OS X Lion apparently changed the cookie storage format in one of the recent minor releases. If you use Safari 5.1.x under Snow Leopard, cookies are in Apple’s well-defined Plist format, which is generally stored as XML. If you use Lion, that file still exists, but the actual cookie storage has moved to binary garbage.

Not the Core Storage model they usually push on everyone, which is a perfectly sensible SQLite database, but an on-disk representation of the NSHTTPCookieStorage class, containing a mix of big-endian and little-endian data. Use Apple’s method calls to read and write it, or prepare yourself for pain.

(via jwz, who is quite naturally baffled by this giant leap into the Nineties)

Digital first, apparently, with DVDs to follow. A very pleasant series, but the decision seems to have a lot of folks scratching their heads.

In the new Star Wars MMORPG, characters get a starship of their own when they finish the first story arc for their class (typically level 15, but if you’ve been doing instances and side quests, it could be later).

I haven’t played a smuggler far enough to see their ship, but thanks to an incomplete feature/glitch in the game, I was able to run around inside one. All of the ships have a bridge, bedrooms, a conference area, a lounge, a cargo hold, and a “talk to your boss” holocommunicator.

But only the smuggler ship has a head in a jar in its cargo hold. Also a giant caged beast and someone frozen in carbonite, but head-in-a-jar is the real prize (pictures). And it’s not even a random head-in-a-jar; it’s apparently a tie-in to the Knights of The Old Republic game.

(The glitch? I was grouped with a smuggler who needed help on the final class quest to get the ship, so after the cutscene, we were both transported onto it. Except we were on different copies of it, so we couldn’t interact, and when I flew it to a different planet, she stayed behind in her copy. When I landed, I was in my own ship. What I should have done was try flying a space mission, to see if I got to fight using her ship model as well.)

Oh, and while there are plenty of “shoot the engineers and release on time” issues with the game, it’s quite playable and fun for folks who like their gaming casual and interactive, but pretty brutal on hardware requirements. Their server/client architecture needs a lot of optimization to handle a room full of people, and the client has a lot of rough spots that can make it perform poorly on computers that can handle maxed-out settings on Skyrim.

Nice. I’ve been quite happy with mine, largely because Sony didn’t try to cruft it up or lock it down. There are some bundled apps, but all the standard Honeycomb apps are still there as well.

There are frequent discussions online about how to end an unwanted visit by Jehovah’s Witnesses. The general consensus is that the sure-fire “stop bugging me forever” technique is to quietly, sincerely say, “I’m sorry, I’ve been disfellowshipped”, which means you’ve been kicked out of the Witnesses, and talking to you can send them to hell, too.

I seem to have found an even better way. I was working from home on Thursday, when I got the knock on my door. I answered it to find a stunning young hispanic woman leading a troop of Watchtower-holders, whose face fell the moment she saw me.

In halting English, she asked, “do you know if your neighbors speak Spanish?”

Or, well, not:

"You know, this is what happens with communism. It’s a great concept. On paper it makes perfect sense. But once you put a human being in power, it shifts. We saw it in Russia, we’ve seen it all around the world. It’s nuts. But, I keep my fingers crossed."

--- Whoopi Goldberg, lamenting that the late Kim Jong-il's legacy was just an implementation problem

The Trustworthiness of Beards. The creator’s site is toast right now, but it’s by Matt McInerney.

The autumn leaves weren’t the only thing brightening up the Kyoto Botanical Garden.

(no pictures yesterday? I blame it on Star Wars: The Old Republic)