rosa Parks.

Did you know, that for the last month, the United States Navy has been involved in a standoff with pirates? Real ones, not the digital kind?

More than a month after Somali pirates seized a Ukrainian cargo ship carrying 33 battle tanks and crates filled with guns and ammunition, a delicate dance is under way: Three U.S. warships encircle the Faina, and no one has any idea when the standoff will end.

The pirates, armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, are staring down the globe's most powerful Navy, as they have done for the last few years with increasing success. This year has seen more than 60 such attacks, on a pace to make this year the worst ever for pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden, one of the world's busiest shipping routes.

I found this out while reading a fantasy baseball blog, of all places. Toby Mergler, friend of MOTY, had this to say about it back on October 2nd:

Lost in all the hubbub about the bailout and the pending collapse of the American economy has been the amazing story of the pirates who boarded a large cargo ship only to find out it was carrying a serious arsenal of weapons from the former Soviet Union. They are now surrounded by the United States Navy. Whoops.

Please do yourself a favor and Google this story. Here are my three favorite parts:

1. The pirates have a spokesman (note to self: go back to high school and complain to the guidance counselor who never informed me of this career option).
2. After being surrounded by the most fearsome military force in world history, the pirates had the guts to lower their demand to a "more reasonable" $20 million.
3. Reportedly, rival pirate factions have formed aboard the ship, with the moderate pirates warring with the radical pirates. Moderate pirates? What? Are they fiscally conservative but socially liberal? My head just exploded.

If you had purchased $1,000.00 of AIG stock on October 1, 2007 and sold on September 30, 2008, you would have $48.55 left.

With Wachovia, you would have had $68.74 left of the original $1,000.00.

With Lehman, you would have had $0.00 left.

But, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of beer kegs one year ago…drank all of the beer, then turned in the kegs and got your deposit back, you would have $240.85 cash.

This is known as the 401-keg program.

idea stolen from 401kegplan.com via Business Pundit

In response to a post about a death threat spam I got back in May comes this little gem:

Did you get killed? I just got it this morning also?

A $700,000,000,000 bailout for the financial industry, to "save" them from risks associated with bad mortgages.

That's roughly $2,300 per man, woman and child in America today. Money we as taxpayers aren't sure we'll ever see again. Money given to companies who made bad decisions, while people who made bad decisions are forced to bear those costs unaided. (Yes, not every company was predatory like that, but many were.)

Tell me again how this is good? Tell me again where this money can possibly come from? Because I don't know, and I honestly can't figure it out myself.

Let me put this another way: If you have an AGI of less than $18,000 and you're single (which means, assuming the standard deductions, you made less than $23,500, or less than $11.25/hr), every penny this year of your federal income tax from your paycheck is going to bail out a bank. If you file jointly, that threshold is $35,900 (thus $46,600 or $22.40/hr).

And to address lowercaseb below, I'm not saying this is anyone in any administration's fault, because really, it's not. It's the fault of companies who wanted to make lots of quick money handing it out to people who were ill-prepared to accept the responsibility of what they signed up for, whether they knew it or not.

Now's when I kick myself for not buying a ticket and heading up to the Cubs-Astros game tonight.

If you're having a problem installing ies4osx, particularly version 2_99_0_1-5 and are getting an error about corrupt files that looks something like this:

# Downloading everything we need
Downloading from microsoft.com:
DCOM98.EXE

!! An error ocurred when downloading. Please run IEs4Linux again. Corrupted file: DCOM98.EXE

The problem may not be a corrupt file, but a bad assumption by ies4osx.

Open a terminal prompt and type id — if either the name following your uid or gid has a space in it, this will cause you problems.

The solution is to fix the getFileSize method. To do this, open a terminal window, enter the directory containing your ies4osx "binary", and then type:
vi ies4osx.app/Resources/ies4linux/mac/functions-overwrite.sh
(You can use another editor in place of vi, if you must.)

