What are you going to be for Halloween?

Yargh!

There are some people in this world who you can trust with your life, others who you wouldn’t trust with holding your own soft drink in their hands. It’s an unfortunate fact of reality: there are a lot of con-men and con-women out there and it really is in your best interest to avoid them. It’s too bad that even I myself have made that mistake of putting my trust into someone I never should have from the beginning. It cost me a lot of grief, stress, and loss on so many different levels. I almost lost a very good friend because of it. It’s hard to imagine what life could have been like if I would have never even met this person. A lot better I’m sure. I made a bad business decision to extend partnership with someone who thought could be trusted when things should have been left well enough alone as they were beforehand. No Mike, this is not about you! You know who you are.

When it comes to any kind of business relationship, there are three basic rules to follow:

1. Be careful who you get into any type of signed agreement with.
2. If it cannot be seen, felt, heard or proven it cannot be trusted.
3. Always trust your gut instinct with doubt, even if it doesn’t sound like the best idea. Sometimes things are just too good to be true, and the people promising them to you fall short stop of a bad used car salesman.

I know this is a short excerpt but I just wanted to share some brief words of wisdom that I have learned in my struggles for the past year and a half. It’s common sense indeed, but we’ve all fell victim to con artists, scammers and cheaters, and I know I have. A lesson learned. In order to stay ahead and succeed you need to know who is the good, bad, and the ugly. I know I have learned a valuable lesson.

Chrome would crash any time I’d finish typing out a really long comment on a wall, or a wall post anywhere for that matter, and then try to strike the “Comment” button. I could not figure out why the browser crashes when doing this. Finally it happened to me again today, and I noticed a pattern. It only seemed to happen when I clicked off the text editor onto a specific area elsewhere on the page. Basically I was missing the comment button itself, but barely.

Here’s a step by step example of how to reproduce the Facebook Google Chrome crash bug:

1.) Begin by clicking the Comment link on any status you desire (or wall post on a group page, etc)

2.) Type something, or leave the field blank, and attempt to click in any of the “forbidden areas” highlighted in the second image below. Doing so will cause the current Google Chrome browser tab to crash.

So there you have it, a replicatable crash that can be submitted to the Google Chrome team. Please note, I am using the latest stable Chrome version 2.0.172.39 as of this writing. I hope the Facebook team can address this issue. While it may seem minor, accidents happen and sometimes you aren’t always able to strike the “Comment” button 100% of the time and it’s quite a disaster when an entire 40 sentence wall post basically needs to be re-typed. I hope the Facebook team will look into this issue and that this blog has provided useful information to the community.

Best Regards!

Attached is the error received when trying to update anything related to the “Everyone” security group:

Facebook AJAX Error on Everyone Post

Here’s the best part: IT’S BEEN HAPPENING FOR THE PAST WEEK! The only way to get around it is to post it to “Friends of Friends”, “Friends Only”, or “Customize.” Well, that’s stupid, what if I want anyone who can view my public profile to view what I post? Lame!

All I can say is “WOW!” Why?

So after I got them to the office, removed the packaging and all that good stuff, I decide to sync them up with the laptop’s on-board bluetooth adapter. Not thinking much of it, and not properly doing my homework, I found out that Microsoft’s Bluetooth stack doesn’t properly support A2DP. A2DP is the protocol used for distributing Audio (both stereo and mono) over Bluetooth. It’s not new technology or anything, and has been around for years. The main reason it had been gaining popularity was because of devices like the iPod and iPhone which support bluetooth, but have the built in iPod MP3 player support. Users of these devices wanted to have the ability to listen to their music in stereo without having to use the mono ear-piece style bluetooth hearing device. I don’t blame them, those are horrible for CD quality sound. As such, A2DP gained popularity.

Link to A2DP Bluetooth Profile Wikipedia Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A2DP#Advanced_Audio_Distribution_Profile_.28A2DP.29

Alright great, so A2DP. Decent sound quality over Bluetooth. Getting these to work won’t be so bad, right? Well, not until I realized the major flaws with Microsoft’s Bluetooth stack. The headphones would skip and cut out every 8-15 seconds, and sometimes wouldn’t come back for 30 seconds. Not only that, but it drained all the bandwidth allowable for the on-board laptop Bluetooth adapter causing both my MX 5500 BT keyboard, and MX Revolution BT mouse to slow down and chop around as well. It was terrible! I finally found a good article explaining the issue, and I followed most of the directions. All of which still didn’t help the problem. Why? Because Vista doesn’t support Bluetooth A2DP natively!

After trying a handful of solutions from disabling the Microsoft Bluetooth Service, to changing some registry keys, to attempting Broadcom’s own stack, I gave up, downloaded (with the help of my little blue friend) and installed IVT BlueSoleil Bluetooth Stack for Windows Vista (I believe it works for Windows 7 and XP as well).

To me, Microsoft’s Bluetooth stack is a waste of time, and doesn’t compare to IVT BlueSoleil. Maybe they should take some tips? Let’s consider that fact because it was supported natively in Windows 7 betas up until the Release Candidate. I shouldn’t have to pay money to a 3rd party for something you could have easily added natively to your software. OSX 10.5 has A2DP support natively (along with a myriad of other emerging technologies). If Apple would release their OS for PC I would probably buy it. I’m tired of Microsoft and their inability to provide the home user with something worth using. I’m aware it was originally created as a business-friendly platform under the idea that 3rd parties would add the much needed functionality for new stuff down the road, but really, no native A2DP? It’s ridiculous and it’s what is killing them with the end-user community. OSX can do a lot of things natively, but Microsoft can’t. I am not an Apple fan boy either, I’m just making the points clear here. But there’s a whole lot more for another article where this comes from.

I conclude by saying, after installing the 3rd party IVT bluetooth stack, these headphones are awesome for the price! Best part of all: no wires and 10 hour play time! Kudos Motorola for making a very affordable set of Bluetooth stereo headphones!

In either case, the solution is to properly re-write your SQL queries as to not leave a gaping hole if someone decides to pass non-typical form data to the script. The following code is bad:

// username and password sent from signup form
$myusername=$_POST['myusername'];
$mypassword=$_POST['mypassword'];
$sql="SELECT * FROM members WHERE username='$myusername' and password='$mypassword'";
$result=mysql_query($sql);

So I guess it’s another handful of old sites to fix since a bunch of others are using the same code. /sigh/ The correct way this code should have been written:

// username and password sent from signup form
$myusername=mysql_escape_string($_POST['myusername']);
$mypassword=mysql_escape_string($_POST['mypassword']);
$sql="SELECT * FROM members WHERE username='$myusername' and password='$mypassword'";
$result=mysql_query($sql);

Check this link to google.