I usually get terrible customer service. Especially when I buy products from companies that I’ve worked at for 5+ years. Stupid Apple.

But lately we’ve had a couple really great customer service experiences. First, we broke our Wii playing too much Super Smash Brothers. Apparently, the GPU overheats(?) when you play too much, or when you play too much over wifi, or something. This caused our Wii to always show flickering black vertical lines. I called up Nintendo on a Sunday, explained the problem, and after 18.5 minutes on the phone, they said I would have to send it in for repair. They emailed me a FedEx ship label, which I printed out. I sent the Wii in on a Tuesday, and a fixed one arrived today, just three days later!

Even better was our experience with Philips. The charger to our awesome Sonicare toothbrush stopped working. Jess called up Philips, spent a couple minutes on the phone, and about a week later, an entire new toothbrush and charger arrived. YAY!

Filed under: support | 0 Comments
Tagged: sonicare , wii

I decided to check out The Soul of a New Machine after reading this account of working at Atari and writing the Donkey Kong cart for the 2600 (if you are an Atari or DK fan, read this).

Anyway, the wiki page for The Soul of a New Machine talks about the Mushroom Theory of Management:

Tom West practices the “Mushroom Theory of Management” - “keeping them in the dark and feeding them shit.” That is, isolating the design team from outside influences and instead using the fear of the unknown to motivate the team.

I’ve encountered this a lot over the years, most notably at Apple, where Mushroom Management was one of my manager’s only motivational techniques.

CC by-nc-sa licensed photo by 23bit_grrrl

See also: Mikee’s awesome mushroom pictures

Filed under: support | 0 Comments
Tagged: assembly , Atari , Donkey Kong , Mushroom Theory of Management , video games

Sydney

Attribution cc photo by failquail orig set pool

Brisbane

Adelaide

Perth

London

By-NC photo by lawl orig

by-nc-sa photo by nic0 orig set

by-na-sa photo by gilberts orig set

Amsterdam

Manchester

Edinburgh

by-sa photos by strevo orig set

by-sa photos by strevo orig set moar

Dublin

Belfast

Brussels

Oslo

Attribution CC photo by say it with flowers orig

Boston

by-nc-sa photo by steve orig

Houston

Austin

Minneapolis

Milwaukee

St. Louis

Portland

By-SA photo by Hardlinejoe orig

San Francisco

LA:

By-nc-sa photo by Sean orig set

KC

San Diego

DC

Montreal

NYC

Santa Barbara

Detroit

Denver

Filed under: support | 0 Comments
Tagged: chanology

I recently got this for some friends of mine who are about to become parents, but I pretty much think it could be useful to all sorts of people….like

• roommates (whose turn is it to scrub the toilet? spin the wheel!)
• siblings (whose turn is it to organize mom’s birthday party? spin the wheel!)
• coworkers (who gets to have the nice desk by the window? spin the wheel!)

Of course there are much more mature and logical ways of going about everyday decision-making, but the one thing this solution has going for it is that you can’t really hold a grudge against or argue with chance…and it’s probably a whole lot faster. (in the absence of a wheel, a game of heads or tails also works quite well)

Filed under: support | 1 Comment
Tagged: parenting

The greatest thing about Leopard is that you can configure your Mac laptop to backup wirelessly and transparently using Time Machine. You can wander around the world editing files, and your laptop will automatically back them up when you come home and connect to your wireless router, without you having to do anything.

You will need a second Mac or Linux box to host the remote backup. This takes five to ten minutes to set up and configure.

First, configure your remote backup machine. These instructions assume that you are using a Mac for this.

• Configure your remote backup machine with a static IP address
  
  • Your backup machine must be connected to the same wireless router that your laptop will connect to when you are home
  • My wireless router is set to assign IP addresses starting with 192.168.1.100, so I assigned my remote mac to use 192.168.1.23
  • To assign an IP address manually while still using DHCP to get other network settings from your wireless router, go to System Preferences -> Network -> Airport -> Advanced -> TCP/IP and choose “Using DHCP with manual address”
    
• Configure AFP File Sharing under System Preferences -> Sharing
  
  • Select the “File Sharing” checkbox. You should see a message that says “Others can access your computer at afp://192.168.1.23″, or something similar.
  • Click the “+” button under “Shared Folders:”, and add the hard drive you want to store the backups to the list
  • Click the “+” button under “Users:”. Create a user called “backup”. Give this user Read & Write permissions to the backup hard drive
    

Now, configure your laptop

• Mount the remote backup hard drive
  
  • In the Finder, choose “Connect to Server…” under the Go menu
  • Type afp://192.168.1.23 in for the server address
  • When asked, log in using user “backup” and type in the password. Be sure to click “Remember password in my Keychain”
    
• Now, Configure Time Machine
  
  • Choose System Preferences -> Time Machine
  • Click “Choose Backup Disk”
  • Choose the remote backup disk that you mounted using AFP
    

That’s it! The first time Time Machine backs up, it will be really slow. Just let it run overnight. All the following hourly backups will be very fast.

