Updating to Joomla 2.5

Updating to Joomla 2.5

NOTE: Do not do this on a live server, backup and test mileage before deploy as components and modules might not be available. Also templates need to be updated

It’s getting pretty easy to update things these days and Joomla is no exception. There is a component that you can get for the joomla 1.5 branch and later that is called jupdate. This component works pretty good as long as your permissions are set correctly. IE if you are not running as a specific user in php that has write permissions to the root of your site, then it may be a problem during the update phase.

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Office WebDav and Javascript

So…. long story short it is possible to reuse office within the browser by using the Word ActiveX control as well as most other Office products like Excel and Powerpoint. The problem then becomes editing the information. There is a registry tweak that enables this with the default ActiveX control, however, the sharepoint dll which provides a nicer interface out of the box allows what you need to do without changes to the registry and also ships with office since 2007 according to outside sources.

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First Quarter 2012

It appears that the first quarter of 2012 has come and gone and I have had little time for a post. It’s easter weekend for anyone that cares, but I don’t think that matters now. I have not had one chance to look over anything that I have wanted to write about for 4 months and I doubt that is going to change any time soon. I have been working a lot with MAPI in the months of late, and as well with asp.net and have come across some problems and found solutions for them. In case you are wondering, simple mapi is awesome but kind of useless in the same token, but extended MAPI is way awesome in terms of power and scalability, but hardly easy to use. That is to say, that it’s not all spelled out for you the way that you would like. My experiences with this have been mostly for a console program, but I am finding that without a message pump, it’s extremely difficult to get messages ( This is tip #1 ). The problem is that I would like to call on this program to deliver a message every so often. The obvious solutions of course are to install a message pump and run for a small time frame, or convert into a tcp/udp/service application.

Status Update – SwhistleSoft Blog

Status Update – SwhistleSoft Blog December

It has been almost an entire month of no postings so I figured I would post a quick little ditty. For those of you hoping to make it in the software industry, you should check out “7 wonders of the Industrial World” as seen on Netflix or elsewhere. This series of episodes outlines some struggles that happened to almost everyone surrounding these technological feats, some of which included sickness, and death. When setting out to do something worth while, it is important to remember that there will be struggles along the way, but that perseverance makes it to the finish line.

Happy Holidays

A link to Mersenne Twister Implementations

Mersenne Twister Implementations

What is the Mersenne Twister algorithm? The Mersenne Twister is a very fast random number generator. The home page that I retreived this information from warns of the following: “Mersenne Twister is basically for Monte-Carlo simulations – it is not cryptographically secure ‘as is’.”. If you read the FAQ, however, there are comments on newer versions and implementation details for specific usage case scenarios.

At any rate, the implementations may be found here.
Interestingly enough there is a javascript version that will most likely find it’s way into our demos.

PHP Rss Information From IBM

Just a simple article from within IBM thats shows how to both read and write RSS feeds from PHP. There are some good points, a working example and both sides of the rss coin presented. The article itself is somewhat dated as it was published in 2006, but the principles work.

PHP SRP php Secure Remote Password

PHP SRP php Secure Remote Password

If you don’t know what SRP is, then by all means – Find Out about SRP from the creators.. For a brief overview, it is a way to authenticate without sending a password plaintext or hashed. The method is similar in theory to public key cryptography in that math functions are used to calculate tokens help validate the identity of the user. There is an existing implementation that appears to work somewhat out of the box that can be found on another blog entitled: Secure Ajax: SRP Hermetic. I was able to get the code to work with some slight modifications to get the database code to work with mysql.
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Halloween is coming – Halloween javascript

Halloween is coming

Halloween is fast approaching with us being over half the month through. Check out this little javascript which animates three ghost images in the screen swooping them and fading them out. This script is simple enough to understand and implement for yourself or by a beginner developer. Of course the image assets would need to be on your site as well. Follow this link to have a quick look. This script is easily probably of the simpler scripts I have seen and check back from now to halloween for more.

Updating the SiteURL or Home Link for wordpress

Updating the SiteURL or Home Link for wordpress

Here and there I have come up with a problem to solve when either deploying word press sites or beginning to maintain sites that are live. My first step is usually to back up the site locally and attempt to fix the issues or create additional functionality as the situation calls for. The problem is that, the live site is usually not the same url that I am using. For instance, I can not use the same domain unless I want to continually be modifying my dns or hosts files. My solution is to usually have an automated way to create an aliasmatch such as the following: devsite.com/devhost where devhost is the domain. This is usually much different than livesite.com/blog or livesite.com.

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Steve Jobs is a hot topic right now because of recent events.

Steve Jobs is a hot topic right now because of recent events.

Steve Jobs has been battling cancer for some time now and has apparently lost his battle to this disease. Here are some articles highlighting some moments in his career. I encourage you to check out the variety of video posts on youtube and to check out the documetary/movie Pirates of Sillicon Valley.

How Steve Jobs Changed Computing from telegraph.co.uk

Looking Back on Steve Jobs Legacy from the Globe and Mail

BBC News: Streve Jobs dies: Steve WosniakFrom BBC Uk

Steve Jobs just before returning to Apple from youtube

Steve Jobs Response to Software Product Failures from youtube

Documentary from youtube

Ajax DNS Down?

Ajax DNS Down?

If you have ever needed to check dns propagation for yourself or a client, I am sure that you have used tools such as nslookup and possibly even dig. There are other tools, however, that you can use to check dns remotely or outside your network. One such tool can be found at www.ajaxdns.com which I have used religiously but for some reason today it seems to be under scutiny with editdns.com until sept 9 2011. As it is, there appears to be an acceptable alternative at: http://www.dnsbench.com/. I really hope that this can be resolved soon as I really enjoy ajaxdns.com

Updates

Recently there has been somewhat of a hiatus from the SwhistleSoft Team, due to projects and other engagements. Lets call this a sort of summer hiatus and get ready for some quality articles in the upcoming fall tech season. It has come to our attention that some of the features of the introduction to CMS are not as useable as people may like. We are looking into a solution to this in order to help our  clients learn to use these systems effectively. Comments are welcome, but we are most likely going to set up a sort of client sandbox with a login so that clients can reset their own environment as well as control access to the environment.