So I’m doing my thing, surfing and reading and writing, and I go to click on my Gmail tab in Firefox. When I look at the tab, I notice something weird: little, single-pixel-high black rectangles beneath the tab.
What the…?
Sometimes if you display an image and then close it, little leftover pixels will hang out on the screen. Usually manipulating the pixels* will fix that. Hmmmm. I iconify FF and then reopen it… boxes still there. I open a window on top of FF, then move it off. Nope. Still cootified.
Here’s what they look like:
See them there? Underneath the tabs? Here’s a closeup:
 |
I marked them with red lines. Look! Some of the cooties are blue!
What. The. Heck?
I have never seen anything like this, and the obvious conclusion is that the government has decided to bug my browser. Or aliens have control of my Mac.
Anyone seen anything like this before? I’m running FF 2.0.0.17 on a MacBook Pro with OSX 10.4.11. I know, I’ll upgrade to 10.5. Eventually. I’m in no hurry.
Edited to add: And now, of course, as I’m about to post this, they’re gone. Back to the mothership? NSA bored with my blog? Maybe the Doctor Who music I was playing scared them off…. and now I miss my cooties. Sigh.
October 4th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I’m sorry, Dr. Phil. I will make sure my spyware is less obtrusive next time.
Cheerio!
October 4th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Big Brother is watching you…with tiny little eyes!
October 4th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
If you zoom in on the pixels without smoothing them, the colors look very much like the colors used for OS X’s subpixel text rendering. It appears you’re getting text remnants for some reason.
October 4th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I’ve seen that before with Firefox 2.x on my Macbook. Never did figure out what caused it.
Upgrade to Firefox 3.0, it’s been out and stable for months now and includes a lot of nice new features. Runs great on my MBP with 10.5.5
October 4th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Looks like an emission spectrum to me. Have you checked to see if your looking at your browser through a spectroscope?
October 4th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Get out of the room! Contact your local bio hazard authority to come dispose of that thing and to decontaminate your house.
October 4th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
on a side-note… why FF2? is the beta for FF3 not available for Mac? (it runs very stable on my ubuntu, so I’m curious. and no cooties, either)
October 4th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Sure it’s not simply a partially visible window beneath the active one? It looks to me like you’re seeing the bottom bits of obscured text.
I don’t use Apple stuff so I can’t be certain, but I get a similar effect when the window I’m typing in isn’t fully maximised, and there’s something else underneath.
October 4th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Submit it to those SETI guys for analysis. Probably remnants of an I Love Lucy episode from Alpha Centauri.
October 4th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
I got them too (FF, Mac OS X 10.5) but I since I upgraded to FF3 they have disappeared. I suspect it is a FF2 bug.
October 4th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
File a bug report?
October 4th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
As soon as you touch the keyboard, consider yourself “sequenced”.
October 4th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Elwood, it really is a single line of pixels lingering after closing an image/tab/whatnot.
October 4th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
It looks most like remnants of text. I’ve never had that that problem with FF but it’s happened on other programmes and that’s what it looks like.
October 4th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Well, you could always do the world a favor and throw it away. One less Mac makes the world a better place.
October 4th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
I looked around on the web, but I can’t find anything related to this (but I did find this funny video).
October 4th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Viewer 3, are you a minion of Microsoft, or does Linux satisfy your Sado-Masochist tendencies?
October 4th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Morgellons Syndrome. First recorded instance of cross-infection between biological and digital systems. Vector unknown.
October 4th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
You mean it doesn’t “Just Work”?
(I have to ask this everytime mac people come to me w/ their problems, which is pretty often)
October 4th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Looking at your collection of tabs: Maybe you’re in Soviet Russia and FedEx is tracking you?
October 4th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Uhm, FF3 has long been out of beta, guys. It has several bug fixes, including that one. Hell, it even looks so much nicer on the Mac OS X. FF2 looks crap on Mac OS X.
If you don’t upgrade to FF3, you are a loony. FF2 is ancient history.
