Peter's Useful Crap

In my search for a standing desk, I found the Ikea Bekant sit/stand desk in the showroom. It looks great, has a large desk surface, and has a motorized up/down mechanism.

Thus, you can move it to the exact height you want whether you’re sitting or standing by simply pressing on a button.

I almost bought the desk until I found multiple reviews complaining about motor failures in the raising / lowering mechanism. While Ikea would presumably replace parts in the event of a problem, I didn’t want to have to disassemble the desk and bring it back to the store.

After much searching, I found and purchased the Skarsta desk, which is essentially the Bekant but with a hand crank to raise or lower the desk. No power or motor required. The Skarsta costs $300 instead of $600 for the Bekant. Ikea does not currently feature the Skarsta in the showroom (presumably in order to push people towards the more expensive Bekant that is a much more impressive demo), and it only comes in white.

The Skarsta is simple and effective. I recommend it if you are looking for an affordable and decent standing desk. The hand crank is quite noisy and takes about 1 minute to adjust the height between sitting and standing, and the desk will wobble a bit while it’s being adjusted. You can be very precise about choosing the final height. I read some concerns about its 110 pound load capacity, although I think that most people don’t place even close to that much weight on their desk. In general I have no real issues with the desk and am quite pleased with it.

I recommend getting a cable tray to attach underneath the desk to keep cables organized, especially for when you are moving the desk between a sitting and standing position. Ikea has a tray called the Signum, which fits well underneath the Skarsta.

Arguably, standing is no better than sitting if you’re remaining in the same position for many hours at a time. So, no matter what desk you have, take breaks away from the desk! You might also wish to buy a tall chair and a floor mat to make your workspace more comfortable.

I was recently troubleshooting a problem where I needed to extract cookie values and IP addresses from Apache access logs. In short, cookies were being shared across sessions instead of being unique to each session. The Apache log entries looked something like this:


216.37.10.126 - [29/Oct/2015:23:59:46 -0400] "GET /user/profile HTTP/1.1" 503 17839 "https://www.site.com/user/login" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.80 Safari/537.36" "SESSID=59n42qa556o2k08ekmbmlhgdg1; othercookie=(direct)" -


Using this command, I could extract the cookie values for SESSID and save them to a file:


grep -ir 'GET \/user\/profile HTTP\/1.1" 503' /web/logs/access_log | sed -r 's/.*SESSID\=(.*)[;|"].*/\1/' > 503_cookies.txt


The sed regular expression wasn’t stopping the match at the semi-colon or quote, however. Instead of using (.*) in the capture for any character, I had to use [^;"] for “not semi-colon or quote” even though the match on the same characters happens outside of the parentheses:


grep -ir 'GET \/user\/profile HTTP\/1.1" 503' /web/logs/access_log | sed -r 's/.*SESSID\=([^;"]*)[;|"].*/\1/' > 503_cookies.txt


Further work was needed to grab the IP addresses for the matches and save them to another file. Here I didn’t need a regular expression, as I could just grab the first column with awk:


grep -ir 'GET \/user\/profile HTTP\/1.1" 503' /web/logs/access_log | awk '{print $1}' > 503_ips.txt


Then I could use the paste command to put the relevant IP address + cookie value entries on the same lines in the report and collapse all duplicate entries:


paste 503_ips.txt 503_cookies.txt | sort | uniq


Each line then looked something like this:


216.37.10.126 59n42qa556o2k08ekmbmlhgdg1


In early 2015, my company decided to trade in our downtown Vancouver office for a new Mugo HQ in downtown New Westminster (30 minutes outside of Vancouver)! Although the main motivation behind the move was to have a more central location relative to Mugonites’ homes, we’ve been very pleased with the surrounding area and amenities.

When we were first surveying available office locations in downtown New Westminster, we met up with David Sarraf, who walked us up and down Columbia Street, speaking glowingly about the city’s revitalization and showing us the many buildings that he owns and has refurbished. When he showed us one of his offices with sweeping river views, we were sold.

