Converting Joomla sites from 1.0 to 1.5 cheatsheet

Some useful links for Joomla 1.5 component development:

• The guys at the Art of Joomla have a really nice crib sheet for converting your 1.0 extensions to 1.5. Well done and thank you.
• Using the JHTML:: functions to create lists

Ubutnu ext3 to ext4 upgrade - won't mount filesystem!

I have just had a little heart stop moment.

I followed the Ubuntu wiki instructions on migrating from ext3 to ext4. After the tune2fs bit I rebooted as instructed and the system could not mount the new filesystem. Errors about bad superblocks and bad group descriptors, but nothing being done about them. fsck did not run correctly and I was left with an un-mountable drive, so I could even mount as ext3. Ahhhh....

Fortunately I have a live CD install of 9.10 on USB from which I could boot and run a fsck.ext4 on my partition.

So my suggestion is that before migrating from ext3 to ext4 do two things:

1. BACKUP all your data
2. Do the migration from a live CD / USB. The advantage of this is that you save on all the reboots too.

Setting up qt4 with visual studio 2005 and 2008

It is not clear (or wasn't to me) how to use QT4 with Visual Studio. The key to the problem is that you need to re-compile QT4 for Visual Studio. If you are not using MingGW at all then you can do all this in the original QT directory. Otherwise copy the entire c:\qt\2009.03 directory to something like c:\qt\2009.03_vs2008

Open a VS command line prompt so that all the env vars are set up.

Run the configure script, my suggestion is:
C:\Qt\2009.03\qt>configure -no-qt3support -no-opengl -platform win32-msvc2005 -no-libtiff -no-dbus -no-phonon -no-phonon-backend -opensource -debug-and-release

Let it do it's thing

Then type nmake to build the VS libraries

Notes:
Use nmake confclean to clean the directory before running a new configure cmd

Setting up PostgresSQL on Ubuntu

Most of my database use has been with MySQL to date as I have LAMP installations for websites but I was looking for a DB to use with a new desktop application of ours. It seems that Postgres may be a better option. Below are the steps I needed to get a Postgres server running on my laptop.

1) Install the packages
# sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-client pgadmin3

This will install the latest versions, which for ubuntu 9.04 at this time is 8.3 if an older version installs then change the references to directories below as appropriate.

2) Change the admin passwords

# sudo -u postgres psql template1
This will start up the command line admin tool and select the template1 db which seems to be where postgre stores user credentials

# ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD 'new password';
and quit by typing \q

3) Change the ubuntu postgres user password. This is a conveinence step as all the conf files are created with postgres user and group. You could add or edit them as root with sudo and then make sure they are all chown to postgres:postgres

# sudo passwd -d postgres
Will delete the current postgres password (needed otherwise you are asked for it in the next step)
# sudo su postgres -c passwd
Enter a new password. For simplicity use the same password as the admin user above, but can be anything so long as you remember it

Restart the server with
# sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 restart

You can now use the pgAdmin tool to connect to the DB

Additions to the Surgical Tutorials

I have been making some additions to the Surgical Tutorials section of the website. Four topics added are:

• Meckel's Diverticulum
• Bed Sores
• Airway and Ventilatory Management
• Thyroid Malignancy

The Airway and Ventilatory Management is part of a new ATLS notes section and hopefully the other tutorials will also provide for useful revision notes.

EWTD 48 hour opt out survey

We have been running a short EWTD survey on the Surgeons Net site about the 48 hour EWTD week and opting out. If you haven't completed the survey then please contribute. But do note that ASiT and BOTA are going to be conducting a more detailed, longer survey in September.

If you are interested in the results then they are available live on line too.

Target Google AdSense even more by rating your content

There is a nice article on AdSense published recently on DevShed. For my own note I had no idea you could direct what content you wanted Google to concentrate on for displaying relevant ads.

Put the main content inside these comment tags:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

And things you want ignored inside:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Firefox 3 sesson restore

Not sure why but firefox seemed to lose it's session restore feature for me. Maybe something to do with having tab mix plus installed prior to the 2 -> 3 upgrade.

Anyhow here is how to restore session saving.

Enter about:config in the address bar and say yes to the behave yourself warning!

Search down for "browser.sessionstore.resume_session_once" and change the setting to true.

and restart ...

That's it.

Clamav with Qmail-Scanner

Probably the best article on getting clamav to work with Qmail Scanner

http://qmail.jms1.net/clamav/qmail-scanner.shtml

WEBSITES DOWN DUE TO FIRE AT SERVER HOST

Unfortunately there has been an fire at the main data center where our servers are hosted and hence the websites and email are down.

The server company are expecting to starting bringing servers back online this evening, but it may be tomorrow morning before the network is fully restored.

Thank you for your patience.