HM2K.com

Tech support blog

hm2k — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:24:12 +0000

I’ve recently launched a tech support job, which combines aspects of my day job with aspects of this blog to form “fixr”.

The new blog will be the new home to my IT tech support posts and solutions.

I will still continue to maintain this blog, but there will be no more technical IT support posts.

- Visit fixr.co.uk
- Follow fixr on twitter

Thanks for your support!

Twitter for mIRC I signed u

Using Your Own URL as Your OpenID with WordPress

hm2k — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:09:33 +0000

Today I decided to join stackoverflow.com, which requires you to login using OpenID.

It was pretty simple to get signed up with myopenid.com, but while I was on the stackoverflow login page I noticed a little message which I found interesting:

Use your own URL

Want to add OpenID support to your website?

It’s as easy as adding two HTML header tags!

Read more..

It basically would mean I could use “hm2k.com” instead of “hm2k.myopenid.com” to login with OpenID, which is pretty neat. There’s also a section in the help on myOpenID.com for using your own domain, which confirms this.

Seems easy enough, I thought. Then I took into consideration that I’m using wordpress, sure not a major problem, I can simply hard code it into my theme, but then do I really want to do that? No, of course not.

Wordpress is renound for it’s ability to be compltely dynamic, I want to stick in line with that. More importantly, I want my OpenID URL to work regardless of what theme I’m using.

So I decided to start looking into it. I soon discovered someone over at wordpress.com had the same idea and had requested a way to add OpenID delegation link to head.

At first I thought about getting a plugin that would inject the required lines of HTML into the head, however after some quite extensive research I found what I was looking for…

The Wordpress OpenID Plugin allows users authorized to use the OpenID Provider can delegate to a different provider, among other things.

Once you have installed and activated the plugin you need to do the following:

Go to the OpenID settings page (/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=openid)
Set the “Blog Owner” as yourself, and click “Save Changes”.
Go to your profile (/wp-admin/profile.php) and scroll to the bottom where it says “OpenID Delegation”.
In the edit box you would provide your OpenID URL (ie: http://hm2k.myopenid.com/)

Now when I check the source code of my site I see the following HTML in the :

Perfect!

I hope you find this as useful as I have.

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Cannot redeclare pclziputilpathreduction()

hm2k — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:49:27 +0000

I had this issue today, I found that you need to deactivate the “Wordpress Automatic Upgrade” plugin as it’s included in the core of Wordpress now anyway.

So, just disable the plugin and try again.

WordPress Upgrade Error Solved – Fatal error: Cannot redeclare pclziputilpathreduction()

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OpenCart v0.7.9 released

hm2k — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:32:13 +0000

OpenCart is an open source PHP-based e-commerce online shop website solution. Ideal for new or existing stores to start selling online.

OpenCart all began because (at the time) the leading open source e-commerce solution out there was not very good, to say the least.

The first public release was OpenCart v0.2 back in early 2006 and has been gaining momentum ever since.

The project is lead by Daniel Kerr, and I have also recently joined the team.

I have been working on 0.7.9 since I released 0.7.8 back in July. OpenCart is now a much more stable platform, and we are now looking to start adding new features in 0.8.

Download OpenCart v0.7.9

If you need any assistance with OpenCart, you can find me on the OpenCart Community Forums, and on the OpenCart project site (Google Code).

Don’t forget to donate!

Enjoy!

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How to restart the explorer shell in Windows XP

hm2k — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:03:21 +0000

If you have landed yourself here chances are you already know why you want to do this, but for those who don’t here’s why:

When installing a new application, they sometimes require you to restart for them to work, often just restarting the Windows explorer shell will be sufficient for it to work as expected.

Normally most people just kill it via Task Manager, but this can have adverse effects on your system (such as data loss), so here’s how to do it properly:

Go to Start -> “Turn Off Computer”
At the “Turn off computer” window, hold down CTRL+ALT+SHIFT and click on “Cancel”.
- When this is done, explorer should cleanly exit and your start menu will have gone.
Hit CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to open Task Manager.
Go to File -> “New Task (Run…)”.
Enter: “explorer” in the “Open” box, and press OK.
- If your start menu appears, explorer has restarted successfully, otherwise try again or reboot.

