Posts Tagged ‘Tip and Trick’

Awesome MediaWiki Bug

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

Poor, lonely <font>. You were irritating to use, and so you were kicked out of the treehouse in favor of stylesheets by HTML 4.01. But cheer up <font>; you can still be extremely annoying! Just try a Wikipedia vanity search, with a few of your pedantic modifiers thrown in for good measure—let’s use <font face=cursive size=50>: wiki_bug_sm

Not only that, <font>, but your old and even more annoying buddy <table> is back in the game, too. And when you two team up,  there’s almost no limit to the amount of carnage you can create:

hi_jeff_sm

This works across browsers, though there are obvious differences in how they render the horribly mangled code these querys will produce. It’s the best lesson in input santization since since Little Bobby Tables.

If you’re good, you can theoretically purpetrate some serious mayhem with this bug—and considering how widely MediaWiki is used around the web, that could be a real problem.

In reality, though, the trickery is probably limited by the abilty of your dirty, dirty inputs to generate search results; without those, it looks like most of your code modifications get cancelled.

That having been said, I endorse using this exploit only for your own personal amusement, not serious destruction. You have been warned.

GMail: Undo Send

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

This is not a joke. The Gmail team has enabled an “Undo Send” feature in Gmail Labs. There’s no black magic or voodoo; it just holds onto your message for five seconds in case you want a panic take-back. After that, the email is gone and un-recallable, just like normal.

I rarely use the Gmail web interface, but I’ve thought about writing a Mail.app plugin to do this for years. I can’t count how many times I’ve tried to scramble into the “Sending…” folder and delete a message before it escapes. I’ve never once pulled it off.

iPhone: Charge while your Mac sleeps

Monday, January 19th, 2009

Here’s a little iPhone trick that made my life easier: you can charge your iPhone while your Mac is asleep.

charging-iphone

You can plug your iPhone into a sleeping Mac and juice up assuming the Mac is plugged in or has a lot of charge remaining on the battery. This is great if you’re traveling and need some extra juice but don’t want to whip out the 15″ laptop.

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