note I’m seeing a bunch of search traffic come in on this one. Solution: Mouse over the video and click the Video title to watch the video on Youtube.

I wonder what the point was for making sure that video player is of a certain size to play the video in this case?

Also, how do you expect your video to get views if you can’t share it?

My guess is that they didn’t want the video to be able to play at a size where ads would be too small to display so they forced a minimum size. Update From the links at the bottom, this is exactly what’s causing it. Turning off advertising for a video will allow it to be played.

I had to figure out what the difference was so I made a quick page to compare them as you can see in this screenshot:

Let’s take a less restrictive channel and see if these work. I give you John Green of the Vlog Brothers

This works just fine. So now the question remains… why can’t you play music videos on Facebook?

Here’s the Vlog Brothers video

Update At least I’m not the only one having these issues. Found a Yahoo Answers question regarding this. The solution was to up the video player size. And here’s a Youtube group posting

It’s been BUSY around here. Whether it’s work or home; there’s always something going on.

We’ve been busy in the yard lately. Not only trying to get the garden going (update on that soon) but also to get some of these plants greened/flowered up so that our house can stay looking less covered in brush.

The tulips grew fast this year and were done and gone a few weeks before their typical Mother’s day viewing.

This plant didn’t look like this last year when we planted it. I’m hoping to start seeing some hummingbirds.

Of course the pets don’t help with this. I snapped both of these within a minute or two of each other. The dog had decided he didn’t want to go outside with me and opted to do this on the couch instead.

Megan and I have also been going to a baby preparation class on Monday nights. Last night was the 3rd of 4 classes and Megan got a little bored. I was obviously totally focused on the discussion.

Baby Dez is due on July 17th and that means we only have 9 more weeks to go until Megan is 40 weeks along (31 weeks today). He’s been making her tired, but she’s been a trooper this whole time. I try to do what I can to help make her day easier, but sometimes even that falls short.

We’re excited for him to get here and hopefully we’re ready for him. But really, who can be fully ready for that big of a shift. I mean, we have pets, but they’re decently independent.

Megan and I are going to try our hand at Square Foot Gardening this year. We did the work of putting up a raised garden bed, and bought the special mixture of dirt needed to make it easy to manage. However, the dog declared war on the compost contained and started digging it out. So we had to build a fence.

Step One:

Watch this video (and take a multitude of mental & physical notes)

Step Two:

Build a fence

Start with your fence posts. See those tarps? Those are bullet proof vests for gardens to protect against fast moving dogs.

Wait out the rain, which was supposed to only be spotty showers during the day, but instead last until mid-afternoon. Once you wait out the rain, plug in your circular saw, swear at it profusely because it doesn’t work, go to Home Depot buy a new one. Once that is done; successfully build a fence panel. Sit back, enjoy a beer, take pictures and tweet it.

Taking your new found talent of building panels, build more. Quit before it gets dark because operating power tools in the dark is better left to vampires and those with night-vision goggles.

After you wake up early the next morning (because you passed out from working so hard the day before) check your local city ordinance for the times when operating power tools in your backyard is legal (in my case 9:00am). Wait until your phone tells you it’s 9:00am and start using without worry.

Finish the remaining panels, but don’t forget to move anything bigger than the gate entry into the garden first (wive’s are good at the reminding part, thanks Megan!).

Add your gate and make sure it actually opens (a lesson I learned when installing a storm door a few weekends ago).

Add mulch to make it look pretty, sit back, tweet, and claim your completeness.

Realize that your fence resembles more a castle wall than a garden fence (after tweeting of course) and take decisive action of cutting the posts down to a manageable level. Hopefully you have a saws-all for this one as the circular saw will just make you sad. Also, take out an annoying tree while you’re at it, for whatever reason it makes you feel better.

Send out another picture to Twitter claiming that you lied the first time and now it’s really done.

Step Three:

Gloat that you successfully built a fence due to instructions you learned by watching a six minute video on the internet, once. You could also just write a blog post about it and post pictures to make all your home-owning friends with dogs and gardens jealous of the fact that your garden is now, in fact, dog proofed.