Enjoy!

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PHP getmxrr() support for windows

hm2k — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:23:41 +0000

As many of you may be aware there’s a lack of getmxrr() support in Windows, which dates back as far as 1999.

It’s not a major problem for me as an individual because I never use WIN32 PHP in production, but for development and for the purpose of wide distribution it can raise an issue.

Apparently the lack of support in win32 is due to the lack of “res_search” in “bindlib_w32″, I’m surprised this hasn’t been fixed already.

The official PHP.net documentation for the getmxrr() function states:

Note: This function is not implemented on Windows platforms. Try the » PEAR class » Net_DNS.

However, there are problems with this suggestion…

Some users don’t have access to install the required PEAR module.
pear/Net_DNS requires PHP extension “mhash” – some users may not have this installed.
The Net_DNS class does not have a direct equivalent to getmxrr() so results may not be as expected.
It’s not a portable solution, especially if some users experience the above issues.

This isn’t going to be a realistic option for many users.

So, what are the alternatives? Do they have any issues?

Use exec() in conjunction with “nslookup.exe“.
- When safe mode is enabled, you can only execute files within the safe_mode_exec_dir. For practical reasons, it is currently not allowed to have .. components in the path to the executable.
- “nslookup.exe” may not exist on the system.
- PHP may not have permission to run “nslookup.exe”.
Write your own class/function to fsockopen() via UDP to a name server and parse the returned information.
- Long and overly complex.
- Requires understanding of the DNS related RFCs.
- Reinventing the wheel, as Net_DNS already handles this.
- Results may not be as expected.
Fix the implementation problem in PHP core.
- Not very simple to implement.
- May be a complex issue.
- Not backwards compatible.

I think the obvious option here is to run with the first option of using “nslookup” and hope for the best.

With any luck you will find the “getmxrr() support for Windows” function in on the getmxrr() manual page (find the latest here).

NEWS FLASH!

As I write this, and go over the article again, check my links, I see an update on the PHP Bug #5311 tracker:

As a new year present, all DNS functions are now available on windows,
5.3 and 6 (head).

This is good news, all that remains is for PHP_Compat to catch up and use the above suggestions

Good luck.

Update: I am now helping the PHP_Compat team. View the getmxrr() support for windows feature request.

Update2: I have now decided to support checkdnsrr() as well. Download checkdnsrr() support for windows.

Update3: I have now decided to support dns_get_record() as well. Coming soon.

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Free icon sets for your website

hm2k — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:48:02 +0000

If you don’t have the time to make your own icons for your latest product or website, then you need to find some for free.

More often than not, the actual task of finding icons can be even more time consuming than if you made them yourself! Okay, maybe not, but pretty close, needless to say, they are often difficult to find as there aren’t that many going for free.

Here’s a list of free icon sets:

Icon Resources

Note: I may revisit this article at a later date.

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Missing Mediaid.bin file

hm2k — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 14:54:49 +0000

Recently I got asked to backup a Vista machine. I’m not a big Vista fan, so this was the first time.

I went ahead and backed up the entire machine onto my external USB hard drive, no problems.

However when it came to restore to a new vista machine I found myself with the following error:

The restore did not finish successfully. Error code:
The backup file could not be found. Check your hardware configuration or restore from a different backup (0×8100001A).

Through the wonders of the internet I discovered the Microsoft Knowledgebase article appropreately titled “Error message when you use the Restore Files option to restore a backup file on a Windows Vista-based computer: “The restore did not finish successfully. Error code: 0×8100001A”“.

As it turns out I must have deleted the “what seems to be unimportant file” Mediaid.bin which the backup utility places in the root of the backup drive, with no reason or explanation.

I soon learned the importance of this file as usefully (sarcasm) the article says:

If the backup location is inaccessible, or if the Mediaid.bin file is corrupted, contact Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS) for help rebuilding the Mediaid.bin file.

