iOS 2011 Alarm Clock Bug

Just to add to the speculation about the causes of the 2011 alarm clock bug of iOS where the one-time alarms would not activate on January 1 and January 2, 2011.

My guess is that the code that sets off the alarm takes day, month and year into account when checking whether the alarm should go off. But instead of using the “normal” year, an ISO-8601 year could have been used. This type of year is calculated by the number of the week (with Monday as the first day of the week), thus for the week 52 (from December 27, 2010 to January 2, 2011) the respective year remains 2010.

When setting the date to January 1, 2012, the alarm doesn’t go off as well (week 52 of 2011). This adds to my theory and also means that this hasn’t been a one-time issue and requires a bug fix by Apple.

Title Junk: Solve it with Javascript

There is some back and forth by John Gruber and others, about HTML <title> tags, with Gruber complaining (and rightly so) that for SEO reasons the titles are filled up with junk having little to do with the real page content.

The writers of cam.ly suggest to use the SEO title in the HTML and have something proper be displayed in Google by using an OpenSearch description. But this still doesn’t solve the problem of bloated window titles and bookmarks.

So my solution to that: use JavaScript. If you want to satisfy your readers with a good title and present a nice title to Google, simply set the title to something nice after the page has loaded with JavaScript:


document.title = "Title Junk: Solve it with JavaScript";

Everyone happy. Except those who have JavaScript disabled maybe.

I have also created a tiny WordPress plugin that does just that: title-junk.zip

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