Ad Terras Per Aspera

Ad Terras Per Aspera is now 3 years old.

Ad Terras Per Aspera has finally reached the 150th thousand spam message, according to the Akismet spam filter in Wordpress. As such, ATPA continues to remain spam free.

Last milestone was August 1st, with 100 thousand spam messages. This means in roughly 2 months, an additional 50 thousand spam messages were sent. Before that, between April 30th and August 1st there was another 50 thousand spam messages sent.

Jeff Dunham - Achmed the Dead Terrorist

Verizon is currently hacking DNS to override bad domain names and sending them to an internal service.

This is considered a severe security violation and they are willfully undermining the integrety of the service they provide. I think it is time that I cancel my service with Verizon and switch to a provider that doesn’t pull shit like this, but in the mean time I will use OpenDNS.

I just found an interesting bug in how ColorSync, Apple’s color profile management framework, functions. This effects (but by far is not limited to) Safari, Finder/Cover Flow, and whatever sets the desktop background.

Any image that does not have a profile is not color managed. I mean, it is completely ignored: in my case, I profiled my Powerbook’s LCD using a Spyder2Pro colorimeter. Using the “2.2 gamma 6500k” profile generated by the Spyder2 software, the desktop background image “Purple Frond” that comes with OSX is actually displayed bluish in color because Apple did not embed profiling data in their background images.

I randomly came across the reason for this because I was editing a different background to fit my monitor differently than the automatic modes did. After saving in Photoshop (which was nice enough to include the sRGB color profile in the JPEG), the colors were different.. or rather, they were correct, matching what Photoshop displayed. Double checking against “Purple Frond” by opening it and saving it in Photoshop with the sRGB color profile makes it correctly display purple instead of blue on my desktop.

The correct behavior of ColorSync should be to assume the data is sRGB and color manage it as such, instead of just not color managing it at all. Many images found on the Internet are “broken” and do not have the proper color profile set, but are obviously sRGB data.

Update: The desktop background is set by Dock, apparently. Set your desktop background to “Change picture every… (time period)” with “Random order”, and run killall Dock in Terminal.app… Dock will automatically restart and change your desktop background.