OddNews
Latest
Obscure OS X Mountain Lion bug makes many apps crash
TUAW reader Don McC pointed us to this Next Web write-up about an obscure Mountain Lion crash. If you type File: followed by /// in many apps, they will crash. There are 8 characters in total and the F must be capitalized. I tested this and managed to crash a bunch of apps. Echofon, QuickTime, Safari, and Notes all fell before the 8-character text, although Firefox did not . Most amusingly, when I attempted to open the crash logs in TextEdit, the logs killed the app! So what's going on? Here's what my system log reports: Feb 2 22:18:37 Esopus-Spitzenburg.local TextEdit[8417]: assertion on /SourceCache/DataDetectorsCore/DataDetectorsCore-269.1/Sources/PushDown/DDResultExtraction.c:1576 "CFStringHasPrefix(urlVal, CFSTR("file://"))" failed :wrong extraction: File:/// As the Next Web explains, it's an issue with a built in assertion. Assertions allow programmers to mandate expected behavior, validating input to assure its correctness. In this case, automated data detectors see what appears to be a malformed URL and send off an application exception reporting the internal inconsistency. The exception crashes the application because there's no built-in handler. I tried out the recommended solution (disabling spelling correction and symbol substitution) but it didn't work for me personally. TUAW submitted a bug report to Apple.
Japanese gov't gives away mobiles to spur birth rate
There's nothing like a free cellphone to entice people to buy something of perform some action. Japan got the memo finally, and decided to do it one further in odd, child-bearing fashion. The Japanese government and even the corporate sector in that country as offering both cash and free cellphones (and other electronics) to would-be parents as an incentive to have more kids amid the declining birth rate there. Yeah, nothing says "bring a new life into the world" like a new Sony digital camera or Samsung wireless handset, eh?[Image via Chaos Scenario]
