my life

Recently, I learned how broken the dispute resolution process is with Bank of America. I asked them to send me the receipts for 5 recent charges from the same Mexican Food place across the street from me. I love Mexican food, but there’s no way I could have eaten 5 meals in a row from this place (esp when I wasn’t even working from home that week), so something was awry.

Herein lies the rub. If they send me the receipts (which include signatures), I can no longer dispute the charges because now I’m in possession of the sales receipts. Even if the signatures on the receipts clearly show an invalid signature, I have forgone the ability to issue a charge back. I asked the customer support if they could visually verify that the 5 signatures closely matched all my other signatures, but that was impossible. They didn’t have the ability to view the receipts.

I find this totally absurd. Granted, using a signature as a form authorization is incredibly fallible, the fact that it’s not even relevant when disputing a charge, raises the question why do we even need to sign the receipt at all? The back of my credit card is not signed, so that means that they would have been required to view a valid form of identification, which obviously wasn’t the case and is rarely ever the case. I suppose it’s all a moot point. BofA reversed the charges regardless, which was nice of them. I would have just preferred a more thorough process.

More information about the new canonical link tags can be found http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/12/fighting-duplication-adding-more-arrows-to-your-quiver/

Sorry to say it, but X.org eye candy is about to eclipse Mac OSX. Check out this video to see what I mean:

To get this for yourself on Debian, these are the steps I had to take.

1. apt-get install libcairo2 librsvg2-2 libglitz1 libglitz-glx1 compiz compiz-fusion-plugins-extra compiz-fusion-plugins-main compiz-gnome compiz-plugins
2. Modify your X.org conf in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
3. Add the following to the “Device” section:
   
   Option “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true” Option “XAANoOffscreenPixmaps” “true”  #NVidia cards only
   
   Add the following to the “Screen” section:
   
   Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “true”  # NVidia cards only
   
   Add the new section:
   
   Section “Extensions” Option  “Composite”      “Enable” EndSection
4. Enable all the cool features of compiz:
   
   gconftool --set /apps/compiz/general/allscreens/options/active_plugin --type list --list-type string ‘[gconf,png,svg,decoration,wobbly,fade,minimize,cube,rotate,zoom,scale,move,place,switcher,screenshot,resize]‘
5. echo “export WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/bin/compiz” >> ~/.gnomerc
6. Restart Xorg

If you’re having problems, you can try to download:

And run compiz-check to see if there are any issues with your setup/hardware.

To get the features of OSX’s Docker, you’re going to want to install Cairo-Docker. Cairo-Docker is actually even MORE incredible than the traditional Docker, allowing for plugins and customization to the Nth degree.

1. Download Cairo at:
   https://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=8724
2. Download the dock package that looks like: cairo-dock_v1.6.3.1_i686.deb
3. Download the plugins package that looks like: cairo-dock-plug-ins_v1.6.3.1_i686.deb
4. dpkg -i package.deb
5. Simply run: cairo-dock

VMWare can be a real bore to upgrade when there are major kernel updates. Very often, the supplied modules with VMWare will not compile.

For example, I got this today:

The solution is always to use the non-standard installer available at:
http://groups.google.com/group/vmkernelnewbies/files?pli=1

Download the latest vmware-any-any-update tarball, decompress it, and run the included runme.pl script inside. It works just like the vmware-install.pl script distributed with VMWare, but this version includes patches to make everything run without a hitch.

The memcache protocol requires that all lines in the server response end with CRLN (\r\n). The Starling server doesn’t strictly obey this for the STATS command. The fix is trivial and the author has been notified of the fix.

Edit lib/starling/handler.rb and add the following gsub right before .freeze in the STATS_RESPONSE:

Recently, I was getting the error

In my particular case, the problem stemmed from defining a deserialization function using

In the process of deserializing an object, it tried to instantiate a class which hadn’t yet been loaded. The autoloader wasn’t able to find the class and the spl autoload functionality therefore croaked.

The problem was that I had defined a property inside of one my model objects that referenced the sfWebRequest. This property should never have been serialized. Infact, only the properties of the object as defined in model should get serialized. The fix was defined a __sleep method in the model.

Replace MySampleObjectPeer with the appropriate peer class.

The following Nginx configuration technique will allow you to do rewrites to status codes.