Great, I’m really not going to be calling them, there must be another way…

Fortunately there was, and so to rebuild the “Mediaid.bin” file these are the steps to take:

Download and unzip “sdutil.zip” and rename the containing “sdutil.ex_” to “sdutil.exe”.
MOVE “sdutil.exe” to your backup drive. (eg: G:\)
Right click on “sdutil.exe” and click “Properties”, click on the “Compatibility” tab at the top, and tick “Run as administrator”, follow the instructions. (If you don’t do this you’ll see “Access is denied. (0×80070005)“)
Find the “Catalogs” directory and COPY the “GlobalCatalog.wbcat” to your backup drive (eg: G:\)
Go to Start > “Start Search” and enter: cmd, click on the “cmd” program from the list.
In the black command prompt window enter your backup drive (eg: G:), press enter, and the prompt will change to “G:\>”
Now in that same window type: sdutil mediaid GlobalCatalog.wbcat [backup drive (eg: G:\)]and press enter.

A Mediaid.bin file should now appear on the backup drive and you should be able to continue with your restore as normal.

Note: “sdutil.exe” only runs on Windows Vista, it will not run on Windows XP.

source.

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PHPizabi – creating a dating site

hm2k — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:00:36 +0000

During the summer of 2007 I decided to purchase a new domain name with a dating theme.

The idea was to start a dating website. Although a fairly saturated market place, I figured it’d be another one to add to my profile.

Earlier on in the year I remember coming across an article on the .net magazine website, entitled “Creating your own dating site” (part2, part3).

In the article Karl Hodge explains how PHPizabi is the ideal social networking site engine with messaging and chat features.

One of the most interesting statements very early on in this article is this:

PHPizabi is a refreshingly professional, 100 per cent open source, social networking and dating application.

But we’ll come back to this later.

We begin with the preparation steps, where we see a screenshot of the author’s attempt: “dogmeet.net” – it looks pretty neat.

Sure i’m a pretty advanced user, so I’ll skip this and jump directly to the comments to see what’s been said.

just google phpizabi and you get www.phpizabi.net – it’s open source which means you can download it all from the interweb.

Thanks Sam, this should get me started.

Visiting the site, I’m greeted with quite a pretty looking site, however the last entry in their news is a vulnerability report from back in August 2008, I figured this would be fixed by now and proceeded to download regardless.

The file I got given was “PHPizabi_0.848b_C1_HFP1.zip“.

I skip to step 2: Installation.

I quickly notice that the installation I’m using is nothing like the (better looking) screenshots in the tutorial, but I thought “never mind it must be a newer version”.

Upon completion of the fairly straightforward installation I get straight to work.

First thing I look at is the themes. There is only one provided and it looks nothing like the (better looking) one seen on the article. Strange, I thought, perhaps they are using a different package.

From here I proceeded to to investigate what other themes I can get for free. I soon found out that “not many” was the answer, although I did find a link entitled “PhpIzabi Mods, 24 mods & themes:FREE DOWNLOAD“. I figured it may be worth a look at.

Pretty wrong. The themes were no better coded than the shipped one. Poor markup, poor use of CSS, and just generally not very good looking.

This would take some time to cleanup. I started anyway.

I cleaned up the “frame.tpl” making it all XHTML, removed the table layout, and added new styles to handle it. I also cleaned up “home.tpl” and a few more of the tpl files.

I eventually started getting somewhere, so decided to browse around the site I had started to form. Some of the pages simply didn’t look right, and wouldn’t populate correctly. I decided to look at the code.

In a way, I wish I never had. In the “index.php” I noticed a lot of poor coding, stuff that I’d not seen since about 2005, makes sense since the copyright says 2005, and last modification date was September 3rd 2006.

This isn’t very reassuring, this would need a LOT of work to bring it up to speed for 2008. Perhaps I downloaded the wrong version? There must be a more up to date version or a simply better version?