October 4th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Last month something similar was happening to my iMac. Then it wasn’t just Firefox, it was other windows. I could get rid of the artifacts by resizing the window, but eventually they’d come back.
Then my computer would sometime just black out the screen entirely — not a freeze, because iTunes would keep playing.
Then my computer screen started to freeze entirely, usually accompanied by the lines of pixels or garbling of all the video (like a jigsaw puzzle).
I took it in (was under warranty) and come to find out the thermal sensor was out and basically my logic board AND video card were toast.
Took it in, got the hardware replaced, and it hasn’t happened since. If you start to get more symptoms, make sure you have backups and then take it in to an Apple Store if you have one near you.
October 4th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
I had similar artifacts on FF2 and the early versions of FF3.
But now I’m on FF3.0.3 (it’s long out of beta) and Leopard 10.5.5, and nothing of the sort anymore.
Phil, update. There’s no valid reason not to anymore.
pcarini, if the worst you worry about are some weird pixels, the rest must be pretty good, don’t you think?
October 4th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Probably a transient “clipping” problem (some text/graphics got drawn in an region a pixel high that should have been outside the repaint area when whatever was being redrawn in the window was painted.
As a programmer, when you’re trying to speed up the painting/repainting of a window, it’s fairly easy to introduce repaint bugs like this. The more obvious problems are usually fixed during testing, but it’s no surprise if a few very minor, transient problems slip through.
BTW: If you’re a heavy user of GMail I would highly recommend moving up to FF3. FF2 has some horrible memory leaks with interactive apps like GMail. It runs much better on FF3.
October 4th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Get FF3.0.3 and your problems are gone. It works fine for me on 10.4 and 10.5 and looks great with the GrApple Delicious theme.
October 4th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
I’m not familiar with Mac, but it looks like like a very minor problem where the screen does not entirely “erase” and a minor artifact is left. Sometimes it happens when developing a web page.
A bunch of you guys have Macs? My god (Loki – my cat, if you must know) are you lucky!. My DFI motherboard died last Monday. May she rest well. I don’t mean to be facetious, but she was a mother who did her best to care for me as I cared for her. When I needed a job she’d carry the mail personally. She listened to my friends without judgement. She’d help me buy CD’s and videos for all my friends and stupid crap for myself. She didn’t mind the SI Swimsuit site.
She was a good ‘ol DFI mother, with an Athlon XP2800+ 2.4G (overclocked to c. 2.6G). She was nice and lean but full bodied, and she woudn’t put up with no crap! Not even from ME!! She didn’t own any video, so I bought some NVIDEA and I let her use my old ATI All-In-Wonder.
Now she’s gone and am left bereft for the memories of so many very good times forever.
R.I.P. DFI Mama.
So I just bought a MSA motherboard and an AMD 5600 AM2 dual processor. Plus the required RAM upgrade. There’s a couple of MSA and ASUS boards that are better, not to mention processors, but not everybody has the money (having just moved from AZ to FL things are thin). It’s running OK on Win 2000 Professional, but 2K isn’t set up for dual processors and so I’ll have to get XP Professional now. Most likely Linux is in the cards – why f**k around too much. At work, all we’ll use is XP Pro and Linux. Vista is out. Totally out. Vista is such total bloatware. Monopoly junk.
Anyway, check the link. All keys are analog. The “Wall of Doom” behind Erik is Moog and Oberheim modular synths.
October 4th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Just looks like a little glitch to me.
You’re sweating too much!
October 4th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Don’t know what’s up with FireFox but a moment ago the main page of the blog made Safari emit a sound best described as “a bad ground”.
hummmmmmmmmm
October 4th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Ahhh, it’s the water heater cam.
October 4th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Those are flees. Dawkins has some too.
October 4th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
You know, as a generally all-round nice person, I’m appalled – appalled! – by all the Windows users coming in and taunting the Mac users.
As a Windows user, I’m somewhat smug ^_^ Aww, is the widdle Mac not working? I thought it ALWAYS worked, with nothing unexplainable happening ever and being able to run the computer, the toaster, and the satellite defence system at the same time! Poor widdle Mac. What do you know? Maybe it ISN’T the be-all and end-all of computing!
