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Goodreads cookie fuckup

Goodreads does not support browsers with deactivated cookies. Even worse: they throw you in an convulsive endless loop of reloads, making at least me SICK.

Background: I turned off cookies in my browser and selectively activate them for sites I really use. Out of a weird idea that came from Marie Wallace, a friend of mine over at IBM.

So in the last week, I turned on cookies for around 50 sites. BUT two of them behaved pretty fucked up. For goodreads, I wasn’t even able to fill in the complaint form, so I blog and tweet it to them, maybe they react.

Here is my message to Goodreads that I couldnt post on their site:

if you have cookies deactivated, your website is a completele broken mind-dizzying endless recursion making me sick. It keeps reloading the page every ~3 seconds, with a popup in between causing ugly-as-hell white/black changes in between.

ARRRRRRGH.

don’t get me wrong here: I am a tech-loving computer geek with a PhD and love your service, but out of a quirk and inspired by a friend over at IBM, I decided to switch of cookies and only selectively activate them again for sites I actually use.

So I have a proper and sane reason to switch off cookies, and I would activate cookies for goodreads as I have done for ~50 other pages I regularly use already.

Technically, what happens is this recursvice bullshit:
http://www.goodreads.com/about/contact_us?auto_login_attempted=true&auto_login_attempted=true&auto_login_attempted=true&auto_login_attempted=true&auto_login_attempted=true

your techies will get this immediately.

BUT it makes me literally sick.

as you may know, repeatedly blinking dark/light patterns is really ugly and causes – at least for me – nausea. Luckily, it is not flashing more than 3 times / sec, which would get you sued by epileptics and get a shitstorm of bad press like here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosensitive_epilepsy

I just may note, that 95% of the other 50 webservices I used in the last week had no problem with my cookie-adversity.

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Yammer VS Chatter: battling it out A/B style

Suppose there is a war, and nobody came to tweet about it. The two enterprise social software vendors Yammer and Chatter are currently at war for market domination, and copycatting their way through it.

If the internet is made for cats, then even more for copycats. There is a war going on between two cats in Enterprise social software. Their promise is “bringing together all of a company’s employees inside a private and secure enterprise social network” according to Yammer. Or to “connect with your coworkers to work together and be more productive” according to Chatter. Anyway, both companies look astonishingly same.

Yammer vs Chatter: battling it out a/b style VS Yammer vs Chatter: battling it out a/b style

Spot the difference? Comment on the group if you can find them.

What makes the battle even better: they quickly try out different designs every day. You never get the same page twice! So, see it as a game:

  • collect them all! (collect images of the landing pages, here)
  • spot the difference! (between yammer and chatter, but also between different views
  • spot the change! (what has happened?)
  • spot the uniqueness! (what is typically yammer/chatter?)
  • guess whats next!

…endless possibilities for spectators…

To play along, collect your images and comments here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/yammerchatter/

Note that Yammer was first and therefore Chatter is proably the copycat. But now, its hard to tell. Here is a great video by Yammer to get you started:
http://youtu.be/MuSLk5FkNrs

Posted on

Please someone create a skype handshake social rite

I hate this:


…skype calling
…connection established

A: hello?
…
A: hello, do you hear me?
——–
B: hello?
…
I can hear you but do you hear me?
———
A: hello?
I can hear you but do you hear me?
——
A: please turn on your microphone!
….
B: please turn off your speakers!
….
etc. etc.
…
A: uh, already 4pm, how fast an hour can go by. I have to close the telco. cya.
B: ah, now it works.
repeat until oblivion….
Aeons of human time are spent establishing a skype connection these days. Probably more time than spent on the toilet.

we need a kind of social poem, , dirty limerick or other ritus which socially works to establish a skype audio telco connection.
something like:

A: knock knock?
B: who’s there?
A: your skype connection!
B: speakers turned off, microphone on, lets go, my prom!

or:
“I once knew a man called Enis,
who couldn’t tell speakers from a …”
(Crusty the Clown’s short Limerick adapted)

but with business people its always tricky to establish proper rites. Any ideas?

Posted on

End of idling

DSC00218Image by Dante Inferno via Flickr

After three years of literally doing nothing, I will stop. This goes as far as it covers IdleRPG, a roleplaying game where your only way to achieve something is to do nothing for a long time.

I was attracted to IdleRPG when I found out that it is one of the much frequented IRC channels on Freenode. Typically, there are more than 50 players online, for years.