We soon met our office neighbours Techno Monkey Media, who gave us a warm welcome to the building, introduced us to a few others in the business community, and helped us with some unexpected internet connectivity issues.

We then got acquainted with the Downtown New Westminster Business Improvement Association, which is a close-knit business community. We’ve learned a lot about the many new businesses that have come to New Westminster recently, and have been kept up-to-date on the various challenges, successes, and developments in the downtown area.

And finally, we got introduced to some of the people from City Hall, who are a responsive and hard-working bunch. Whether the topic is the recently opened New Westminster Pier Park, hosting an event at the Anvil Centre, or the upcoming city-owned fibre optic network BridgeNet, people like Blair Fryer are hard at work improving the city and eager to talk collaboratively with businesses and residents about various initiatives. Blair also has all the good tips about stores and restaurants at River Market and where to get the best turkey sandwich.

To top it all off, after almost 7 years of remote work, we finally met some of the doctors from one of our first clients: Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster. We’ve worked with them on a number of web projects, including the recent emergency department shift evaluation system.

We’ve had a great year in New Westminster and look forward to many more!

There are plenty of places that take passport photos in New Westminster, but finding somewhere to take baby / newborn (that is, less than 6 months old) passport photos is tricky. I visited London Drugs and BCAA in Uptown New Westminster, but neither of them would do it. London Drugs said that the baby needs to be able to hold their own head up. I didn’t try Shoppers Drug Mart, but my guess is that they won’t do it either. I was referred to Walmart, but beware that the one at Royal City Centre does not do passport photos at all.

I had success at the Walmart at Queensborough Landing (Boyd Street). At $25 + tax, it definitely wasn’t cheap. However, the photographer knew what she was doing and was able to get the baby’s attention for the photo even when the baby was crying. Walmart guarantees that the picture will be valid, in that if the passport office rejects the pictures, Walmart will retake them for free.

Before you go, make sure the baby is wearing dark clothing — white clothes on a white background is not allowed. If the baby is wearing a sleeper, make sure it’s one with buttons, because you have to prop the baby up with your hands underneath their clothes without your hands appearing in the picture. And lastly, be prepared to wait at the store in case there are other photo appointments ahead of you. Walmart won’t take appointments for passport photos, since they should technically be very quick once it’s your turn.

Uber, Lyft, Gett, and other ridesharing services can be more attractive than taxis for many reasons: they often cost less, are more convenient to hail a ride, and do not require physically exchanging any money or a credit card.

Uber for Business enables employees to charge normal Uber rides to a single business credit card. This makes it simple for employees because they just need to use Uber as per normal. Administrators get the advantage of consolidated expense reporting, and the only required setup is that the employee is added to the Uber business account. No additional credit cards are required.

For an employee, Uber for Business works just like normal Uber. Using the Uber app, you enter a pick-up location and destination, pick a type of ride (from among all of the usual uberX, uberPOOL, uberXL, and other options) and request a fare estimate:

Before officially requesting the ride, you can select a payment profile for the company, or for yourself:

Then, you can optionally enter some expense notes to describe the trip:

Then, you just wait for the car to arrive!

En route, the app shows you a map of where you are and an estimated time of arrival.

When you’ve arrived at your destination, you can just step out of the car and the ride is automatically charged to the card on file. Since Uber does not offer a tip option in the app, if you want you can tip the driver with cash, although that is not required.

For administrators, there is a web interface where you can do the following:

• Generate a list of trips taken by all company users, and export that list to CSV
• Download monthly PDF statements
• Add and remove employees by e-mail address
• Add and remove credit cards
• Manage settings to limit pick-up locations, and days and times during which employees are allowed to take rides. Or, just allow trips to be taken at any time of day from anywhere.
• Forward ride e-mail receipts to specific administrators

For me, the account setup process was intuitive and straightforward. Once everybody’s accounts were set up, the booking and reporting worked exactly as advertised!