If you use your laptop in the standard, Apple-approved manner, then you can configure Time Machine to only backup your Users directory, which will save space and time. Let me know if you need more help!

Filed under: osx, support | 2 Comments
Tagged: backup , howto , Leopard , TimeMachine

Our newly-purchased Miele dishwasher was DOA. We had to call the service department, who sent out someone to repair it the same day. When we called, they had us put the dishwasher into service mode, which will tell you which error (”technical fault”) is causing your dishwasher to fail.

These instructions are for a G2140* model Miele Dishwasher

• turn off dishwasher
• hold start
• turn on dishwasher with start button still pressed
• release start button
• press start button 3 times, quickly, holding it in the last time, until the Start/Stop light flashes (no other lights should be flashing)
• Start/Stop should flash for four seconds
• press program button.
• This should cause the rinse LED to flash in a series of long and short blinks. Count the long blinks. Those are the tens digit of the fault. The short blink are the ones digit. For example, ours flashed one long blink and four short blinks, which meant we had a F14 fault.
• You’ll have to figure out what the faults mean. We only know that F14 means “Water intake fault with heater or circulation pump”, or something like that. Our circulation pump was clogged.
• Now, to delete the fault, press and hold the start/stop button for five seconds.

Filed under: support | 1 Comment
Tagged: debugging , dishwasher , howto , Miele , ServiceMode

We finally got a dishwasher! It took some time and work to get it installed, but fortunately we had a lot of help! A couple weeks ago Ken helped remove the old cabinet and Steve wired a new electric outlet. This weekend Paul helped do all the plumbing and install the new cabinet + dishwasher. But when we finally hooked everything up Sunday evening and tried to test it out, the dishwasher flashed a ‘technical fault’ error code. Blah!

Paul called Miele this morning at about 8:45. They did some tests over the phone and said they would have to send a technician out to look at it. After lunch, I got a call Miele saying that they could send someone by in and hour. At 2pm or so, a Miele technician named Glenn shows up, hooks up some debugging equipment, carefully pulls out the dishwasher, unclogs the circulation pump, puts it back together, and it works! Elapsed time from frustrated customer support call to happy customer: about 6 hours! Yay! I think I got lucky because someone had canceled their appointment so they fit me in right way, but still.. yay! So much better than dealing with AppleCare or Blue DoubleCross.

To top it off, Glenn explained a lot about how the Miele worked (I had no idea), and tweeked the software to increase the fill level and water temperature so we can run it on economy mode and still get super-clean dishes. This is like taking your computer to a Linux hacker who hooks you up with a custom distro to get more reliable network connections. Or like taking your car to a gearhead who reprograms the ECU to give you an extra 50HP. Our dishwasher now runs GlennOS. Awesome.

If you care, the clogged circulation pump (error code F14) was suspected to be caused by water drying in the the machine after testing at the factory in Germany. Apparently German water is very hard, and it hadn’t drained completely before shipping (it arrived at our house still full of water), so it left residue in the circ pump.

Here is Zara inspecting the dishwasher (the cabinet work is not done yet):

Here is Paul, who did a weekend’s worth of install work, and the inside of the dishwasher:

This dishwasher connects to the cold water supply, and heats the water depending on what the selected cycle requires. Connecting to the cold instead of hot water supply adds an extra 10-15 minutes to the roughly 2 hour normal cycle, but increases efficiency.

To add a second line to our cold water supply, we replaced the shut-off valve under the sink with a dual 1/2″ to 2 x 3/8″ shut-off valve made by BrassCraft:

If you have 1/2″ unthreaded copper pipe coming into your house, and you need to attach a 1/2″ threaded fitting, you need one of these 5/8″ compression to 1/2″ pipe thread unions. The 5/8″ fits over the unthreaded 1/2″ copper with a compression fitting, and then you can just screw the shut-off valve onto the other side of the union. The fine folk at Cole Hardware helped us find this elusive adapter, shown here covered in teflon tape.

