Updated – December 31, 2008 | 12:00 PM | Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
Currently, Microsoft has not issued a statement on why their Zune music player is crashing. Nor has the company issued a fix to correct the problem.

Has your 30GB Zune stopped working, too?

Just wondering. It’s either a hoax or a serious Microsoft faux-pas. WebGyver is voting for the latter. The Zune online forums are completely slammed and overloaded with requests at the moment.

If you happen to have a Zune 30, check out the following news sources:

Entertainmant Weekly: Zune 30s all freezing up at once. Ack! Aliens!

The reports that all of the world’s 30 GB Zune MP3 players have at once suddenly frozen up seem to be true.

http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2008/12/zune-30s-all-fr.html

DailyTech: Hundreds of 30GB Zune Players Fail Around the Country

Microsoft has yet to comment on what is causing massive numbers of its 30GB Zune to fail virtually simultaneously

http://www.dailytech.com/Hundreds+of+30GB+Zune+Players+Fail+Around+the+Country/article13824c.htm

GIZMODO: 30GB Zunes Failing Everywhere, All At Once

Apparently, around 2:00 AM today, the Zune models either reset, or were already off. Upon when turning on, the thing loads up and… freezes with a full loading bar (as pictured above). I thought my brother was the only one with it, but then it happened to my Zune. Then I checked out the forums and it seems everyone with a 30GB HDD model has had this happen to them…

http://gizmodo.com/5121311/30gb-zunes-failing-everywhere-all-at-once

Zune doesn’t work anymore; Zune 30 stopped working; Zune stopped working; Zune freezes; Y2K9

This may be old news to some of you, but I had totally forgotten about my nifty Dropbox account.

The free account allows me to store 2GB’s worth of files on the web. The Dropbox desktop interface handles all the uploading and synchronizing and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The premise is simple:

Have you ever wished that you could access your files from anywhere? We made Dropbox because we were tired of e-mailing files to ourselves or carrying around a USB key.

Your Dropbox account can be accessed from multiple computers. Obviously, that means that you can have access to your project files at work, at home at a client’s site, etc.

Is it secure? According to the folks at Dropbox, “All files are transported over SSL and encrypted using AES-256 (banks use this too).”

All in all, the dozen or so people at Dropbox have done a great job at providing on-the-go file backup & access. What surprised me was to learn that at least three of the Dropbox team members are MIT drop-outs who thought that starting their own company would be more meaningful than finishing their degree (and at least two of the guys only had a year or less to go).

Sometimes you just want to select the correct option from a drop-down field (aka Select element in an HTML form).

If you have a Preferences or Account Setting page in your web application, or something similar, chances are you sometimes need to display the correct option in an HTML form Select element. For example, if the end-user selected a specific country during the original registration process, you want to make sure that the correct country gets displayed in the Account Settings page, right?

And sometimes, you just have a pre-determined number of options in a select (or drop-down) field. For example, countries, states, regions or products. Not everyone has all of those option values and descriptions (i.e., text) in a database, and so you end up having to select the correct option as soon as the page has loaded.

The solution that I have used in this situation works really well if you get the value (for example, the name of the country) from PHP or ASP and want to plug it into your JavaScript code. We are using getElementById(), so your form elements need to have an ID tag with a value.

Obviously, this also requires a modern web browser that can handle the associated JavaScript. Unless you’re several years behind updating your web browser, however, you should have no problems.

The approach is fairly simple, and the only tricky thing is to remember the proper syntax. Here is an example with PHP and JavaScript:

That’s it.

Perhaps most of you learned readers consider yourselves Internet savvy. When you end up at a web site with way too much content — or if you simply want to fnd something quickly — you look for the Search box, enter your search term, press ENTER and off you go. No worries, and probably 90 percent of the time, no second thoughts either.

Now consider this conundrum: Surrounded by people who think that being able to find stuff on Google should be a manadatory job skill, I was tasked with revising the search feature for a human resouces (HR) related web application.

What’s the big deal? Well, for starters, the typical end user is not too computer literate, aged somewhere between their late 30s and 50s, and eight out of 10 are female HR directors.*

* Before you complain to me and accuse me of being a completely biased male chauvinist, let me make absolutely clear that I, as a person, have nothing negative to say about the demographic sampling I just described. And I am in no way insinuating that everyone who falls into this category is experiencing technical difficulties. However, as several years on the job have taught me and my fellow-workers (the majority of whom are female, by the way), seven out of 10 clients who call in about technical issues a) fall into the category I just described and b) are having “higher than usual” technophobia. That, however, is another story altogether.

Back to the subject at hand: How do you revise a web application’s search function without intimidating the people who pay to use your product? We used to have a straightforward and simple process to search either by first or last name. You enter the name, then you select one of two radio buttons (first or last), and then you click Search.

However, as people progressed in their use of the web application, they also realized that this was limiting their abilities to search for specific employees in other departments or locations.

So in the process of re-designing and re-programming the entire web application, I came up with something relatively Web 2.0 (see screenshot below). The idea was to provide an extended set of search options (first name, last name, department, division and location) into one compact search box.

Those end users who aren’t too familiar with this kind of approach are supposed to click the info icon for more information. And if you’ve changed your mind about doing a search, you can close the search box by clicking the “X” in the upper right. (By the way, simply clicking anywhere outside the search box will hide the search box, too.)

