The nice people at TELUS have upgraded my ASDL speed to their High Speed Turbo. I've only had it for a day, and I cannot complain getting 5Mb/second downloads. Kudos - now, please work on increasing the maximum upload speeds.
Nothing works completely. I should start by saying that CS Cart has impressed me greatly, and it is probably the best shopping cart software I've used. The administrator area is simple and powerful, and the templates (skins) are relatively easy to customize.
Getting shopping cart software to run propertly for a business in Canada is aways difficult. It's a combination of little effort on the developer's part to make it built to work, and what looks like no time spent on testing.
CS Cart gets full points for making it straightforward to create tax rates for different locations - PST for the province, GST for federal taxes, and HST for those three provinces that require it currently (the number of provinces will increase in 2010).
CS Cart does not get full marks for the Canada Post shipping module in CS Cart version 2.0.8. It almost does the minimum required, but it has a bug. I think the Canada Post module is relatively new, so hopefullly this will be improved in the future.
For more than an hour, I was troubleshooting why it would correctly estimate shipping from Canada to Canada, but it would never estimate from Canada to the USA. It always came back with the error message, "Unfortunately no shipping options are available for your location". After digging through the code, I realized that:
Having given up looking for the optimal solution, I just hardcoded a fix. The code below was added to the /shippings/can.php file at line 87 (the first line is included here as a reference). It shortcircuits the bad logic to correctly state "if the customer is in the USA, get shipping quotes for the Xpresspost USA product".
list($header, $result) = fn_http_request('POST', 'http://sellonline.canadapost.ca:30000', $request);
// Short circuit the code used, because it continues
// to use a Canadian shipping code for USA customers
if($location['country'] == 'US')
{
$code = '2030';
}
After a few days time of pondering, I decided today I will participate in the 2009 NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). But I am not going to write a novel. So that leaves non-fiction, and labels me a rebel!
Over the previous nine years of NaNoWriMo, enough people have rebelled to warrant a separate special area in the online forums. I would have been a rebel anyway, but it's reassuring to know I'll be joined by others.
I've chosen non-fiction because I want whatever is produced by the end of the month to be something I've always planned to write, even if it is a first draft.
My procrastination to write a book is just as common as the novelist participants; I've always planned to write a book, but it's never gotten off the ground. NaNoWriMo motivates me to attempt to reach the goal and win by writing 50,000 words.
Other things I like:
Personally, some things I hope to gain:
You may ask, what is my topic? Well, the conversation would probably go something like this,
You: "So you're a non-fiction NaNoWriMo rebel huh? What's your topic?
Me: "Oh... I see what you're after - get your own topic!"
If you've ever planned to write anything - novel or otherwise - consider NaNoWriMo this year.
Before:
After:
When you need to understand a new database schema, making a model like this is a big help. I still like DBDesigner4 fromfabFORCE.net to get these simple models done. Yes, I know there's a much newer GUI program, MySQL Workbench, that could do a better job. One day I'll have time to test you again, Workbench. But for me, DBDesigner4 is a simple yet powerful tool.
I have a short code snippet to share, if you want to do simple date calculations using the Smarty template engine. As a very short preamble, I've used Smarty off-and-on for eight years, and it's great. I find its simplicity and power outweigh bloated frameworks on a regular basis.
If you need the date for tomorrow, you can do it in two ways.
The first way is to create the variable in the "code behind", assign it to the template and then you can use it:
In PHP:
$smarty->assign('tomorrow', strtotime('+1 day'));
In Smarty template (or use a date format of your choice):
{$tomorrow|date_format:"%Y-%m-%d"}
The second way is done in the template alone. This is useful if you did not, or did not want to, assign a variable in the code behind. It is also useful if you wanted to use multiple dates (tomorrow, the next day, next week, etc.), or you could even use it in a loop:
In Smarty template:
{math equation=x+y x=$smarty.now y=86400 assign=tomorrow}
{$tomorrow|date_format:"%Y-%m-%d"}
This uses the UNIX timestamp value of $smarty.now, and adds 86,400 seconds to it. Unfortunately you cannot easily add exactly one month - or one year - using this method because each month or year could have a different number of seconds in it.
In future, I plan to say a little more about Smarty and its virtues.
HTML5 and great expectations
It's a busy day full of chatter on the InterWeb about HTML 5 and its proposed features. "Could it kill Flash and Silverlight", as supposed by Paul Krill at InfoWorld?
One thing is certain: it is not vaporware. After a short search, I found this example implementing a coverflow-style animation from Adnan Osmani (nice work!!) http://blarnee.com/wp/an-improved-javascript-coverflow-demo-using-canvas-and-html5/ If you have an HTML 5 compatible browser - it worked in my Firefox version 3.0.11 - then give it a try. It replicates the animation you'd previously require Flash to do.
My prediction is not can it kill Flash, but when will it kill Flash. Open standards, after gaining momentum, are unstoppable. I'm sure companies like Adobe realize this, and the newer Flash application software will just generate HTML 5 compatible elements. What provides a heavy anchor on progress is how slow users are to upgrade their web browser to be compatible with the new features.
Today I was waiting for files to upload to the server in order to upgrade Drupal (in fact it is Acquia Drupal) and CiviCRM for Drupal, and while I was waiting I started writing this.