We hope the dish robot likes its new home in our kitchen! Thanks to Ken, Steve, and Paul from helping get it installed, and thanks to Glenn for Miele for making it work!

Filed under: gadgets, support | 2 Comments
Tagged: dishwasher , how to install a dishwasher , howto , Miele , recommended , shag

It seems like half the net just got knocked out by six back-to-back power outages in downtown San Francisco. A bunch of great sites went down: archive.org, craigslist, LJ, yelp. Did Slide go down, too?

A bunch of our racks are still powered down…

Filed under: archive, support | 10 Comments

This morning a utility pole on our street caught on fire, and then it cracked in two. The fire department came and hosed down the pole after first turning off the power. The top part of the pole was just left dangling from the power lines until PG&E showed up about eight hours later and lashed the two parts together.

We have underground electric at our house, so we didn’t lose power when they cut power to the overhead lines. But when PG&E switched to underground power, they left these live power lines dangling in front of our window, which is a bit scary.

Filed under: san francisco, support | 0 Comments
Tagged: bernal

travel.metafilter.com has gone live. It’s still new, but soon I’m sure it will be filled with smart answers to questions about traveling to weird places!

Filed under: excursions, support | 0 Comments

SourceForge is great for project hosting, but let’s face it.. their bug tracker is slow, clunky, and barely usable. Same for the SF.net support forums. Today I found LaunchPad. It’s a project by Canonical, the people behind Ubuntu.

LaunchPad has a bug tracker, support forums, project planning, and a translation wiki for your open source project, all free.

They also do code hosting, but they also let you link your LaunchPad project to your SourceForge project. Hooray open source collaboration! LaunchPad code hosting requires that you use Bazaar, but offers svn/cvs import.

Filed under: support | 0 Comments
Tagged: opensource

From a postcard addressed to RESIDENT:

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directorys & Nathaniel P. Ford, Sr., Executive Director/CEO invite you to join the Community Celebration:

Saturday, April 14, 2007
10:00am-4:00pm
(Official program begins at 11:00am)
K.C. Jones Park
5701 Third Street, San Francisco
Carroll Avenue Station
(Note: The Thunderbird will run every 20 minutes)

Special Guests:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi
U.S. House of Representatives
Mayor Gavin Newsom
City and County of San Francisco

Woohoo!! Nancy Pelosi … I’m going to check this out.

Link to Thunderbird on SFMTA
Link to Nancy Pelosi on Wikipedia

Filed under: san francisco, support, upcoming | 0 Comments

I keep giving the same advice to people who ask me about RSI, so I’m writing up some ideas here. Remember, I’m not a doctor, and this is not medical advice.

• If you are in serious pain, stop typing. Really. Completely stop using a computer, at least for a while. See a medical professional and talk to your friends who are going through the same thing. Here are some things your doctor might recommend if you are diagnosed wtih tendonitis:
  
  • Ice packs to reduce swelling of your tendons. Bags of frozen peas work. Use a towel so they aren’t too cold. Do not exceed ten minutes. Do *not* type while your arms are cold. Use as needed.
  • Wrist guards, the kind that peliom recommends. Wear them while typing. Wear them while sleeping. Yes, really. It helps a lot.
  • Ibuprofen also reduces swelling. Use as prescribed.
  • Tendon stretches and exercises, several times a day.
  • Lots of breaks, early and often.
  • Squeezy stress ball.
  • Stop typing.
    
• OK, so you decided to ignore my advice and keep using a computer. No one ever stops. At least set up your computer to be as ergonomic as possible, and reduce use.
  
  • STOP WEB BROWSING. Also stop non-work related emails. Most people I know keep hurting their wrists doing stupid shit like surfing the web several hours a day. If you must surf, do it on a blackberry, sidekick, or a tablet pc.
  • Stop using your laptop keyboard and trackbad. Don’t use a laptop at the coffee shop, on the couch, or in bed. Use an external keyboard and pointing device.
  • You need to work at a properly adjusted desk with a properly adjusted chair. You want someone who knows what they are doing to make some measurements so that your workstation fits your body. Actually, you want at least three people to make the same measurements, because at least one of them will give you bad advice.
  • You will most likely need a keyboard tray, but really this depends a lot on your body proportions. A fully adjustable one will cost at least $200. We’ve been using the $220 one from Anthro.
  • You will most likely have to raise your monitor up to be at eye level.
  • You will most likely have to rip the armrests off your chair. Armrests are horrible if you have RSI. Same goes for wristrests. Your arms and wrists should float.
  • Learn how to roll up on your sit bones, so your back and neck are held straight without effort. Learning how to sit correctly helps a lot. You shouldn’t be slouching, but you don’t need to use muscle to correct bad posture. You shouldn’t be leaning on the back of the chair while you type.
    