We’re 9 hours 57 minutes away from the end of the overnight website challenge. I woke up at 5:30 this morning and was here by 6:45. We’ve got a great client and this has been a lot of work by me and Team Pegacorn (That’s Pegasus + Unicorn).

Lots of activities going on today, but since I’ve never had a caricature done of me… ever… and they had comic artists out there I got myself all done up robot style. It was drawn by Kevin Kosmo

So I’m going to try worm composting. However, I’m not willing to just buy some worms, throw them in a bin and throw waste in there as it becomes available. I’ve been doing some research and talking to some people that do worm composting already. But I know some of you, dear readers, probably also do composting or at best worm composting.

Any tips, resources, references that I should use. I’m going to be building my compost center this coming weekend. I have some time to do the research first.

I’ve just started Unit 1 tonight and I’m in the middle of the unit right now, but took a quick break to watch a video of Grace Hopper on Letterman (More on that in a bit).

Back to this Udacity thing. It’s an online unversity that’s being offered at no cost. There aren’t accreditation for taking the courses, but you get to learn from some amazing people. The course I’m taking right now is how to build a search engine. In seven weeks I’ll have learned how to build a search engine from one of the co-founders of Google and some other people.

There isn’t much more to say about it than that, but half-way through the first unit I’ve already learned a TON.

One of the things I learned is that late night talk shows used to have guests who were more than just entertainers. Sure, they still do that sometimes, but nothing like the video below that I was sent to as a side-viewing interest video from Unit 1.

Here’s Retired Rear Admiral Lower Half Grace Hopper on the David Letterman show.

I’m going to get back to the course now, but I thought I’d write up a post quick saying that if the late night shows would do more interviews like this one, I’d probably watch a lot more. Stupid pop culture.

I’m able to write this now that the issue I found is fixed. The Minnesota Department of Revenue used to put your social security number in plain text within a non-http-only cookie and it wasn’t a session cookie.

While this is bad enough that wasn’t the limit of the issue. You could also guess SSN’s and be returned legal names attached to them; within the cookie. This was kind of scary.

I should put a disclaimer out there about this. I wasn’t doing testing in any official capacity, I was paying my tax bill. I had logged into the site from work and hadn’t finished up the task of paying before closing the tab and putting  my laptop into hibernate to go home. Once I got home I opened my laptop again and revisited the site. It auto-logged me in. This scared me since the only login credentials was my social security number.

Being a tester, I went straight to the cookies. I found a govdata cookie that was pipe delineated with my Social Security Number and my full legal name (which I hadn’t yet put into the site). I cleared my cookies immediately. I tried the steps again: Log into the site with my SSN, view govdata cookie. Again my name was shown. So I tried my wife’s SSN. Her full legal name showed up as well.

I stopped there. I didn’t want to type in any other random SSN’s and be returned legal names (power scares me at the right times). I knew how to make a script that would just start from 000-00-0001 and count up until the end and store all that data. I’m assuming that the state is using the social security administration’s API for checking the validity of an SSN. Also, I’m assuming that the same service provides the full legal name attached to that number.

It wouldn’t have been hard. If you entered an invalid SSN you were shown an error. Enter a valid one and you were shown the next step. The poor sap with the example SSN displayed on the page had his number out there for years.

But why am I publishing this now? First off, it’s fixed. I had contacted a number of officials to make sure they knew about this issue and that it should be corrected ASAP (including a tip to take down the site until it was fixed). The MNDoR communications person replied to my email saying that a new system was due to be in place soon and gave me exact dates.

Her response was a bit alarming and totally incorrect, however, it’s likely because she either received a blown-off reply from the development team or didn’t understand the reply from the development team (emphasis is mine)

Thank you for your e-mail.  The Department of Revenue is in the process of transitioning the e-file program you are referencing to a new system.  On January 16, 2012, all business taxpayers will be transitioned to the new system and on January 29, 2012, individuals making estimated payments will transition to our new system.  The new system will never create a cookie.