On line 51 of the file I edited, the getFileSize method looked like this:

function getFileSize {
ls -laF "$1" | awk '{print $5}'
return 0
}

The $5 above had to be changed to $6 to accomodate the extra "word" in my group name.

I hope this helps someone else out.

Edit: You might also be able to change ls -laF to ls -laFn to fix the bug. I have not tested this theory, though.

Spam of the day:( a death threat ) More info from 419scam.org

petdance says he got threatened twice this morning! Dang, maybe the Python folks are looking to take out the Perl folks! I guess that's what happens when you get a large influx of cash!

What I find especially amusing is that ten days from now, I won't even be in the *country*. Maybe the moose in the Great White North have something to do with this.

I've got a shelf of books sitting in my home office that I don't want, and I don't know what to do. Do I throw them out? Do I burn them? Do I donate them somewhere?

Before you say "donate", here's the catch: Many of these aren't really even applicable anymore. "Peter Norton's Guide to DOS 5.0" isn't burning up the charts. "Teaching Computing: A Practical Approach" (© 1988) is going for 41¢ right now on Amazon. Guinness World Records 2000 is only 8.5 years out of print. And even if I took them to my local used book dealer, I doubt anyone, especially anyone here in McHenry, would be interested in them. Not too many people need a book on Mathematica 3 now that Mathematica 6 is here.

My local recycling guide only has dropoffs for, ahem, "usable" books. I don't think any of these qualify.

Suggestions?

At the Pingree Road Metra stop, Impark has taken out the cash boxes and put in machines that ask you for a space number, then accept your payment and give you a receipt. They also sell pre-paid vending cards so you don't have to have exact change (since the machines don't give it).

You would expect the transaction process to go like this:

1. Enter space number
2. Insert and remove card
3. Take receipt

All in all, a five to ten second process, right? It actually goes like this:

1. Enter space number
2. Insert card and leave it there
3. Read balance display on machine
4. Get told to "press Value button"
5. Look for the value button before finding it in the upper left corner of the number pad. No, it's not any of the giant stoplight buttons (green for writing added value to your card, yellow to change the language, or red to cancel... something), nor is it well labeled.
6. Press the value button and wait for your receipt
7. Take your receipt and your card

I guess once you get used to it, it's a 15 second process because of the delays inherent in reading and writing the smartcard. It took me almost two minutes to actually pay for my parking, and had there been a line of people as confused as me (the system started last week) I don't know that I would have made my train.

Yes, I understand they want you to hit a button because they use the same machines to reload the cards as they do to collect the money. Yes, I understand that the card has to stay in until you're done so the right amount can be written back to the card based on what you choose to do. Yes, I know I can pay the extra 28¢ if I run late and pay by phone. It just seems real easy to forget your card or hit the wrong button and not pay for your parking (which I did this morning the first time).

It's not even like electronic POS systems are a new technology. We're talking about a system that should be able to serve a rush of a hundred customers in a few minutes so they can catch their trains. Heck, take a lesson from the CTA and create a system that allows you to enter your space number, tap your card and go. Even with five machines out front, the current system will barely withstand a rush of people trying to make the train.

Oh, who am I kidding?

Tomorrow is Paczki day! Everyone have Paczki and celebrate!

Yeah, it also happens to be Fat Tuesday and Mardi Gras. Who cares? There's Paczki!

Edit from the future: Paczki is the plural - the singular is paczek.

Did you know that if you've ever bought an appliance or tool from Sears, that the world now knows about it?

Who was the genius that came up with this great idea?

"If you're reading this, you're rich. This may seem surprising, but it's true." - via substitute

I went to see I Am Legend today in IMAX as part of a work outing. Coming out of the theater, I was ready to wholeheartedly recommend it, and I still suggest you go see it if you're interested in sci-fi/horror. But... ( Hic sunt spoileres! )

If you read the Ebert review, which gives away quite a bit, he also has the same logic problems I do. Consider the last line of his review:

The movie works well while it's running, although it raises questions that later only mutate in our minds.