…Sorry XD *flees*
October 4th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
These actually look like artifacts. I should note your using an old version (upgrade to Firefox 3 already!). The graphics library has been totally abstracted to Cairo, so it’s possible this bug is long gone. Lots of changes have been made to graphics and performance.
October 4th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Phil, your browser is obviously blueshifted…
You’re looking at -
EMAIL’S FROM DA FUTURE!
Or maybe it’s just a smudge…
October 4th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Phil’s story mirrors this short video perfectly. So if the video is any indication, the cooties will come back and a good time will be had by all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkZWlAIG0w
October 4th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Can I urge you, Phil, to ignore all the well-intentioned mooks telling you to upgrade FF and instead listen to thebouv and me? Boot from the install disk that came with your Mac and run Apple Hardware Test. Test your video system. Test it repeatedly. Test it just after you start up and test it after your Mac’s been on for a long time. Test everything, definitely, but hammer that video system as long as you dare.
If you bought AppleCare or otherwise have TechTool Pro, use that instead. It finds things AHT doesn’t.
And as thebouv says, get to the Apple Store as soon as you can, or call the toll-free number. Once you’ve got a replacement, sure, upgrade to FF 3 if you want. Every moment I spend in FF is like having needles jabbed in my eyes, personally, so I’m a happy Safari user. But what matter is having a working computer.
October 4th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
You are using FF2???
Please upgrade to FF3. Hopefully the cooties would be gone by then.
October 4th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
(Sorry to sound to smirk in my last comment. I was just a little… surprised.)
I hope the comments don’t erupt into a Mac vs. Win war.
October 4th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
I had that problem as well with Firefox 2 on Mac OS 10.4.11. I don’t know what the problem was. It did go away though in Firefox 3.
October 4th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
As many others have said, upgrade to FF3! It is not beta (3.1 is the current beta). You will notice that it is much more responsive, feature rich, and uses much less RAM than FF2. p.s. Forget bug reporting it.
October 4th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Maybe it’s the MCP?
October 4th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
@ Freiddie:
There is no war. PCs suck.
October 4th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
tacitus Says:
October 4th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Probably a transient “clipping” problem (some text/graphics got drawn in an region a pixel high that should have been outside the repaint area when whatever was being redrawn in the window was painted.
As a programmer, when you’re trying to speed up the painting/repainting of a window, it’s fairly easy to introduce repaint bugs like this. The more obvious problems are usually fixed during testing, but it’s no surprise if a few very minor, transient problems slip through.
Knurl says:
My Roman friend, you are quite right. There’s a bunch of ways I’ve left errors on page, especially older software in the past. Maybe I’m an old fart, but I wish that I had more code and less GUI to work with.
Naomi Says:
October 4th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
You know, as a generally all-round nice person, I’m appalled – appalled! – by all the Windows users coming in and taunting the Mac users.
As a Windows user, I’m somewhat smug ^_^ Aww, is the widdle Mac not working? I thought it ALWAYS worked, with nothing unexplainable happening ever and being able to run the computer, the toaster, and the satellite defence system at the same time! Poor widdle Mac. What do you know? Maybe it ISN’T the be-all and end-all of computing!
Knurl says:
?? The issue isn’t actually a real issue. I can’t say I know much about Mac, but what thebouv said could happen to anyone. I do know a number of people that had them for years, and while there was not a lot of software for them in years past, that is changing. They’re fine. What Microsoft wants me to do is not. See my post above. From a Computer Science standpoint (my BS degree is Computer Information Systems from SUNY College at Buffalo and I have a bunch of post certifications), Windows is not very good, and is devolving.
# Viewer 3 Says:
October 4th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Well, you could always do the world a favor and throw it away. One less Mac makes the world a better place.
Knurl says:
Let me guess: For the presidential vote, you’re doing a write in for Sarah Palin with McCain as VP.
Relax people. There’s A Sky Full of Stars.