To which I replied:

Thank you for the prompt reply. That is great news to hear about the move. However your statement about the “new system will never create a cookie” is impossible on a browser. There’s always a cookie involved when handling transactional processes. If the statement should be amended to say that the new system won’t store a cookie with private information in plain text then that is a better solution.

Keep in mind. Cookies aren’t the bad thing, what is stored in cookies can be.

Yes, I should have combined the 2nd and 3rd sentences (realizing that while proofing this post) but she got back to me pretty quickly with a better answer:

Thank you for the follow-up question.  To clarify, we do use a cookie that is a temporary session key.  It is unique and temporary and is used to guarantee that the user logged in is the same user for that session.  It is set to expire at the end of the session and has a time out feature on it as well.

YAY! A session cookie!

I checked on January 29th to see if the new system had gone up, and it hadn’t. I then forgot about this post due to being really busy with my job and checked it today seeing that it was fixed. Now the cookie is a session cookie that is marked as httponly and isn’t storing the ssn hashed within the cookie itself.

While this security issue doesn’t quite hit the OWASP top ten it’s the second time in a few months that I’ve hit an issue that’s only duplicatable within cookie data.

I’m also disappointed that the other people I contacted never got back to me. Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, United States Department of Justice, IRS Security Department, Social Security Administration Security Department. They were all copied on the email I sent to the MNDoR and I never received a response. I did receive canned responses from our two senators though, the canned responses being that they don’t handle state affairs and that I should take it up with the MNDoR and the Attorney General’s Office.

How many of you testers check cookie data obsessively like I do? I use the “Edit This Cookie” Chrome extension to quickly view what cookies are stored for the domain I’m on. I love that extension and suggest it to anyone who wants to know what the website they are on is tracking about them.

Image Credit: Shanta on Flickr

From Boing Boing

This is awesome and totally worth watching for 5 minutes. Lots of explanation on what exactly is going on with the droplets orbiting (note: it’s not because of gravity) so make sure to have your sound on.

The astronaut, Don Pettit, explains that it’s this type of interaction with solar particles and Earth’s magnetic field that gives us our auroras.

This post is to help anyone else that is desperately searching for why their Google Apps for Business Account cannot log in to Chrome Sync.

Steps:

1. Go to the Users & Organization’s Tab and click on services (or go to this link and replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain):

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com/Organization#Organization/subtab=1

2. Find on page (Ctrl+F or Command+F): Sync
3. Turn it on.
4. Save Changes

This took me a LOT of google searching to do because just not a lot of people are having the issue and it apparently is only usually with Apps for free accounts.

I even contacted Google Support and they told me flat out that there wasn’t an option to turn Sync on or off and that it’s likely a user setup issue. Ugg.

It’s because they didn’t realize that people use the back button.

Megan and I bought a Philips Sonicare set tonight at Target after taking back the camera that we bought the other night.

I went to register the product online so that we could extend our warranty by 6 months and get 15% off and free shipping from their website (like was promised on the insert in the box). First off, they didn’t have this model on the website so I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out how to register a product that doesn’t exist as far as the manufacturer is concerned.

Then I stumbled upon a SECOND registration site in the philips domain that not only didn’t need anything more than a “click the picture of your product and enter your personal details” but they kept giving me different codes for 15% off product & free shipping. They must have felt bad for not remembering they made my toothbrushes (they so nice).

So here’s the steps I took (complete with screenshots)

Choose to get 15% off & free shipping

Verify that you don’t want spam

See that you have a code for 15% off product and free shipping

Print the code (because we ALL have printers… i don’t)

Then press back… rinse/wash/repeat. Yeah… i’ve got enough. don’t need that one.

Update: Apparently their mail server is a bit slow… apparently I registered 8 times. Sweet!

We purchased a Canon Powershot ELPH 300 HS last night at Target while it was on clearance. We’re taking it back today.

Why? the pictures are grainy! even at normal viewing size for Facebook the images look grainy. The high burst mode is even worse making 12.1 megapixel pictures looked like pixels exploded. The flash left light artifacts on the pictures in lower light situations.

The video camera was great as long as you didn’t start zooming. As soon as you pressed the zoom in the lighting quality went to shit (even if you hadn’t moved the lens).

