Articles - Joel Lipman .Com

Hide a Drive per User in Windows 7

: Joel Lipman; Windows OS; 28 March 2014; Hits: 11895

Applies to:

Microsoft Windows 7 Professional

What?
Looking at ways of displaying different drives per user on a single computer. This one is by modifying the system registry, so if you aren't familiar with the system registry in MS Windows, you may need to find someone who is.

How?
As a proof of concept, let's see how to hide a specific drive. Note that this section applies to the currently logged-in user.

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 27 March 2014; Hits: 4431

What?
A note for myself on some code to convert a string of two names into a string made up of the first name and then using the initial of the second name.

copy raw

-- What I have
John Smith
Fred.Bloggs

-- What I want
John S.
Fred B.

-- What I have
John Smith
Fred.Bloggs
-- What I want
John S.
Fred B.

How?

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 556

: Joel Lipman; Transact-SQL; 27 March 2014; Hits: 24832

What?
This took me a while to find so I've posted an article below detailing how to parse or extract values from a string containing XML code.

Why?
I'm working with a system which stores XML strings in a database and rather than a separate file, it stores these in a row.

How?

ReCaptcha alternative: Integrate PlayThru in JComments 2.3 for Joomla 2.5

: Joel Lipman; Joomla; 24 March 2014; Hits: 95551

Applies to:

Joomla CMS v2.5.11 (Joomla.org)
jComments v2.3.0 (JoomlaTune.com)
PlayThru v1.1.8 (AreYouAHuman.com)

What?
This article is a follow-up of my article JComments 2.3.0 with Google ReCaptcha (Joomla 2.5.x) but instead of using ReCaptcha, we're going to use an alternative called PlayThru by AreYouAHuman.Com.

Why?
The kCaptcha used by the jComments extension is easily automated and no longer blocks spam comments.

How?
So I have come up with what I consider a pretty stable solution. I adapted it from various legacy solutions when using Google's ReCaptcha.

JComments 2.3.0 with ReCaptcha in Joomla 2.5.x

: Joel Lipman; Joomla; 20 March 2014; Hits: 123248

Applies to:

Joomla CMS v2.5.11 (Joomla.org)
jComments v2.3.0 (JoomlaTune.com)

What?
Posting this as it was rather rewarding to achieve and I hope will be of some use to others in the same boat. This article details how to replace jComments built-in kCaptcha with Google's ReCaptcha. Note that I have an article on how to do this with a ReCaptcha alternative called PlayThru by AreYouAHuman.com

Why?
The kCaptcha used by the jComments extension is easily automated and no longer blocks spam comments.

How?
So the main bulk came from the JoomlaTune website but as it was a forum post that may get moved/deleted, I've copied most of it and put it here with my minor revisions/adjustments to get it actually working.

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 07 March 2014; Hits: 9726

What?
This article details a method we used on a search form in a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) environment. The requirement (amongst others) was that the report ran in less than a few seconds.

Analyzing the report through the ReportServer databases (internal auditing) only showed how long the SQL query would take to recover the data and present it in a report, which would average about 0.4 seconds.

We're obviously not interested in shaving off time from 0.4 seconds; no, we're more interested in the fact that 0.4 Microsoft seconds seems to translate to about 10 minutes in the real world. Where do the extra 9 minutes come from? Not the SQL as this runs in 00:00 seconds in SQL Server Management Studio. Not the internal processing and rendering as the report server says it did this in 0.4 seconds. So where's the problem?

How?

Excel: Find values in one column that are not in another

: Joel Lipman; Excel; 06 March 2014; Hits: 19092

What?
A quick note on how to compare two columns for values that are not found in another. I have a column with old values, and now that I have a new list, I want a quick way to see what values are in the old column and which ones are new...

Why?
Consider the 3 following columns in an Excel spreadsheet:

copy raw

Old       New       Exists in Old?
--------- --------- --------------
123456    234567
234567    345678
345678    456789
567890    597890

Old New Exists in Old?
--------- --------- --------------
123456 234567
234567 345678
345678 456789
567890 597890

I want the third column to say whether this is new or not.

How?

Category: Excel :: Article: 551

: Joel Lipman; Joomla; 28 February 2014; Hits: 4831

What?
Somebody said I could pay to get an export list of my Joomla users. I said Joomla is a FREE OpenSource system, why?

Why?
I want to move a client's list of Joomla users to a new system which allows the passwords to be in MD5. All I want is a quick bit of code to get all the users out of a Joomla CMS.

How?
I could just type a query on the database and get the same result, but this script was more fun. Simply create a text file with the following code and upload it to the root of your Joomla website. Access the page from a browser and you should get all your users listed... For security reasons, delete the file after you have used it.

IT IS A SERIOUSLY BAD IDEA TO LEAVE THIS FILE ON YOUR WEBSITE FOR ANYONE TO ACCESS!!! DELETE IT AFTER USE.

: Joel Lipman; Joomla; 26 February 2014; Hits: 11999

Applies to

Joomla CMS v2.5.14

What?
This article is a note on how I fixed an issue on a client site. The website had a redirect on the login which would go to a page accessible by "registered" users but only "Super Users" could actually login. "Registered" users would not be able to login, despite their status in the admin panel saying "enabled" and "activated" (not blocked).

If I used a test account, none of the Joomla groups, not even "Administrators" could login. However set the same test account to a "Super User" and they would be able to login. Was the problem authentication? Restricted access to a component? A load of blab on ACL managers?

How?
In our case, the website had recently been migrated from Joomla 1.5.x to 2.5.x. I asked to examine the database and a quick scan in the assets table revealed 3 assets had the parent_id = 0. Only one asset can have that and that is "root".

: Joel Lipman; MS-DOS; 23 February 2014; Hits: 16273

What?
A quick note on how to copy files and folders over without overwriting existing files. It's easy to say "Yes" and replace all files. What I need is something that synchronizes files on an internal hard drive to an external one. I wanted it to copy only the files that were new in the original folder and only copy those over (reason being, the archive is 4 terabytes and backing up only the changed files would speed things up).

Applies to:

Microsoft Windows XP
Microsoft Windows 7
Microsoft Windows 8
for Vista and Windows 2008 without XCOPY, try ROBOCOPY.

How?
We're going to use MS-DOS because I'm that old.

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 20 January 2014; Hits: 8200

What?
A very quick note on why borders may be misbehaving in SSRS. This note corrects the situation at Design time. This is where you are trying to select a cell to have an outline border but then cells around it without a border. You may find that BIDS or Report Builder (however you're building your report) will apply the border to some cells and sometimes a whole section of the report with just one border???

How?

: Joel Lipman; Databases; 09 January 2014; Hits: 6034

What?
Practice makes perfect. Or in my case, any practice is a start. This article serves as a quick note on how to use regular expressions within SQL statements:

How?
For the following examples, I am pretending to select rows from a table called `STUDENTS`.

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