October 4th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
It’s not a memory leak, it’s bad programming. If you take a close look at the top of the pic that Phil has provided, you’ll notice that the top couple of pixels of “Google” are cut off, as are the top couple of pixels of the whole menu bar. Then, just below it, you notice the junk.
What has happened is that the programmer has shoved the Google menu bar up a pixel or two, which then pulled the top couple of pixels of whatever is supposed to have been below it also up a couple of pixels. Then, the screen corrects itself below that (and also above the menu bar).
The programmer has just screwed up on the menu bar. I’m sure the next version of whatever is causing it has had this annoying little bug fixed.
- Mikel
October 4th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
I’ve noticed that a few Windows users have made comments about Macs. As a lifelong Mac user, I am not going to reply in kind — after all, being stuck with Windows is punishment enough…
October 4th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
You’re problem appears to be… you’re running a Mac.
October 4th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
‘Don’t have that problem, I’m going to go with what others have said and guess that it’s a FF2 Bug. I did however hear a strange radio like buzz when I entered the main page for your blog, maybe the aliens have different ways of tracking different people. Hmmm…
October 4th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Windows and Mac are not the only operating systems on the market. Some people prefer to not be charged just to use an inferior operating system.
October 4th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
I use Linux. The only pixel issue I have with FF3 is if there is a grey background there will be one hot yellow pixel while switching tabs on minimizing. Only FF3 has this hot pixel and I’ve verified nothing wrong with the monitor.
October 4th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
I stopped using Firefox on OS X because Safari just performs better. Between Safari Adblock (http://safariadblock.sourceforge.net/) and Inquisitor (http://www.inquisitorx.com/), I really don’t miss FF. If you previously gave up on Safari because of the lack of plugins, it’s worth giving it a second chance.
October 4th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
A man was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, “I was turned into a frog by a wicked witch. If you kiss me, I’ll turn back into a beautiful princess.” He bent over, picked up the frog, and put it in his pocket.
The frog spoke up again and said, “If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will tell everyone how smart and brave you are and how you are my hero.” The man took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it, and returned it to his pocket.
The frog spoke up again and said, “If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will be your loving companion for an entire week.” The man took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it, and returned it to his pocket.
The frog then cried out, “If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I’ll stay with you for a year and do anything you want.” Again the man took the frog out, smiled at it, and put it back into his pocket.
Finally, the frog asked, “What the hell is the matter? I’ve told you I’m a beautiful princess, that I’ll stay with you for a year and do anything you want. Why won’t you kiss me?”
The man said, “Look, I’m a computer programmer. I don’t have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog is so cool.”
October 4th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Mikel Says:
October 4th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
It’s not a memory leak, it’s bad programming. If you take a close look at the top of the pic that Phil has provided, you’ll notice that the top couple of pixels of “Google” are cut off, as are the top couple of pixels of the whole menu bar. Then, just below it, you notice the junk.
What has happened is that the programmer has shoved the Google menu bar up a pixel or two, which then pulled the top couple of pixels of whatever is supposed to have been below it also up a couple of pixels. Then, the screen corrects itself below that (and also above the menu bar).
The programmer has just screwed up on the menu bar. I’m sure the next version of whatever is causing it has had this annoying little bug fixed.
Knurl says:
That’s what tacitus and I said, in a nutshell. It’s a non-issue. ‘Ya know, I think Phil’s just yankin’ the chain. Macs have been used in physics labs and sound studios since about 198? because the OP system doesn’t f**k around and neither did the Motorola RISC processors. Motorola is Japanese, Intel is US. IBM’s bank account backed who (and why) in 1980? Please don’t get me started. I’ve been into it since ‘74. Man, I am so tired of it all. So seriously very tired. But what else can i do?
Relax dudes and dudesses. It’s Saturday night and there’s A Sky Full of Stars.
October 4th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Wow, such a set of responses!
For those who gave serious advice: thanks.
For those who took this in the humorous vein in which I presented it: good on ya!
For those who could sit on a piece of coal and have a diamond when they stand up: relax.