• General keyboard advice:
  
  • Do *not* use a laptop keyboard. A laptop is not ergonomic. Here is a test: Try using an external keyboard on a well-adjusted keyboard tray. Did your wrists hurt less than when using the laptop? If so, your laptop keyboard is hurting you. Stop using it.
  • Ergonomic split keyboards are good.
  • Zero force multitouch keyboards like the TouchStream are great, but no longer on the market. They use gestures to reduce pinky-reaches and other kinds of hand stretching, which is a huge win. They cost a lot on eBay.
    
• General pointing device advice:
  
  • Stop using your laptop touchpad. At the very least, carry a bluetooth mouse with you.
  • Move your mouse to the to other side. If most your RSI is in your right hand, and you mouse with your right hand, move the mouse to the left side.
  • Try replacing the mouse with a trackball or a vertical mouse.
  • Replace the mouse with a Wacom tablet. Holding a stylus or pen is much more ergonomic than a mouse.
  • Try keeping a Wacom tablet on one side and a mouse on the other. Lots of different input methods = good.
    
• General handwriting recognition advice
  
  • It helps supplement typing.
  • It’s hard to write code using handwriting reconition, but not so hard to write emails.
  • Easy to get started: built into OS X and tablet PCs. Wacom 4×5 tables are $80 or less.
    
• General voice recognition advice
  
  • Not for programmers
  • It moves RSI from your wrists to your throat.
  • It is hard to problem-solve and speak at the same time.
  • Give it a try if everything else fails.
    
• Update: Advice on choosing a keyboard
  
  • Overuse of your pinky fingers can aggravate your RSI. Keyboards such as the Kinesis Contoured move modifier keys to your thumbs, which helps reduce pinky usage.
  • Gesture keyboards like the Touchstream are even better at reducing pinky reaches, but difficult to find and have a longer learning curve.
    
    • Backspace, Delete, Enter, Space relocated to thumb keys.
    • Modifier Key gestures for Shift, Command, Control, Option/Alt.
    • Editing and Navigation gestures reduce stretching your hand to hit modifier+letter combos.
    • Programmers’ keypad (simlar to numlock keypad) reduces pinky reaches for symbols.
      
  • At the very least, re-map your primary modifier key to be a thumb modifier, instead of a pinky modifier. The command key on a standard macintosh keyboard is a thumb modifier; the control key on a standard pc keyboard is a pinky modifier. Pinky reaches = bad for RSI.
    

OK, who has more advice?

Filed under: medicine, support | 3 Comments
Tagged: multitouch

when a double espresso will do the trick. According to this study at the University of Georgia, caffeine cuts post-workout pain by nearly 50 percent. Also…

…a 2003 study led by UGA professor Patrick O’Connor found that caffeine reduces thigh pain during moderate-intensity cycling. O’Connor, who along with professors Kevin McCully and the late Gary Dudley co-authored the current study, explained that caffeine likely works by blocking the body’s receptors for adenosine, a chemical released in response to inflammation.

The recent study was only conducted on women so they’re not sure if it works on men just yet and apparently it doesn’t quite work on people who already consume lots of caffeine on a regular basis since they’ve likely developed decreased sensitivity to its effects. Still, I’m going to make sure I have a latte before hitting the slopes this winter! (although I’m still going to keep the vicodin in my pocket)

(via collision detection)

Filed under: medicine, support | 2 Comments

Do you hate dialing customer support with some terrible pressing problem only to get strung along by endless automated voice prompts? Here’s a great database of numbers for 500 companies (give or take a few) with instructions on how to get directly to a live human when calling for support.

The gethuman project is a consumer movement to improve the quality of phone support in the US. This free website is run by volunteers and is powered by over one million consumers who demand high quality phone support from the companies that they use.

A tip that I’ve been given to get the best support from a cell phone carrier (but haven’t tried yet) is to call and request cancellation (rather than tech support). You’ll get sent to a “retention” specialist who is trained to do whatever he or she can to keep you as a customer, so your problem will get routed to the right person a lot faster.