It was at this point that I decided to read the included documentation starting with the “UPDATE_README.TXT”. Here I find this:

To perform an update from PHPizabi 0.4XX, please visit the PIO website to download
the latest migration tool – http://online.phpizabi.net

Interesting. 0.4XX must have been a fairly popular version for them to create a migration tool for and I also found that the “phpizabi online” contained lots of mods and themes.

However, looking at the “core” releases I found that the latest release was “Mar. 5th 2007″. This is not good for any project.

What the hell is going on here? Time to do some research.

I came across the PHPizabi demo site, which looks similar to the version I have (apart from the mention of Alicia), only it has broken pages too (see Inkspot). I’m convinced I have the wrong version now.

This is when I discover phpizabi.com, and their about section:

PHPizabi was founded in mid 2005 by Jeff Knipp whom hired Claude Desjardens to code a personal website. A short time later Claude and Jeff agreed to become 50/50 partners and the personal project became what was destined to be known as PHPizabi.

In August 2005 the first release of PHPizabi was made available to the general public to download free of charge. PHPizabi has gained international fame through various publications as one of the best free community softwares on the market and has a broad following of users.

In November 2006, Jeff was illegally removed from the PHPizabi project by Claude Desjardens. Though legal remedy has not been ruled out, the best interest of the community was taken into consideration and thus the creation of this site which was created to offer the community an alternative to the non-community oriented support provided by the PHPizabi.net site.

Where the net site surrounds themselves around those only wishing to make a buck or two by allowing people to sell 1 line code mods for ridiculous prices, we beleive in the open source community spirit. While we do have the Mod Club, we have many mods that are free, and as always support is 100% free.

Turns out there’s legal issues surrounding this product. This is no good.

I decided to return the original article and try and figure out where it all went so wrong.

On the first page, I find the following statements which I had clearly missed:

Find the file PHPizabi_0.415b_R3.zip on this issue’s CD and drag it over to your hard drive

return to the CD and find the file 0415bR3_sphfixHFP.zip

As it seems, they ARE using a different version, it appears to be the earlier 0.4XX version mentioned in the upgrade text in the newer version. I found this:

PHPizabi 0.415b R4 6.03Mb 11/23/2005 No support Encrypted (IonCube)

Low and behold here we have the version mentioned in the article, released back in 2005, however it has IonCube Encryption on the core files. Odd because I remember the article saying that it was 100% open source. Guess not.

Further research via google news finds me an article describing a known vulnerability in PHPizabi. I also discovered that there is still no fix, dubbing PHPizabi as the most hackable Dating Script on the Internet. There’s no end to security issues in PHPizabi.

It seems I’m not alone, others have also had bad experiences with PHPizabi and apparently support sucks even when you pay.

So what now? I CANNOT use this, it’s unprofessional, barely usable, unmaintainable, poorly coded and worst of all vulnerable to exploitation. This project is dead.

So with the help of my earlier research, and wikipedia, I found some alternatives:

Also checkout this social networking solution comparison table at techcrunch.

What did you decide to go with and why?

Hopefully a “refreshingly professional, 100 per cent open source, social networking and dating application”, but I don’t hold high hopes.

UPDATE: I decided to share my article with the PHPizabi.com forum, however I guess they didn’t agree with me as I’m banned. The reply post notification via email from blackbook says: “yea ya like giving links to my paid mods for free..your banned dude”, thanks, as good as an excuse as any I guess, but it begs the question: now who’s “wishing to make a buck or two”? Besides, let’s face it, if nobody is going to want to use PHPizabi, who’s going to want to use the mods anyway?

UPDATE2: I’m looking at writing a dating site solution using CakePHP as the framework, based on Matt Inman’s Mingle2. I symapthise with his decision to write his own solution. Wish me luck!

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Don’t forget to run make test!

hm2k — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:17:26 +0000

During my install of PHP5 on FreeBSD…

Build complete.
Don’t forget to run ‘make test’.

amber# make test
make: don’t know how to make test. Stop

It made me laugh anyway.

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