For those telling me to upgrade: that takes effort.
October 5th, 2008 at 12:03 am
Three words: Mercury in retrograde!
… jk
October 5th, 2008 at 12:17 am
I for one wouldn’t take the replies about hardware problems all that seriously unless you start seeing it happen in other programs, or all over the place. Of course you should have anything you can’t afford to lose backed up at all times anyway, but that’s just common sense or common paranoia.
The FF3 upgrade took all of about two minutes for me and kept all of my FF2 settings, favorites, etc. Of course some people can’t stand the FF3 changes to the address bar, but I rather like them.
elgarak Says: (5:40 PM)
“pcarini, if the worst you worry about are some weird pixels, the rest must be pretty good, don’t you think?”
You try to get Scplugin working on a network managed machine w/ portable homes and then we’ll talk… I’m disappointed that most mac users don’t care all that much for my favorite mac feature, the unix-like command line, but then we can’t all be geeks
October 5th, 2008 at 1:42 am
Hmm…
I hate Macs but I respect them.
Microsoft, well I neither respect nor like.
BSD Unix, I respect, but not my cup of tea.
Linux, well it has its problems,
but I has earnt my respect and I like it.
Ain’t no perfect operating system – accept it,
and use the one most appropriate
for your needs and foibles.
As for your problem Phil:
please up grade to Firefox 3,
and use what ever operating system
you deem appropriate for yourself!
Cheers,
Gavin
October 5th, 2008 at 1:53 am
“For those telling me to upgrade: that takes effort.”
It takes very little effort. Here’s the download and instructions for MacOS X:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.0.3&os=osx&lang=en-US
October 5th, 2008 at 3:15 am
In the beginning was the Personal Computer, and God said: Let there be light!
PC: You have not signed in yet.
God: J_E_H_O_V_A_H
PC: Enter password.
God: O_M_N_I_S_C_I_E_N_T
PC: Password incorrect. Remember that passwords are case sensitive. Have you forgotten your password?
God: O_M_N_I_P_O_T_E_N_T
PC: Password incorrect. Remember that passwords are case sensitive. Have you forgotten your password?
God: O_M_N_I_P_R_E_S_E_N_C_E
PC: Password incorrect. Remember that passwords are case sensitive. Have you forgotten your password?
God: “F***ING STUPID COMPUTER!”
October 5th, 2008 at 3:30 am
Hhadron collisions…
October 5th, 2008 at 4:05 am
Phil – damn good advice.
I’ve only been in Florida for six months, so I didn’t have too many places to backtrack and check on. It took a good while to clean ‘em off, but I swear I must have about a good ten or twelve carats. One must be at least four. Man that was a real bad day. God (Loki – my cat) knows what I left in Arizona. I’ll have to ask him.
New link. Neurosaur.
October 5th, 2008 at 5:55 am
@Lara,
I heard the same buzz and thought it was the speakers on the way out. Then I noticed that it was only on the same page as the water heater video. For the record, I use Windows, IE7, and FSM only knows what else. Not going to indulge in chest-beating over which is the best system/browser to use.
October 5th, 2008 at 6:46 am
Sorry, but you’re wasting a lot of your time as well as the time of others by complaining about a bug while running an outdated Fx level on a backlevel OS. This is a most unproductive way to generate an alien code sequence….
October 5th, 2008 at 7:09 am
Yes the webcam feed with the pilot light has a hum.
October 5th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Wendy is correct! Why, I just read an article on MSNBC.com about that very subject….
October 5th, 2008 at 8:34 am
I’m with the “check the video card and monitor” camp… I had a squirrelly monitor that used to leave behind little cooties like that when I’d open one file or close one… turned out to be a loose connector AND a about-to-fail video controller card… which can happen no matter which perversion of computer/OS you use.
October 5th, 2008 at 8:47 am
Speaker hum? Oh, so YOU’RE the cause? I was beginning to wonder,,,
Now I’ll just click on something,,,anything,,,to stop the hum.