The last straw on this camera was that it didn’t charge via USB and had a proprietary battery that needed to be removed from the camera to charge at all, removing the ability to quickly get a camera up for cute moments.

So, Megan and I are looking for a decent point and shoot in the intermediate range (we don’t want a DSLR) so that we have something for when the baby gets here that will produce pictures that could possibly be printed on photo paper for hanging/saving physically.

Any suggestions?

A few months ago, Megan and I splurged on this set of collapsible measuring cups and spoons. We have a small house without a lot of storage space, and our storage drawer for measuring type things in the kitchen didn’t have quite enough vertical space to easily store all of our measuring cups (3 sets).

While continuing to try and save space, I decided today that I wanted another set of these since they are so very nice for the drawer and they clean really easily.

So now we have two sets of space-saving measuring cups.

However, we throw away the little silicone thing that holds the cups together. It looks a lot like a penis and after the jokes get passed around, nobody wants to use it to hold our measuring cups.

There are plenty of examples out there regarding customer service on the social channels that are good. Companies using their own customer service departments to monitor tweets and public Facebook posts or posts to pages that actually get handled. However, this falls apart for many companies that outsource their social networking channels as well as their customer service departments.

Social Network service can be ruined by having a marketing agency handle replying to reviews and postings without a direct tie to the company they are servicing. This leads to complaints falling on people that have no real power to help the customer having issues. I’ve complained about Comcast in the past regarding service issues, but their Twitter team is actually employees in the customer service department. Which means that they can listen and actually help fix issues.

My latest issue was with TMobile’s Twitter team. I had an issue lately with my bill after combining my wife’s and my accounts into one bill and contract. I was switching from unlimited text messaging my own account and 1000 message limits on my wife’s account (which she consistently used under 100). Because of the switch the messages that she and I had sent out since the last bill were thrown into a limbo state that their billing system thought was overage use. I got charged $45.20 + tax for the overage. The bill I got had just come through and wasn’t due to be auto-paid for another 20 days. I called in.

This is where the Service Theater idea comes in with outsourced customer service departments. The poor CS rep that I spoke to couldn’t do anything to help me. She told me that the money would be credited back to my account in the next billing cycle (March). I told her that what she was suggesting was ridiculous and that I would like to speak to a supervisor. She put me on hold for a few minutes to go check to see if a supervisor was available. Once she came back, she told me that all the supervisors were busy helping other customers and that it didn’t really matter since the supervisor wouldn’t be able to help me with anything either.

I don’t fault the CS Rep for any of this. Her hands were tied in regards with what she had permission to do. The calls are so scripted that delving off into uncharted territory leaves the agents unable to handle slightly different from the script. I wouldn’t even be surprised that the “my supervisor wouldn’t be able to help you” comment is on a script for ornery customers (which I was).

The last part of service theater was the twitter team. I’ve complemented Tmobile on their service before, and did so when I switched Megan and I to the same plan because we were saving money. They were very quick to respond on Twitter and always have been. However, when I complained about the bill I got silence. When I complained about the silence, I got silence. When the matter was resolved and I tweeted about it again, I got a reply that they were happy that it was resolved. When I questioned them on the fact they hadn’t replied to any of my complaint tweets I was told that they can’t respond to every one. I’m translating this to: We can’t do anything if you complain anyways, so we just don’t reply.

Luckily this whole thing had a good ending. My account isn’t going to get charged the extra $45.00.

I laughed my way through this:

How to Plan a Wedding without Losing Your Mind (or being an Asshole)

Favorite quotes:

About people helping:

So they’re honored guests, not slaves, right? Got it? Okay.

AND

Be grateful for the help you’re getting, no matter how big or small.

Or, as my father said during his wedding toast, “Don’t be an asshole.”

I’m redoing a menu page for a new menu relaunch for a restaurant’s website that I host. When I created the menu page they had a Pie dessert option which they are now removing. I made myself laugh when I saw the following:

<!– The following line is the saddest line ever –>
<!– End of Pie –>

I made myself giggle.