(apple)mac geek

This took me a while to figure out when I first tried to do it because it’s so “simple” that no-one bothers to write any documentation for it. Take the component you’re trying to install and make sure it’s in a folder. For instance, I’m installing “mamblog” onto the IASYM site. So, copy the folder into:
mambo_root_dir/administrator/components/com_installer/

Then log into your admin backend, go to Components -> Install/Uninstall. In the Install Directory, leave whatever is in there as is, just go to the end and replace “component” with “mamblog” (or whatever your folder name is – case sensitive). Then hit “enter” or click “install” (for some reason, in Firefox, it didn’t work the first two times when I clicked “install” – but hitting “enter” did…odd).

It should say “Upload new component – Success” if it worked ok, and there might be some other stuff, like a readme. You should be able to access your new component in the “Components” menu.

Technorati Tags: component, install, joomla, mambo

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I got a request today from Lenard about how to set up Mambo-phpshop to work with Virtual Card Services as a payment gateway. The instructions below should work with phpShop as well.

Open the phpshop admin console, click on “list payment methods” and create a new one – “Virtual Card Services.” Make sure it’s a “Paypal-related” one. In “configuration” paste the following code:

<form method="post" action="https://www.vcs.co.za/vvonline/ccform.asp">

  " type="hidden">
  p("order_id") ?>" type="hidden">
  f("order_total"))?>" type="hidden">

   -->
</form>

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I’ve just archived last year’s Summer Camp site. They turned down my suggestion to set up a wiki, ostensibly because they were afraid of what content could be posted there and it would be “too chaotic.” *sigh* That’s the *point* of a wiki – to allow people to post stuff (photos, reviews, questions etc etc etc) online. Only people really interested in Summer Camp would visit the site anyway and if anything nAsty is put there it can easily be taken off. The point is that a wiki allows a community to develop a site and not just a few people at the top. It allows anyone to have their say and sure, while this can be chaotic there’s some great stuff which can come out of that.

Technorati Tags: summer camp, wiki, church, baptist, South Africa, christian

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Not the easiest. Found a page on the Drupal site talking about how to do this, but it doesn’t work. *sigh* This is what I want to do…

I have this blog sitting at www.burningdog.co.za/blog and a fresh Drupal install at www.burnindog.co.za. I’ve turned url aliasing on which means *everything* at burningdog.co.za is passed through Drupal…including my /blog folder, which is then process and Drupal says “page not found.” So I need to reconfigure my .htaccess file for it to still work with the url aliasing in Drupal, but to ignore that when I hit the /blog folder.

This is the code that finally worked:

  RewriteEngine on

  # ignore the blog subfolder
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !blog/
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1
  DirectoryIndex index.html [L]

I’m waiting for my Drupal login details to arrive and then I’ll post it on their site. But for now, I’ll continue reading Harry Potter. Btw, I found that unless that last line (with the index.html) was added in, it wouldn’t work. As long as this is your default file then you’re fine. Otherwise change it to index.php or whatever you need it to be.

Other links I came across:

The official mod_rewrite site.
A bit friendlier version, also at the apache site.

Although, if you ask me, the code looks like frikking assembler. I spent the best part of an hour and a half trying to get the exact right syntax. And there’s no way of debugging the code either – it either works or it doesn’t…no wonder it’s voodoo!

[UPDATE]: the above code worked, all right, but it broke my Drupal comments. Have NO idea why! So I disabled it and went hunting around for code that does. Here it is:

  RewriteEngine on

  # ignore the blog subfolder
  RewriteRule /blog/ blog/index.html
  DirectoryIndex index.html [L]

The last line needs to be there for the same reasons as above. I got most of the code from The Art of Web and just needed a minor rewrite.

Technorati Tags: apache, drupal, htaccess, mod_rewrite

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The browser I’m using now is Flock (well, in combination with Firefox and Safari since I tend to have about 20 websites open at the same time). It’s based on the Mozilla source code and is rather cool. It’s in alpha stage, meaning there are some bugs, but I’m liking it. I’ve used it to do all of my customisation at my new Burning Dog site.