So what is the game about? You register a character, give it a name, class, and alignment, and then start playing. Which is – idling. My character is “Bush and his pony”, of class “president and pony”. Once you are online in the chat, the game plays itself. To reach the next level, you have to wait a certain amount of time (something like 10 minutes for the first level). The higher you are, the longer it takes to reach next level. The only thing you have to care for is to stay online for a long time, every time you disconnect you get punished by added time to your “clock” to reach next level.

At my last level, 49, it took about 10 days to reach the next level. Now I have reached level 50 and maxed out: as I am really online to play, I can’t reach 51 realistically, every time I log off I lose about 3.8 hours. Given that I log on/off two times a day, I lose more time than I am online. Thats it! I reached my goal and maxed out. Of course, Gunnar’s quest for semi-goddom in nethack was much more noble.

To go on from this point, I would have to set up a IRC command-line client on my linux box to idle for me, which would be cheating. So I rather say: it was an excellent time of idling, I had a lot of fun, BushAndHisPony maxed out, and Barack Obama is now president. The right moment to send Bush and his Pony into retirement. Greetings to all idlers out there, I am gone!

At the end, I own the following items:

  • helm: 72 [Mattt’s Omniscience Grand Crown]
  • ring: 69 [Juliet’s Glorious Ring of Sparkliness]
  • tunic: 104 [Res0’s Protectorate Plate Mail]

And this is what happened in the last days of playing, the full story here:

[01/28/09 04:23:17] bushAndHisPony stopped using dial-up! This wondrous godsend has accelerated them 0 days, 03:37:34 towards level 50.
[01/28/09 07:38:21] nohar [845/1207] has challenged bushAndHisPony [423/488] in combat and won! 8 days, 01:11:32 is removed from nohar’s clock.
[01/29/09 08:05:22] infe [226/553] has challenged bushAndHisPony [261/488] in combat and lost! 0 days, 14:29:07 is added to infe’s clock.
[01/29/09 21:42:02] simmy [248/660] has challenged bushAndHisPony [434/488] in combat and lost! 0 days, 07:29:34 is added to simmy’s clock.
[01/29/09 23:42:14] bushAndHisPony [34/488] has challenged MegaBunny [103/492] in combat and lost! 0 days, 02:28:31 is added to bushAndHisPony’s clock.
[02/02/09 03:41:54] bushAndHisPony [326/488] has come upon praetorian [116/819] and taken them in combat! 0 days, 03:47:10 is removed from bushAndHisPony’s clock.
[02/02/09 05:46:15] geekboi, FreeBeak, and integral [959/2077] have team battled bushAndHisPony, VxD, and betterworld [1418/2191] and lost! 0 days, 05:39:17 is added to their clocks.
[02/02/09 11:48:39] integral [500/550] has come upon bushAndHisPony [146/488] and taken them in combat! 0 days, 03:20:48 is removed from integral’s clock.
[02/04/09 10:56:55] bushAndHisPony [344/488] has challenged pravus [389/657] in combat and lost! 0 days, 00:31:29 is added to bushAndHisPony’s clock.
[02/09/09 03:10:57] nohar [839/1207] has come upon bushAndHisPony [442/488] and taken them in combat! 1 day, 20:31:33 is removed from nohar’s clock.
[02/11/09 00:16:49] bushAndHisPony [446/488] has challenged barbarian [133/485] in combat and won! 0 days, 03:30:18 is removed from bushAndHisPony’s clock.
[02/16/09 02:01:41] Verily I say unto thee, the Heavens have burst forth, and the blessed hand of God carried bushAndHisPony 0 days, 22:35:43 toward level 50.
[02/16/09 07:31:15] simmy [43/666] has challenged bushAndHisPony [411/488] in combat and lost! 3 days, 11:34:26 is added to simmy’s clock.
[02/19/09 02:24:46] bushAndHisPony is forsaken by his evil god. 0 days, 00:08:32 is added to his clock.
[02/19/09 19:31:44] bushAndHisPony [1/488] has challenged Ol’M00sato [501/728] in combat and lost! 0 days, 22:16:33 is added to bushAndHisPony’s clock.
[02/19/09 20:46:31] bushAndHisPony [3/488] has come upon Shuriq [184/306] and been defeated in combat! 0 days, 20:57:49 is added to bushAndHisPony’s clock.

(and for the joy of it, I zemantified this post)