When I asked my Son why he quit working for Microsoft and went to work for Apple, he said,” I got tired of working on cr*p,,,”
From one who has worked both sides of the fence,,,
There are no perfect operating systems. All have bugs. Just some bugs are more lethal than others.
The iMac my Son gave me last year came with Safari and works just fine for me. The old PC in my office worked ok(with a lot of auto reboots) but it was the old 2000 system. I hear Vista needs some serious rework,,,
Computers were a lot more fun before Gates ran all the other competitors out of business(except for Apple).
I really, really dislike monopolies,,,
Gary 7
October 5th, 2008 at 8:54 am
It’s a seckret govmintal specktografical reed out of them !CONTRAILS! they dumpin into owr air. Some how you acidently tapped in to the seckret fils that the govmint keeps on goooogles’s servers. You need to examun the specktograf thing and let us no what is in them !CONTRAILS! The sooner we can crack this govmint conspracy and and find what it is they puting into owr air to keep us all dosille, the sooner we can fight back.
just rememer that any time you see a plain spraing !CONTRAILS! to get on your gas mast. All so be sure to rememer to remove the TACMARS marker stickers off the back of the street sines in your home towns so the govmint wont be able to find there hiden detintiun camps and supply stash’s.
One last thing to rememer. the reason the eleetist’s want nucular power is so they can ship raidioation through the power line’s into the homes of the poor peple in small emounts so they can make us all not be able to have chilldrun. them govmint and sinetist’s grupes won’t to cleer out all us reglar peeple sos they can have there own little fascits-comunists world.
the conspeeracist-theoriser!
October 5th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Oops, sorry for the conspeeracist getting loose. i try to keep him locked up, but sometimes he breaks loose and binds my mind in the chains of ignorance. looks like i need to lock him a bit deeper into the dungeon. ah well… what more can i do?
Mac vs. PC: believe I’ll be sticking with my Vista laptop here. After a year and a half of use, I can honestly say that I’ve never had any of the big problems that people claim Vista is prone to. My laptop stays up and running for days and weeks at a time. 24 hours a day kind of running. About the only reboots it ever needs is when some of the updates come through. As for Apple, they make some pretty things, but i have way too many programs and games that are not in any way, shape, or form compatible with a Mac. And while I do know there is software that supposedly lets some one run them on a Mac, the idea of needing software to run software because the main software can’t run the software seems.. well, it seems like a crash waiting to happen.
No need to tell me to try a Mac. I tried one a couple of years ago, and lets just say, it was slower than my nearly 8 year old desktop, and didn’t even meet the same specs as said desktop. The Mac had a slower processor, less ram, a smaller hardrive, and wasn’t able to run a fairly high portion of the programs I use on a regular basis… all for 3 times the price i paid for my old well-used Emachine.
On the other hand, I wish both sides would stop the war. Apple makes some products that a lot of people find very useful and simple to use, they just handcuff people who want to design a system by telling you what you WILL have in your system. PCs are great for people who want a custom system, but on the other hand it can be twitchy because too many geeks want to overclock and push things to the very limit which leads to crashes and errors. Apple makes new designs that inspire people to think of better and better gadgets. Microsoft supplied some of the code that was use by apple way back in the day, and provided the bailout cash to keep Apple solvent.
It all boils down to what you as a user like. If you like one system over the other, use it. I’ve tried Mac, and I’ve tried Linux (which I couldn’t WAIT to get off of my systerm), and found that I prefer my windows. A friend of mine used windows for years then bought a Mac and found that she prefers that instead. Shrug.
October 5th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Yumpin yimminy, Scott, ther rally be no inteligents don heer,,,
Bame me oop, Scootty,,,
GAry 7
October 5th, 2008 at 11:01 am
“I’m with the ‘check the video card and monitor’ camp…”
The fact that Phil was able to take a screenshot of the cooties without the use of a camera suggests it has nothing at all to do with the monitor.
October 5th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
I’ve seen these — on a Mac, Windows, whatever window’d computer system.
