Articles - Joel Lipman .Com

JDatabase: using the Joomla database with examples

: Joel Lipman; Joomla; 27 January 2013; Hits: 50485

What?
Apologies for posting yet another article on how to access the Joomla Database using the Joomla classes but this is just a quick note for myself as a reference sheet. Plus the official documentation don't have enough examples in my view. Source: http://docs.joomla.org/ for v1.5.x and for v2.5.x

This article applies to Joomla 1.5.x, 2.5.x and 3.x.

: Joel Lipman; IT Support; 26 January 2013; Hits: 6086

i3 workstation upgrade running Windows 7
So another year gone and our workstations running Windows 7 are somewhat lagging when opening too many apps. The recent release of Windows 8 has led to a review of our developer's equipment and the verdict is that our workstations need upgrading (it always is). So on a budget (ie. as cheap as possible), we'll skip Windows 8 and wait for Windows 9, but in the meantime we need something that flows as smooth as any other Microsoft product with Windows 7 as its Operating System:

Proposed for January 2013 (5 suppliers)

Processor	Intel Core i3 3220 Dual Core CPU ( 3.30GHz, Socket 1155, 3MB Cache, Ivy Bridge, 55W, Intel HD Graphics 2500, Advanced Vector Extensions) - Intel	£88.50
Motherboard	AsRock H61M-DGS Motherboard (Socket 1155, Intel H61, DDR3, 4 x S-ATA 300, Micro ATX, PCI Express 3.0, AsRock XFast USB, AsRock Instant Boot) - ASrock	£37.58
Hard Drive	Western Digital Caviar Blue 160 GB (7200 rpm) SATA 8 MB 3.5 inch Hard Drive (Internal) - Western Digital	£24.95
Memory	Corsair CMX4GX3M1A1333C9 XMS3 Desktop Memory 4GB - Corsair	£20.05
Optical Drive	Sony AD-5280S-0B DVD±RW 24x SATA Drive with Dust Protected Enclosure and Emergency Eject - Sony	£17.77
Other	2 X Serial ATA Sata Hard Drive Data Cable Lead - Unbranded	£0.90
	Total	£189.75

Confirmed for January 2013 (2 suppliers):

: Joel Lipman; Windows OS; 22 January 2013; Hits: 6584

What?
Applies to Windows 7.
Requires a Vogonian environment of red tape and bureaucracy.

This is an article to describe an alternative method then "right-clicking on the desktop", "selecting Personalize", "clicking on Desktop Background", "browsing to the Picture Location". The problem happens when browsing to the picture location and it doesn't seem to remember which folder you selected. At home, this would be a breeze, but that's because I don't implement group policies at home.

Why?
We get problems with this because none of our staff are full administrators of their local workstation. As IT staff we have elevated privileges but not absolute rights to configuring our computer. And we still need to re-login for every change. About a zillion group policies control our every deviation from the standard staff image and so we spend more time on "how do you make it like it was in XP?" situations.

How?
Who doesn't want to change their desktop background wallpaper? Using Windows 7, who doesn't want it to be a slideshow as well?

: Joel Lipman; Cascading Stylesheets; 21 January 2013; Hits: 5091

What?
So this is an article to note an oddity when I was working with a Yootheme template called "yoo_sync". Some clever scripts (both mootools and jquery) using the equalize method to make div layers the same height, and in this case, the same width. It isn't so much a miscalculation of 100% divided by 3 that leaves 1 pixel left over, more the fact that the scripts use that 1 pixel (ceiling rather than floor?).

Why?
We have a row on a website of three boxes made of div layers. When viewed normally on a 15" Laptop, all was good using Chrome and tolerable using MS Internet Explorer. If we maximized the Google Chrome browser, the row would split and there would be 2 boxes on the top row and the third would pop under these. As for MSIE, that was ok when maximized.

How?
You could do loads of code hacks which is what I tested but all for nothing because you always end up needing to specify a third of the width.

: Joel Lipman; MySQL; 11 January 2013; Hits: 5257

What?
So this is a quick article on how to delete from multiple tables in a mySQL database where we use some JOIN statements.

Why?
It is never recommended to delete from multiple tables and instead to use the system you were given. Given a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) where deleting some erroneous rows in one table will cause errors because the existence of those rows is stored in another table, how do we delete from all the related tables as well?

How?

: Joel Lipman; Google; 08 January 2013; Hits: 8435

What?
So this is a quick article to get your Google Translation services working with your website.

Why?
At time of print, Google now charge for every 2,000,000 characters (2 million) every month.

