Memories and Cookies

By Lynne Greer Jolitz

September 15, 2003

(Memories and Cookies :  Page 1 of 1 )

Well, it's a cleanup day, starting with my laptop. Noticing that I couldn't dig a file easily out of my cache, I decided to delete a number of "unnecessary" files—to wit, cookies. Won't take much time—I've cleaned up the cache before, right?

And what did I find? Well, first of all, even though I had set the clean-up mode many times in the last three years, cookies on my laptop just don't delete, preferring a "mother-may-I" yes for manual deletion. No wonder my cache is full. OK, if that's the way they want it. Fine. I'll just go through and delete them myself.

So, I begin to delete cookies—thousands of them, all about 1 KB in size and running the gamut of topics. Like going over your closet and finding little gems from high school, cleaning out the cookies brings back lots of memories and shows how much the Internet has changed over the last three years of dot-com boom and bust.

So what kinds of cookies have quietly (or parasitically) resided on my disk drive all these years?

There are cookies that never expire. Why anyone would want ads from Business Week to persist until 2037, I can't imagine. Given the fallout in the magazine business, I don't think Business Week will be around in 2037—there may not even be "business" in 2037. But perhaps cookie programmers, especially during the dot-com bubble, are an optimistic lot. "Gee, Frank—do you think 2037 is long enough?" Of course, for Unix systems, 4 gigaseconds is quite enough.

There are cookies that should have expired but never do. Like that jar of apple butter that returns to the fridge after it's been cleaned, many cookies seem to stay in the cache long after their life ends. Cookies must possess remarkable survival skills. Cookies, like red dwarfs, seem to be eternal.

Reading cookies is singularly boring; they're usually just an URL and a hashed identifier. However, they are often hooked up with my machine name, which has changed over time, so I remember what I was doing on particular projects.

 Page 1 of 1