These cooties are one pixel’s worth of whatever is displayed under the window — text from another window, your desktop pattern, a drop shadow, etc.
Slide the window up and down, and you’ll see what I mean.
October 5th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
Have you tried clearing the cache? I’ve found that in the past update or two, the cached images tend to get really corrupt, making any page that you revisit often unreadable, until the cache is cleared and the page reloaded. This is happening on an otherwise stable and problem-free Windows XP setup, but Mozilla likely run the same source code through their system specific compilers for each update.
No idea where the control is for clearing the cache is on a Mac, other than under the Advanced options in the Network tab. Options are available under Tools in Windows, and under Edit in Linux, so it may be one of the two for Macs.
October 5th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Speaking of the NSA, a pal of mine made a funny comment about being a drug addict on a writers’ GoogleGroup we both belong to. A week later, a couple of detectives appeared at his door, saying they had information that he might be dealing crystal meth – the exact drug he had joked about.
So before you dismiss those little niggling bits, know that yes, we’re being watched, and no, we’re not just paranoid.
October 5th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
REAL Mac geeks use Camino!
October 5th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
@Svip – “If you don’t upgrade to FF3, you are a loony. FF2 is ancient history.”
FF2 works great. FF3 is poop, because it doesn’t let me turn off the “awesome” bar and revert to the way FF2 does things. Yes, I know I can disable it entirely, but that’s not really a helpful solution, is it? And don’t point me at oldbar – it does NOT restore the old functionality. And show me one site that works in FF3 which doesn’t work in FF2.
And FWIW, I get these little guys on my Mac all the time. I think they’re artifacts from sloppy tab-closing routines. I just ignore them.
October 5th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Well, dang. It’s up to me, yet again.
Check this page on modifying Firefox.
And the video thing is common. The IBM box at work (XP Pro, 2.13 Core Duo 2, 2GB, running Notes, Word, Excel, Access and a few IE7 windows and two custom applications) leaves entire windows painted on the desktop when it gets confused. Part of why it does that is interference from programs installed by a Federal agency in charge of computer “security”; they can’t spell, and can’t get the law right in their logon warning message, but hey..You got somebody pretending their stuff is super, it’s just because it isn’t doing anything.
But hey, I’ll tell on ya, Phil. You spend so much time doing your real job, astronomy that you haven’t studied your OS. That’s OK. Life is too short to spend watching progress bars. Hey, even Ubuntu has screen-painting problems according to a quick search.
So, hey, make sure your favorite computer magazine subscription is up-to-date, and read the thing. The editors will have seen everything you do already. Just think of all the junk your box has to do to edit text in a Firefox window with Windows fonts while building the Web page you’ve just called up. So it stutters. No big deal.
Robust – adj. – a measure of the amount of time it will take to recover your computer system when it crashes.
October 6th, 2008 at 12:45 am
Phil,
this seems to be a not-so rare artefact of a suboptimal redrawing algorithm in the Mozilla XUL system, the front end of all Mozilla-based products like SeaMonkey, Thunderbird and Firefox. A simple off-by-one-error in the calculation of “redraw regions” can lead to this. In the older OSses, iconifying/moving the window out of the side of the screen and in again/moving a window in front of it had the effect of immediately redrawing the window area.
Combined with Apple’s Quartz (the display layer of OS X) and font antialiasing, the off-by-one-error leads to these ugly, but mostly harmless artefacts. Quartz double-buffers window contents in order to things like Exposé, Spaces, Dashboard effects etc. Font antialiasing causes the text to slightly “bleed out” of its bounding box sometimes.
I wrote “mostly harmless” because, yes, I’m a Douglas Adams fan, but also because it sometimes can be indicative of memory corruption, too. If parts of an offscreen buffer are erroneously overwritten and the buffer is then displayed, you get funny pixels — if not a crashing app.
One easy solution: change the window size slightly. A resize operation forces pretty much everything in a window to redraw.