If you don't know what those software programs are, I will not explain here - you can go and read about them. What matters is they are web applications, meaning they run on a web server and you use them in your web browser.
Many computer users - hundreds of millions of them - have from time to time installed software or upgraded software on their own computers. On Microsoft Windows, Mac, and others it's a fairly painless procedure of clicking the "Next" button as you confirm some choices. The computer does some work, you may restart the computer, and 19 times out of 20 you're good to go. Web applications are not that simple.
The general process in upgrading web application software is:
These usually require any combination of FTP, tar, gzip, zip, ssh, svn, SQL, Linux, and lots of specific knowledge to debug problems that may arise. There's typically no one click install, and if there is, it may work correctly 2 out of 3 times.
The web application software, through its available functions and possible customizations, are very complex. I dread having to upgrade the software because of the possible headaches that arise. But, I don't think it should necessarily any easier to upgrade it. Making it easier would lower the bar of expertise required to upgrade the software, and lowering that bar makes those who should not be upgrading the software themselves to think "it's not that hard, why don't I do it myself".
Unfortunately having a difficult upgrade process causes a steep learning curve for software administrators, and ... it's probably really scary for many people. When a security update is released, they are dependent on hard to find experts to help them.
There are so many adages that apply just as well to computers and software as anywhere else in life: be prepared! An ounce of prevention is.... The wise ones will use prevention to their advantage.
For example, if you run a hosting server, and a users' domain name is about to expire, would you rather:
You can think of it in terms of a game of chance. Let's say sending the reminder will take 10% of the time and headache a downtime causes. 50% of the time, the domain name doesn't get renewed, and the downtime is caused. Then that ounce of prevention wins.
It's not magic to keep computers running and keep bugs to a minimum, though to some it seems like the "black arts". Developers and IT professionals experience much they wish never to repeat again. The good ones will learn from their experiences, and if there's a known cause, next time that situation appears they prevent the bad experience from happening again.
As the years go by, this experience and knowledge starts to gel into some kind of wisdom. Wisdom is not just about fixing all the problems you've seen before , but is more like a "gut feeling" about what is a good choice and what is a not so good choice, and what you should or shouldn't do.
A couple years ago I was discussing this with a someone. Well, I was probably just blathering on about how I had fixed something that I noticed was wrong in some software, but this error was not my responsibility. Funny enough, she has done the same thing before, and for the same reason. We didn't fix the error primarily because we care about the customer. We fixed the errors because when it goes disastrously wrong, we will have to fix it, and it will be far more time consuming and frustrating to fix it than to ensure it never happens in the first place.
In software development, this wisdom works in an ongoing basis. We anticipate how the application will evolve over time. Perhaps we'll add a field in a database table for the date a record was created, because there's a good chance we may need it in the future. I'm sure there are hundreds of ways wisdom allows software and computers to run more smoothly. Unfortunately wisdom cannot be taught, so to gain more wisdom always be one the lookout for ways to anticipate disaster (and prevent it).
I've been using the terrific anti-spam plug-in Spambayes for years now in Outlook. It takes a very short time to install and configure. What I like is how I tell it how to "train" itself, pointing it to my good email folders - the "ham" - and keeping my "spam" in a separate folder. After the initial training, I just have to help it make some decisions about junk email suspects, by making the final "ham" versus "spam" decision. In the process, my Spambayes gets even smarter.
Only today did I try the option "Show spam clues for the current message"
The results really show me what Spambayes is using behind the scenes to score my messages, based on my personal "ham" and "spam" folders. Not so surprisingly, not one legitimate email I've received has included the term "Acai", and 506 junk email messages have included it. A little surprising to me, 4222 junk emails have been sent using Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.2180 (or at least identifying themselves as using that software), but only 6 legitimate emails I've received come from that software.
As a follow-up to my earlier post, recover a FileZilla password online, it only applies to version 2 of FileZilla. FileZilla 3 now does not obsfucate the passwords you save in the software, and relies on the operating system security to protect the plain text passwords (there's a scary thought).
At the time, I didn't quickly find an online form that decrypted a password nice and quickly, though since then I found at least one online form implemented in JavaScript. I have also found other versions of the decryptor function ported to PHP, so I'm adding mine below. It's a complete rewrite of the function in FileZilla. I think it's more staightforward than other solutions, but maybe that's just because I'm familiar with it because... I wrote it. I'll let you, the reader, be the judge of how readable it is. If you get a reason to use it somewhere, let me know.
function filezillaDecrypt ($password) {
$key = "FILEZILLA1234567890ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";
$keyArray = str_split($key, 1);
$clearText = '';
// Remove everything but digits from the password
$password = preg_replace('/\D/', '', $password);
// Only continue if a password was supplied
if($password != '')
{
// Split the password into groups of three characters
$passwordArray = str_split($password, 3);
$passwordLength = count($passwordArray);
$keyLength = count($keyArray);
$i = 0;
// The fun decryption happens below, using bitwise operator
foreach($passwordArray as $char)
{
$keyIndex = ($passwordLength+$i)%$keyLength;
$clearText .= chr($char ^ ord($keyArray[$keyIndex]));
$i++;
}
}
return $clearText;
}
