Log in to Facebook to personalize your experience with this social plugin

I was unable to click on any FaceBook [Like] button until I enabled 3rd party cookies in FireFox.

With 3rd party cookie disabled, a FaceBook login pop-up window appeared each time asking to "Log in to Facebook to personalize your experience with this social plugin". Entering login/password wouldn't help. The pop-up appeared again and again.

(Tested on iframe version of FaceBook plugin, but I think that JavaScript version needs cookie, too...)

Simply Accounting cannot connect to database / files read-only / connection timeout

Version:
SAGE Simply Accounting 2010 B

Symptoms:
"Simply" starts, opens the company selection dialog. After a company is selected, it displays an error message, which could be about "read-only" files or about "connection timeout" or "cannot connect to database".

Clarification about the error messages:
Their content changes depending on the stage of your "fight" with Windows and Simply.

What help did I get from Simply (program's "Help" and online Knowledge Base):
Simply says that the problem lies in .NET Framework (version 2! - KB looks very outdated)

Steps that were pretty useless:

• Reinstalling .NET 3.5
• Installing .NET 1.1
• Attempt to install .NET 2 (does not work on Vista)
• Reinstalling .NET 3.0 (tricky: has to be done via "OS Features" in Control Panel / Programs and Features)
• Removing old versions of Simply
• Attempt to install Simply over existing installation
• Playing with read-only attributes of files and permissions

What helped:

• Uninstall Simply completely
• Download Simply from SAGE website (they give the latest release, so I did not need to upgrade to release "B" after installation)
• Remove old folder containing unpacked installation files
• Install, run and feel happy

What was the real reason:

Simply Accounting 2010 uses MySQL ODBC connector 3.51

A separate installation of MySQL, not related to Simply, was recently upgraded to 5.1, with ODBC connector 5.1. Old ODBC 3.51 was removed.......

Now both versions of ODBC are installed. Simply feels happy.

PDO bug: exception caught but reappears in foreach() loop

I was experimenting with PDO/MySQL trying to see how a PHP code will behave with a single static DB connection, multiple connections but declared as "persistent", unbuffered MySQL queries and so on - and discovered a bug which I'd like to show here, because it took me a while to find any reference to it.
I tested it with PHP 5.2.13 under both UNIX and Windows.
Below is the code that demonstrates the problem, and two solutions/workarounds:

#
# PDO foreach exception bug
# Demonstration code
# Author: http://www.tiv.net
# 2010-05-06
#
# Note: same results will appear if using "while fetch()"
# instead of "foreach()" loop
#

print 'This code works OK (Exception is cleaned artificially)
';
$conn = new PDO( 'mysql:host=localhost', 'test', 'test' );
$conn->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
$oRS = $conn->query( "select 'OK'" );
foreach ( $oRS as $row ) {
    try {
        $conn->query( 'Bogus SQL' );
    } catch (PDOException $e) {}
    if ( $conn->errorCode() !== '00000' ) {
        $conn->query( "select 'CLEAN_PDO_ERROR'" );
    }
print 'NO exception will be thrown.
';
}

print 'This code works OK (two separate connections)
';
$conn = new PDO( 'mysql:host=localhost', 'test', 'test' );
$conn2 = new PDO( 'mysql:host=localhost', 'test', 'test' );
$conn->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
$conn2->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
$oRS = $conn->query( "select 'OK'" );
foreach ( $oRS as $row ) {
    try {
        $conn2->query( 'Bogus SQL' );
    } catch (PDOException $e) {}
print 'NO exception will be thrown.
';
}


print 'This code throws unexpected exception in foreach
';
$conn = new PDO( 'mysql:host=localhost', 'test', 'test' );
$conn->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
$oRS = $conn->query( "select 'OK'" );
foreach ( $oRS as $row ) {
    try {
        $conn->query( 'Bogus SQL' );
    } catch (PDOException $e) {}
print 'Exception will be thrown after this...
';
}
?>

My "final note" on using "article" websites for SEO

None of the test articles I submitted was recognized by Google as a link source (checked both in the "link:" search and in the Webmaster Tools).
Nobody came to the site through those links either.

EzineArticles - the verdict

The verdict is "NOT GUILTY!" :-)

Here is what I discovered during my little research:

• EzineArticles has a well-designed and carefully developed interface for submitting articles. Except for minor bugs, everything works.
• Submitted articles go through several stages of approval, starting from an automatic validation to the human-operated analysis of the content. (Disclaimer: my account was new. I do not know if the same level of validation is applied to the established authors)
• My attempts to submit a "just-for-links" article failed. My article was rejected 5 times, for various reasons, including the last one, which pointed out that the content was "not unique and not giving any new specific information to the readers". There was a policy about the links, too, so I could not "stuff" my text with the link spam.
• When I finally made a "real thing" (proud of myself :-), the article has been accepted. All the links in the article body had the "nofollow" tag (that means "ignored by Google"). Only the link in Author Profile (the article footer) did not have "nofollow".
• After one week, the content of my article could be found only on the EzineArticles site. Therefore I assume that there is no automatic distribution of the content to some "satellite" websites.

In my opinion, EzineArticles cannot be used as a place to get "easy links".

Postfix error -- connect to transport private/smtp: Connection refused

Problem:

Cannot send out any email, except to local users

Environment:

UNIX (Linux, FreeBSD, etc)
Postfix

Symptoms:

/var/log/maillog has these messages:

warning: connect to transport private/smtp: Connection refused

Reason:

"unix" smtp is disabled in Postfix configuration

Fix:

Uncomment this line in master.cf

smtp unix - - n - - smtp

(there are two more lines about smtp - they deal with external connections. Need them only if you want to accept mail from outside, not to send mail)

Additional thing to check:

mailer.conf should look like this:

$ cat /etc/mail/mailer.conf

#

# Execute the Postfix sendmail program, named /usr/local/sbin/sendmail

#

sendmail        /usr/local/sbin/sendmail

send-mail       /usr/local/sbin/sendmail

mailq   /usr/local/sbin/sendmail

newaliases      /usr/local/sbin/sendmail

From EzineArticles to The Web

Here is an article submitted to EzineArticles.com 2 days ago:

Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting

By Daniel Blinman

http://ezinearticles.com/?Creating-Your-First-Canvas-Art-Painting&id=3662867

It's a typical "made-for-backlink" article. It links to http://www.artistry-pictures.co.uk/ for the "canvas art" phrase. Here is one more link for you, Daniel: Canvas Art

As of today, Google does not tell us there is a backlink to Artistry Pictures from Ezine Articles. Not enough time. Will see later.

However, there are several sites already having a copy of either the abstract of the whole article!
None of them have any attribution to Ezine Articles... Thieves? I do not know. Did not read the Terms of using EzineArticles' texts yet.

1. Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting

   2 days ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
   ezinearticles.com/?Creating-Your-First-Canvas-Art-Painting...

2. Everyone's Jumptags for Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting ...

   7 hours ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
   www.jumptags.com/item/4247E7F66ACA44138F97FF553974F330/ 

3. Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting « Bulk News – bulk.net

   1 day ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
   www.bulk.net/creating-your-first-canvas-art-painting/ 

4. Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting

   2 days ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
   dtcwebmedia.com/.../creating-your-first-canvas-art-painting-28232/

5. Become a Model

   3 days ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
   www.becomeamodel.us/