October 6th, 2008 at 10:36 am
“MAC Says: Speaking of the NSA, a pal of mine made a funny comment about being a drug addict on a writers’ GoogleGroup we both belong to. A week later, a couple of detectives appeared at his door, saying they had information that he might be dealing crystal meth – the exact drug he had joked about.”
NO? Really? Nobody in the writers’ group would ever file a complaint about drug dealers in their forum. Google has to be bugged because there’s no other possible way for statements made on a public forum to reach the NSA, FBI, or any other government agency.
October 6th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Reminds me of Cantor dust.
October 6th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
I was going to ask Phil why the hell he’s using a Mac. It’s not because they’re cheaper. It’s not because they’re better.
Perhaps it was a gift? Or perhaps he’s inspired by the same kind of misguided elitism that leads the stereotypical mac-head or linux-head to go out of his way to make a system that’s inferior for (you can’t get much more inferior than “just plain won’t run”) some of the most common user applications as his primary desktop.
For the record, Vista works fine. It has some annoying features and yes, it is bloated, but it’s stable enough, secure enough, and entirely functional. Really, it’s almost as good as XP.
XP blows OSX and Ubuntu clean out of the water in terms of usefulness for the home user. The chances are good that anyone who will tell you otherwise:
1) Has never used XP, and thinks it’s like Windows 95/98/ME (for reference, MacUsers, this is about like me evaluating OSX based on my extensive and mainly negative experience with OS9)
2) Is smoking or shooting something.
3) Actually knows something relevant that I don’t, in which case I’d like to know what it is.
I used Firefox for a while. Then I used Opera for a while. Then IE7 had tabbed browsing and worked fine and I realy haven’t bothered with anything else since.
October 6th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Jedi,
I’ve been barefoot on the Web since 1993, until two months ago when I got DSL and the router’s firewall was installed.
No viruses. Garageband – and a world full of audio tools if I want them. MS Office. Several browsers.
I find a lot of people identify, empathize, anthropomorphize their computers based on how involved they are with them. Updating antivirus and antispyware counts. You love your car because you wash it, too, not just driving it. Even though you didn’t buy it to wash.
I use XP Pro at work, and I have a laptop here at the house with XP on it, too. That makes it apparent that cheap hardware is the only thing that makes the OS viable. I know you’d hate Windows on 900MHz – I’ve fixed a friend’s 1.3 GHz Celeron box and it was pitiful – but OS X runs pretty swiftly on two G4s summing that speed. Why is it, now, that bunches of people and businesses are downgrading to XP from Vista?
It doesn’t matter to you, of course. I’ve been running this thing for eight years. I am ticked at Apple for cashing in on the “fix this” market, though, and for changing file architecture at least three times. I can’t run my copy of Excel v0.0B on this thing. But if you have something that works – and I acknowledge that tinkering is an enjoyable hobby – well, have at it!
Right now, Staples has a special on a 4-core Phenom box from HP for $700 that looks good. I’d have to subscribe to a couple of services, but I see the appeal.
That PC is cheap!
October 6th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Life is too short to get into flamewars over which OS is best. Use what you like and ignore the trolls.
October 6th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
@Radwaste – let me be a little more explicit. There are two reasons my current PC is not a Mac.
1) OSX won’t run Supreme Commander out of the box.
2) I get less bang for my buck.
Given that I’d just end up running Windows on my Mac anyway, I have a Dell.
October 6th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Phil, I used to have one “cootie” in my Gmail too. See they’re tracking-dots by Google to track the traffic and all. But now I guess its not used. Seems they might’ve did the beta testing on a new feature on you. (maybe!)
October 8th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Ditto the “no OS wars”. So I have an old box that runs MacOS X – and BSD Unix, remember? And cheap is good. Have fun! I wouldn’t mandate anything for you, even if I could.
November 10th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Get NO SCRIPT it’s a firefox add-on
that will not permit scripts on any
webpage to show on your computer unless you o.k. it. I’ve been usuing it for a year
(I use Linux- I don’t even need it) and i’m content with it.
Aside from this, I will thank you for your defense of common sense.
There’s just too many easily mislead people out there in the world.