So far so good: It’s a great improvement over the previous version, that’s for sure. Yet as simple as it seems, there is some serius opposition to change within the organization. “What about the Search button?” they ask.

Hmmm, good question. Personally, I think we could easily cram something into the search box, if we wanted to. Then again, we’ve wanted to avoid having too many controls in an already densely populated area of screen real estate.

Other people have even implemented search features that start crunching and returning results as soon as you start typing text into the search field. For example, Peter deHaan at the flexexamples blog uses the “type and wait to search” approach:

Although I’ve gotten used to that kind of funky-ness, I have to admit that it used to creep me out when I first encountered it. Am I doing the same thing to the end users who will be using my web application?

When I started out with this BLOG several years ago, I just wanted to have a place online where I could jot down tips and tricks for various web development issues. So, after banging my head against the wall in disbelief, I would like to dedicate this post to myself and anyone else who’s been getting the “HTTP Request Error” in Flex 3 lately.

The fascination thing (to me) about this error was that I was sending a request to a PHP page on Server A, and everything worked fine. Because I didn’t want to disrupt the web site on Server A too much, I published a mirrored copy of everything on Server B. The same code, however, would result in an error on Server B.

After staring at my code in Flex, comparing identical PHP files and thinking up all kinds of scenarios that could explain what was happening, I copied and pasted the HTTPService’s url parameter into my web browsers . . . and everything looked all right. I even stripped down the PHP code on Server B to the bare minimum: nada!

After consulting with my best online friend (Google), I discovered that other Flex developers had experienced similar boo-boos. In my case, I had omitted the “http://” prefix from the HTTPService’s url parameter for Server B — thanks to a lot of careless copying and pasting. Once I added the full web page URL, everything worked wonderfully.

In case this might help anyone else out there, other causes for the dreaded HTTP Request Error could include:

• Pointing to a web page that doesn’t exist (or is misspelled)
• Accidentally reversing one or more slashes in the URL
• Introducing typos into the HTTPService’s url parameter

For what it’s worth.

No, I’m not being sarcastic. Pencil is the name of a GUI sketching and prototyping tool that runs within Firefox 3 — on virtually all platforms that Firefox 3 supports.

What’s so amazing about this, you ask. For starters, it’s free. And it only weighs in at about 400KB. Once you’ve installed this tool and restarted Firefox, you launch it from the Tools menu in Firefox. Doing so will open Pencil in its own Firefox window.

At first glance, you may or may not be too impressed with the GUI sketching tools that are available. However, as soon as you start working on an actual GUI prototyping project (which Pencil allows you to save as an .EP or .EPZ document), you’ll begin to realize that this tool really is better than drawing with a pen on napkins.

Each GUI prototype goes on a page. You can have multiple pages, and if you right-click the page tab, you can fine-tune the page size, background color and name. Also, if you have multiple pages, right-click on the page tab to navigate from any page to anywhere else. By the way, if you have multiple pages, you can export all of them as PNGs — or you may export only the current page.

Using the available widgets (Windows XP, GTK, Annotation and Common Shapes), you can sketch and prototype graphical user interfaces for typical web and Windows purposes. Working with Pencatively easy, too. When you drag shapes and widgets onto the page, you can click almost any object to resize and position it. Control-click multiple objects and group them. Select multiple objects (such as buttons) and then make them the same height or width with one command.

Additionally, you can rotate shapes and widgets. For example, when I added a table widget to the page, I wanted to separate it into multiple columns. Since Pencil is a sketching tool, and not an actual programming tool, this has to be done visually. So I dragged a horizontal separator onto the page and rotated it 90 degress, until it became a vertical separator. After doing that for multiple columns, I was then able to select and group the separators and the table as one object.

And, of course, you get the typical alignment tools (left, center, right, middle, top and bottom). Fonts and colors can be assigned feely through simple dialog boxes and toolbar controls. If any of this is too complicated for anyone, there are user guides and screencasts available as well.

If you’re interested in more widgets and/or adding to the project, consider the following:

Pencil is built on top of the the concept of stencils which act as the templates for all shapes you can create in a document. Pencil is shipped with a very limited set of out-of-the box stencils. More stencils can be added by creating the definition an install it into Pencil. The Pencil project will create a central directory for stencil authors to share stencil that they made.

All I can say at this point is: Wow! What an amazing piece of work. Credits go to Duong Thanh An, who just so happened to win the Extend Firefox 3 Contest with his contribution.

Are code injection attacks ever going to stop? According to a statement dated June 23, 2008, Adobe has identified a critical vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat 8.1.2.

Is that bad? Again, according to Adobe, “This vulnerability would cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.”

What to do? Adobe recommends users of Acrobat 8 and Adobe Reader install the 8.1.2 Security Update 1 patch. You can download the appropriate Windows and Macintosh update patches (for Acrobat and Acrobat Reader) directly from Adobe’s Security Advisory web site.

By the way, people using Acrobat Reader 7.0 through 7.0.9 should upgrade to Reader 7.1.

If everything goes according to plan, the update should resolve input validation issues in JavaScript methods that could potentially lead to remote code execution. And yes, Adobe admits that reports have been made, claiming this issue has already been exploited in the wild.

Additional articles about this exploit:

WebProNews

Washington Post