Technorati Tags: flock

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According to PC Magazine, “For Apple, in both the desktop and notebook sections of the survey, every single score is significantly better than the industry average for Windows machines. No exceptions.” [source: Lockergnome

[UPDATE] I liked this paragraph from the survey:

The company’s scores are so high there’s some concern that they can’t be completely trusted: that Apple users are so passionate — almost fanatic — about the company and its products, they’re not quite as objective as other computer owners.

How does Apple get such passionate (fanatic) users?! They continue:

Still, there’s solid evidence that Apple computers may actually be worthy of devotion. There’s little doubt, for instance, that the company builds unusually reliable products.

On the desktop side, readers say that Apple systems needed repairs only 11 percent of the time, an astonishing number when you consider that the closest competing score is Sony’s at 16 percent. Just 17 percent of Apple notebooks needed repair—second to Averatec’s 14 percent—but this is still amazingly low considering that no one else is under 20 percent.

Tempting as it may be to suspect that Apple owners are prone to exaggerate when asked subjective questions, they are much less likely to exaggerate the number of times a system needs repairs.

Hmmm…I don’t mind paying for quality.

Technorati Tags: review, computers, apple, good design, quality

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“Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or Ajax, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications.” [Wikipedia] AJAX is the technology behind the cool pages making their way onto the net recently which fetch and submit data without needing to refresh the whole page. AJAX isn’t a technology itself, but rather a combination of HTML (and CSS), Javascript and XML. I’m looking into it…

Technorati Tags: ajax, javascript, web2.0, xml

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http://www.ubuntu.com/download/. Ubuntu is still the most popular linux distro with Mandriva coming in 2nd. The local ISO is at Internet Solutions.

Technorati Tags: download, linux, ubuntu

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I love Apple. But not the Apple setup in SA. It’s quite simple: on Wednesday Apple announced their new Powerbook line. Very nice – they all now come standard with DVD writers. Skip over to the Apple SA website and compare prices:

(that’s at today’s exchange rate of $1 = R6,60).

Apple SA (i.e. Core), please explain why you’re R3,802 more expensive on the 12″ and R5,385 on the 15″?

That’s a 40% markup!

Technorati Tags: apple, expensive, South Africa, rip off

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Why? Because I spent 6 hours looking for a bug in it when there isn’t one. The only bug is that somehow it caches output, so that even when something is changed in the backend it doesn’t show in the frontend, leading me to the conclusion that something is buggy.

i.e. a product is downloadable so it doesn’t need a shipping rate. However, due to selling products alongside it which *do* have shipping rates I can’t disable shipping rates. Ok. So, make a shipping rate for all downloads as weight “0″ and give all other products
a weight. Configure shipping rates so that weight “0″ = free, and anything larger than that costs R50. Fine.

But in testing this is doesn’t work. My download which used to be (wrongly) configured as a product with shipping is now assigned a weight of 0. Great. Test it through the frontend – and it still picks it up as a product which I need to pay R50 shipping on.

So I play with backend configuration etc etc etc, change shipping rates, change product weights…and nothing works. In fact, there’s no consistent error either (the worst kind of bug) which means I can’t re-create the error and hence track down the bug.

Before leaving work I download the database, install it locally and once I’ve eaten supper at home, attack it again. Same thing. This time on a local copy of mambo-phpshop. I’m beginning to hate it. Whenever I change shipping rates the change is instantaneous, but if I change product weights there’s no change…and yet sometime there is.

::time passes::

Eventually I find the problem (kinda): mambo-phpshop is somehow caching *some* of the content – at least it’s doing that with the product weight. So after turning on site-debug on the live site (never a good idea) and doing all of this bug tracking stuff over the last 6 hours, it turns out that I simply have to change the value and ignore the fact it doesn’t show through the frontend. It’ll sort itself out (or, it works if I log out and back in again).

This p*sses me off. Even though this entry will bore the hell out of you and I’d be surprised if you’re still reading, but I needed to vent. [Venting done]

Technorati Tags: bad design, mambo, phpshop

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