Fast Company had a recent article on the most innovative companies putting Facebook as number two below Apple all because of the new Facebook timeline. Is Facebook really innovative? Not really. With their hoards of functionality issues including photos that always seem misplaced and Facebook’s weak infringement policy, Inner Geek Central would categorize the Square Up Application as ten times more innovative than Facebook. The Square App provides a useful tool for endusers needing a payment method that is not your everyday generic merchant account. Merchant accounts for accepting credit card payments has always been a costly and confusing method for accepting payments. Most merchant accounts charge a monthly fee of $30-40, a percentage per transaction fee and a maze of third party contacts if there is ever to be a dispute on charges. The Square app was developed by Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter) and by all means consider him a genius for the Square app. With an easy account setup, no third party delinquents to deal with, no monthly charges and only a 1.75% per transaction fee, the Square App is innovative, provides a very useful tool for start up companies and rates higher than Facebook ever will.

Facebook’s recent IPO will probably come out being over-valued and over-rated. Part of this article is written because of Facebook’s poor infringement policy which has shut down many Facebook business pages. Here is an article on the lastest shutdown to Jabberbox Designs Facebook page.

After shutting down IGC for quite some time I’ve decided to fire it back up since there has been so many good articles that need posted. The lastest one is on Facebooks infringement policy. I’m associated with another company called (co-founder) Jabberbox Designs. Jabberbox Designs produces carrying cases for the Jawbone headsets. This morning I received an email saying our Jabberbox Facebook page has been taken down. Below is their half ass email that they sent me about it.

Hello,

We have removed or disabled access to the following content that you have posted on Facebook because we received a notice from a third party that the content infringes or otherwise violates their rights:
Fbpage: Jabberbox
We strongly encourage you to review the content you have posted to Facebook to make sure that you have not posted any other infringing content, as it is our policy to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers when appropriate.

If you believe that we have made a mistake in removing this content, then please visit http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1108 for more information.

The Facebook Team

First off, how the hell are we supposed to review the content when you’ve taken it down? Facebook’s policy on copyright infringement that it seems a 5 year old wrote it. They have actually exposed a simple hack to all hackers to easily take down FB business pages. How? File a complaint stating your name, number and email, that’s it. Facebook does not verify the complaintor’s information nor do they verify the so called infringement.

We all have known for some time that Facebook for being a billion dollar company has many flaws, both in design and functionality of the social networking site. Here is my plan of attack on Facebook after waking up to this email this morning and being pretty bent about it.

I’m going to submit a press release that will be distributed to 8000 different news syndications. I’m doing this for two reasons, to expose their horrible policy and also benefit from the media (I think they’ll like this type of confrontation), exposing the media and driving more sets of eyes to the Jabberbox website. In the meantime I’m going to get to the bottom of the infringement problem. I’m about 90% certain that once I get the complaintors name, number and email address, they will all be invalid as I’m sure it’s a hack as happened to Redmond Pie’s Facebook page. You can read the full article on Redmond Pie’s infringement here.

Here is an update to the Jabberbox Designs Facebook infringement policy submitted through our marketing channels.

Here is a quick note on changing those ugly permalink structures that Joomla defaults to along with other content management systems including WordPress and Drupal. Changing permalink structures vary depending on which CMS (content management system) you are using, but we’re only going to cover Joomla permalink structure for today. This is a fairly simple task to do in Joomla and we just revised our structure and tested in over at Myjabberbox.com. The first file you will need to change is the htaccess.txt file. Rename this file to .htaccess and don’t forget the dot in front of htacess. You can accomplish this by accessing the file via FTP or your host’s control panel. Secondly, login into your Joomla Engine and go to global configuration located in the upper left menu bar under the parent menu “site”.

Under SEO Settings, change the SEF (search engine friendly) URLS and Use Apache mod_rewrite to yes. Click save and you are done. Make sure before changing the Use Apache mod_rewrite to yes that you first rename the htaccess.txt file over to .htaccess file.

You will now have cool permalink structures or in wordpress lingo, pretty permalink structures. These are important for Search Engine Optimization since now the URL’s of your site will include page names instead of a combination of letters and numbers. If you think about it, when search engines start indexing pages, how do they know the importance of a url that reads: ex: http://www.mydomain.com/p=123?.
That is an example of an ugly permalink. After changing the structure over, you will see something like ex: http://mydomain.com/products or http://mydomain.com/about us.

Changing over permalink structures is only one of many good SEO practices and while content management systems don’t have pretty permalink structures out-of-the-box, well…we’re not sure.

Accidentally ran across the BoomPhones while googling for a company that produces fuel cells. First the name BoomPhones caught my attention and then the website. With a $200 price tag, these headsets look awesome and probably sound awesome as well. The Boom Phones have an internal listening mode (amplified bass booster) and an external boombox mode with allows you to plugin an electric guitar, keyboard or video game console and switch it over to external speakers. The cooler part is when you have it in ILM mode, the ring in thecenter of each earpiece will glow with white light and red when it’s in EBM mode.

Designed around your hair for good ergonomics with the best materials and craftsmanship, they look like you could wear them for 3 days without an discomfort. Check out BoomPhones. If these things sound as good as they look, Inner Geek Central will have to get a pair and report back on sound quality.

SPECS:

• high fidelity stereo headset with bass boost amplifier chipset
• Frequency response: 20Hz-20Hz
• Sensitivity for internal speakers: 119dBS.P.L. @ 1 KHz
• Output power for external speakers: 2W @ THD=10% @ 1 kHz
• Stereo separation channel to channel: 60 dB
• Impedance of internal speakers : 32 ohms
• Impedance of external speakers: 4 ohms
• Battery: Lithium, 3.7V

I ran across this post at boingboing.net today featuring a blog about trick pancakes, and thought something was lacking. I suck at photoshop (or in this case GIMP), but 10 minutes of time created this little picture.

The trick pancake site in question is also pretty entertaining, and can be found over here.

Enjoy!

-GiR

Joomla passwords are encrypted via the database so you cannot recover the password. The only way to reset the password is to access the database through your host’s php my admin feature. Passwords are kept using a one-way MD5 hash which prevents the recovery. Here are the recovery steps:

• Goto yer PHP My Admin via your hosts control panel
• find the database that is tied to yer website (obviously not a problem if you’re only hosting one site)
• find the table jos_users and edit this table.
• find the admin username and select that row for editing
• In the password field, set it to a known value, example: password=”this is the MD5 hashed password”
• login into Joomla Engine with the new password, “password” then change the password to a more secure one.

The I phone 4 that I currently use is getting a warning screen, “The iPhone needs to cool down before you can use the flash.” What is the problem? Not sure other than possibly a bug in the firmware. Or wait, the iPhone 4 doesn’t support Flash so why does it need to cool down? (joke..).

From what I’ve read from Apple, they aren’t chalking this up to a bug in the firmware but an enduser error of leaving the phone in a hot car, direct sunlight, a combination of both or using the phone in either of these conditions. These rules don’t apply to my experiment as the phone has been in an air conditioned house out of direct sunlight.

Some other tips from communites like AV forums says to restore and update. I will try to insert iPhone 4 in freezer for up to a maximum of 4 hours and see if this cools down the unit. If this doesn’t work we’ll keep searching for an answer and will post back once the issue has been rectified….

Until then, drive fast and text.