Filed under: lifehacking, support | 1 Comment

Make apple crisp of course. Tom Dickson demonstrates much better on his ipod below (though i think he’s blending up a smoothie).

I tried this recipe today and it was good, but the “crisp” was not as crispy as I would have liked. Anyone got tips on how to make the “crisp” part extra-crispy???

Filed under: doodles, support, tronix | 3 Comments

This is the last post I’m going to write about my MacBook Pro. I had a bad hard drive, and I still don’t have a working machine after several months. In fact, I don’t have a machine at all. It is at AppleCare, and has been there since 12/19. The repair status is ‘on hold’, and I have called 3 times and spend several house on the phone to get the hold removed. It is still ‘on hold’, despite many promises to the contrary.

Filed under: sucky companies, support | 1 Comment
Tagged: applecare , flowchart

DHL “released” my macbook pro box back to me today after I called and hassled them about it. Just another note in the Apple Support Saga: According to DHL, Apple’s Contract with DHL does now allow the customer (me) to sign for and pick up the laptop box from DHL dispatch if there is a missed delivery attempt. Apparently they feel this reduces theft somehow. Anyway, to avoid this annoyance, make sure Apple Support sends “The Box” to your workplace, or be prepared to stand outside your door all day waiting for the DHL guy.

So now I get to go through Apple Setup again and create my user account and go to System Preferences and change “key repeat rate” to “Fast” and change “delay until repeat” to “short” and pull out all the crap that’s in the dock and put terminal in the dock and I think you get the idea. I have to set up my mac again. Every time. I’ve done this around 40 times in 2006 alone.

Apple Setup has an option to transfer data from you old mac, but it’s pretty specific to transferring your home directory from a previous machine. There is no option to “restore you laptop to the way it was before the hard drive crapped out”.

And wouldn’t it be nice if it was simple as copying my home directory? But no, many applications install stuff into the “/Library” folder and so on, kernel extensions, registration keys. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, the music that I purchased from the iTunes Music Store will no longer work on my macbook pro even though it is exactly the same machine with a new hard drive. Everywhere in the iTMS documentation it says you can “authorize up to 5 computers” … but really what is implemented is you can have up 5 different installations of Mac OS X authorized to play your songs at any given time. If you lose access to those installations for whatever reason you are screwed and/or have to deal with Apple Support to reset some counters. I am really curious how Apple Support handles this iTMS authorization issue but I haven’t had the energy to make the phone calls yet.

I was hoping the boot-disk-RAID-mirror would solve the problem of backup but in the end it didn’t work out due to complexity, poor documentation of Apple RAID Mirroring, and just plain not understanding what happens when there is a conflict between two mirrored disks. In one of my tests, the file with a conflict just ended up with some bogus data in it … I didn’t feel like it was worth my time to analyze what does and does not work with Apple RAID when the mirrored pairs are disconnected, modified differently, and then reconnected. There is no point to making a backup if you are unsure whether it’s even going to work.

This is a long way of saying I would love to hear about a way to back up your mac in a way that minimizes all these problems.

Filed under: all talk, osx, support | 14 Comments

My head spins when I read what peliom has to say about AppleCare:

It’s very frustrating but still, I would *much* rather be dealing with Apple Support than Dell or HP.

As I write this, my MacBook Pro is in a DHL box, on it’s way to Apple’s repair facility for the third time. I’ve had five different problems with this machine (very early MBP, serial number starts with 860) and come to realize that AppleCare is fundementally broken. When they encounter a hardware problem, they do two things:

1. They try to convince you that your hardware problem is really a software problem.
2. When that fails and they actually accept your machine for repair, they try to make it boot and then stop trying to fix your machine.

The first time I sent my MacBook Pro in for repair, I had a bad hard drive that was quite obviously bad. I explained, in great detail, what was wrong, and after the usual AppleCare run-around they finally sent me ‘the box’, and I sent it in. They sent it back with same hard drive installed, the machine was still crashing in the exact same way, but the machine booted, and that’s what’s important. If they can get the OS to boot, then they can tell you that you have a software problem.