Microsoft's Bing has added itself to the fray pretending to offer free services but in the small print, you will find they too charge the same price.

How?

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 03 January 2013; Hits: 12927

What?
Just a quick note on how to format a given filesize and to reduce the display output to a small string, eg:

copy raw

196 bytes          : displays as => "196 bytes"
   12945 bytes        : displays as => "12 Kb"
   1478515 bytes      : displays as => "1 Mb"
   8798745455 bytes   : displays as => "8 Gb"

196 bytes : displays as => "196 bytes"
12945 bytes : displays as => "12 Kb"
1478515 bytes : displays as => "1 Mb"
8798745455 bytes : displays as => "8 Gb"

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 468

: Joel Lipman; Team Foundation Server; 03 January 2013; Hits: 5412

Why?
So I get back from annual leave and I can't check-out / check-in any files in a Visual Studio 2010 project. All my colleagues can.

What?
Rather silly I know and the solution is one of those obvious ones for those that know how but for those who can't remember, then it can take a while.

How?

: Joel Lipman; Joomla; 19 December 2012; Hits: 21408

What?
More for others than for myself, but this article is for those who do not have development/test environments of their Joomla website.

I have been doing this for years and still come across clients who have the one version of their website. They experiment on their customer-facing website and in most cases, they are paying for a hosting package which would allow them to have several copies of their website.

: Joel Lipman; MySQL; 13 December 2012; Hits: 7164

What?
In view of the fact that this error pops up in so many systems I take over, I have often gone down the wrong path following the red herring as it were when in fact the answer to this is very common.

Why?
Bespoke systems are the usual suspects. Developers will have told the system what to do when newline, carriage returns and tab characters are entered in the data. Those who are security-conscious will also make their system escape apostrophes (') and double-quotes ("). But who can honestly build a system that thinks of everything from day one?

How?

: Joel Lipman; Transact-SQL; 07 December 2012; Hits: 7461

What?
Along with my DataJumble function and DataTumble procedure which also help scramble database tables sent to suppliers/developers, this is a function which simply finds random characters and inserts these.

I would recommend using the DataTumble script over this one as this leaves data very difficult to work with:

copy raw

Before:
           StudentID   StudentName          DateOfBirth
           ----------- -------------------- -------------
           1           John Smith           1990-03-21
           2           Fred Bloggs          1988-11-02
           3           Another User         1985-07-11
           4           Yet Another User     1977-06-25

       After:
           StudentID   StudentName          DateOfBirth
           ----------- -------------------- -------------
           1           PDUHjRWJcb           1926-01-02
           2           WRmNqQKxvuV          1969-03-14
           3           nBCkAVDrvdhe         1968-05-05
           4           RJDsFMaeNcLrcMWw     1964-08-08

Before:
StudentID StudentName DateOfBirth
----------- -------------------- -------------
1 John Smith 1990-03-21
2 Fred Bloggs 1988-11-02
3 Another User 1985-07-11
4 Yet Another User 1977-06-25
After:
StudentID StudentName DateOfBirth
----------- -------------------- -------------
1 PDUHjRWJcb 1926-01-02
2 WRmNqQKxvuV 1969-03-14
3 nBCkAVDrvdhe 1968-05-05
4 RJDsFMaeNcLrcMWw 1964-08-08

How?

Category: Transact-SQL :: Article: 460

: Joel Lipman; Transact-SQL; 07 December 2012; Hits: 5448

What?
This is a stored procedure I've nabbed from some consultants from my day job. It shuffles the records and matching data values:

Before:

copy raw

ID        Name         DateOfBirth
--------- ------------ -----------
1         John Smith   1988-06-24
2         Fred Bloggs  1972-11-17
3         Another User 1964-02-18

ID Name DateOfBirth
--------- ------------ -----------
1 John Smith 1988-06-24
2 Fred Bloggs 1972-11-17
3 Another User 1964-02-18

After:

copy raw

ID        Name         DateOfBirth
--------- ------------ -----------
1         Fred Bloggs  1964-02-18
2         Another User 1988-06-24
3         John Smith   1972-11-17

ID Name DateOfBirth
--------- ------------ -----------
1 Fred Bloggs 1964-02-18
2 Another User 1988-06-24
3 John Smith 1972-11-17

Looks pretty good, doesn't it? The advantages of this is that you can send this data to your developers and the data types will be correct and maybe they'll resolve issues faster than if they were given scrambled data (see my articles on DataJumble and DataScramble).

How?

Category: Transact-SQL :: Article: 459

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