So I have this machine that has been to Apple for a new HD, and come back with the same 100GB HD that has only 30GB total free space after reformat, and the console is filling up with read errors. I called AppleCare again, and got connected to a ’specialist’, who attempted to convince me that this was a software problem:

him: OK, your machine is booted? Now in the Application menu…
me (wondering what app has an Application menu): Um, which app..
him: …choose the Utilities menu
me: ..um.. wait…
him: … now select Disk Utility
me: Oh, you mean the Utilities folder…
him: Yeah, also known as the Utilities MENU.
him: So does the S.M.A.R.T. Status say Verified?
me: Let me explain what’s going on.. I sent this machine in for a new HD, and it came back with the same HD. After a format-and-install, the HD has only 30GB total space. It also read errors when trying to access a lot of the system files.
him: Well, I don’t know how you found those read errors. I’m going to ask you to run Verify Disk Permissions..

To the engineer who put ‘Verify Disk Permissions’ into Disk Utility, congratulations. You’ve probably saved Apple hundreds of thousands of dollars in repair costs. AppleCare thanks you for giving them an easy way to hang up on customers suffering from hard drive problems.

My friend Shag only buys laptops from companies that sell on-site support. Watching him interact with Toshiba support is eye-opening. When he has a problem, he calls them up, and the next day they send a repair guy to whereever shag happens to be. And they come with the part they need to fix the laptop. And they don’t try to talk him out of the repair by blaming it on some bogus disk permission voodoo. I am through with trying to deal with AppleCare, and I doubt my next laptop purchase will be a mac.

Filed under: sucky companies, support | 3 Comments

Does your YouTube have no audio? Does the console on your MacBook Pro display this spew?

Some app set your output sample rate too high.. fix is here.

Filed under: support | 1 Comment

As someone who is frequently accused of having her head in the clouds, it makes me happy just to know that something like “The Cloud Appreciation Society” even exists. Could they have existed before the internet?? I dunno, but I certainly wouldn’t have found them. Anyways, they’ve got what looks to be a fabulous book out called The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds and a photo gallery of interesting cloud formations submitted by their members. (Kevin Kelly has a great write-up of the book over here.)

Everybody loves stars, but clouds always get a bad rap, so here’s their manifesto

• WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.
• We think that they are Nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them.
• We pledge to fight “blue-sky thinking” wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.
• We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of a person’s countenance.
• Clouds are so commonplace that their beauty is often overlooked. They are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul. Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save on psychoanalysis bills.

Here’s to cloudy days!!

Filed under: support, why are we here? | 1 Comment

Do you hate wrapping presents? Well with the holidays just around the corner, the Onion’s got your back with these fabulous gift boxes. They’ll be available the last week of November, but you can pre-order yours today.

Filed under: support | 4 Comments

Google just launched a neat service called Google Co-op that lets you create a customized search engine for a single (or a couple sites) so I created one for TikiRobot and put it in our sidebar (it’s all the way at the bottom). There are some other revenue sharing and customization aspects associated with the service that I haven’t really explored yet, but there’s more info here. In the meantime, you can now find that long-lost-post that you’re pretty sure you saw on this site, but don’t remember what we tagged it (cause even i don’t remember what I tag things).

Filed under: meta, support | 9 Comments
Tagged: neat

Here is an interesting MeFi thread about Cross Site Request Forgery. It was taking a while for my brain to grok the attack until I came to this comment, in which poster embedded an image that pointed to a GET Web API instead of actually linking to a jpeg (CSRF link since removed). Everyone who read that comment while logged in had that comment marked as a favorite, since their browser happily called the GET url and passed their login information via cookie.

My first thought was that this would be an easy attack to avoid, but it’s crazy scary, unless maybe your web app doesn’t use cookies. Just switching to POST isn’t good enough.

Filed under: support | 1 Comment

I’m thinking about staying up all night once per week, trying to learn about what physiological effects that might have. I’m proposing this as an alternative to building up sleep debt by getting 5-6 hours of sleep a night. I haven’t really found any conclusive information, but here are some interesting tidbits on sleep:

• The function of sleep has not been fully determined
• The Army is researching modafinil as a way of keeping soldiers awake 80 out of 88 hours, two 40 hour shifts seperated by 8 hours sleep
• Microsleep is defined as brief (several seconds) runs of theta or delta activities that break through the otherwise beta or alpha EEG of waking. This is what happens when you fall asleep at the wheel, etc
• All-Nighters are a bit of a macho thing among some business travelers (pdf, bugmenot )

For my own purposes … there is a lot of stuff I want to get done, mostly software. Late at night is quiet and free of interruptions. I’m wondering if getting on this schedule would make me more or less productive overall. Also will exercise help? How long would I be able to stay on the schedule?

Filed under: all talk, support, tiki lifestyle, tronix | 2 Comments