cat my-thoughts | blog

I just made another interactive online regular expressions editor to join the fray of other interactive online regular expressions editor all over the net. I hope this can help you out with tasks involving regular expressions.

Can’t wait? Here it is http://io-ree.appspot.com.

Just installed CS Cart and wanted almost ready to open your online store to the public? But wait you need to test if the shipping modules are returning correct shipping quotes. What you get an error on the addresses used in the test? If you are looking for a fix read on.

I have a fresh install of CS Cart 2.0.12 on my localhost I tinkered it a bit to reflect everything on a live store. When I tried to test the shipping quotes I see two Boston, MA addresses and an error message saying that there’s a non-matching postal code. Of course the solution is to just plug in another set of addresses. I looked for it anywhere in the admin panel and I saw them in two places. One in Administration > General under the header default location. This reflects the destination address in the test. The other in Settings > Company under the company header. I changed this and tried the test again it’s still there. So I thought I could be hardcoded somehow so I searched for these addresses on the scripts under the cscart folder. I found them in install/database/data.sql and /var/cache/settings.cache.php. I assumed that data.sql is contains the SQL queries of the initial database contents and the other is a cache somehow keeping the old data shown on the admin panel. I deleted it and everything is good to go.

It’s sad that a commercial software like CS-Cart isn’t so well documented. Maybe they did so on purpose to gain more income via support services. The documentation doesn’t even mention this feature or how to troubleshoot it.

Remember that the origination address is the address under default location in Administration > Settings > General and the origination address is the address in Administration > Settings > Company. To change the addresses on the test simply change these addresses accordingly. If you’re changes aren’t reflected on the test simply delete the settings cache.

Facebook developers are changing the layout of facebook once again. I’m one of the unlucky few to get a taste of what it’s like and how it behaves in it’s early stages. I don’t use facebook that much which makes the transition very difficult.  I was just getting used to the old layout and now I have to unlearn all of that and start over.

I sucks to be a guinea pig. As of the moment facebook is barely usable for me. It even crashes firefox.  The layout makes me feel cloustrophobic. Are the developers trying to optimize for netbooks or even mobiles? What’s with the distorted images? Even the facebook logo is skewed. Why are the options defaulting to global access?

If you are one of those who still have the default layout savour it. It will be as horrible as mine soon enough.

When you think Firefox has gone nuts, think again.  Simply search the web with a description of the odd behaviour and you just might get your answer just like I did.

Most probably it started in the morning when my wife is playing FarmVille on facebook yesterday morning with our baby. His name is Mac and he likes to bang on the keyboard. Mac probably hit F7 and activated what is called caret browsing. It’s an accessibility feature that I never used, I never knew existed and I never knew can be toggled by F7. With caret browsing on, wherever I click on a webpage I see a cursor.  If I happen to click on a giant div I get  giant cursor.

That's one huge cursor invading facebook

At first I thought it was some sort of javascript bug but then it exists on all pages I visit.  I thought it was the desktop theme I’m using (I’m running ubuntu as GNU/Linux distro) but then it’s still there even if I change themes. Baffled and believing it’s a Firefox bug I made a post to ubuntuforums.org to see if anyone has a fix for it.

But wait! Before I made that post I already searched for “giant cursor firefox” on google. I saw results for my query and thought maybe someone else already made a post about it on the forums so I serarched for “giant cursor firefox site:ubuntuforums.org”–no results so I made the post. Right after I made the post I returned to the result of my former query. The first on the list was the answer I was looking for.

For subscribers of these mobile broadband provider here’s a neat trick to be able to connect to the net for free. Please note that these tricks should only be used for educational or emergency purposes. For example you need to get online, you don’t have any credits and you don’t have anyone to top up your account.

For this how-to I’ll be using kproxy. Although there a different proxy servers out there. Just google “proxy servers”. This is the first one I used and the only one I’ve been ever since I’ve learnt about proxying to surf the net in the office.

Ok let’s start. Plug-in the dongle. On your browser type

globe.com.ph.kproxy.com

Your browser should show a page with text input box and the button labeled “Surf!”.  Simpy type in the URL of the site you want to visit and click Surf!

Cheers!

Google is set to shake Microsoft Windows domination with it’s flagship operating system Chrome OS. The operating system it intended to users who use most of their computing time on the web. It’s meant to be fast and sleek, perfect for netbooks. Yes it’s built for the net. In fact the only software on it is Google Chrome Browser.

Here’s a quick demo.

EDIT: Bummer my widgets are on the way.

This is the saddest program ever. It is written to do nothing, and exit telling the operating system that it failed to do what it intended to do. Yet being a Unix utility it is programmed to do its job well as the Unix mantra is: “Write programs to to one thing and do it well.”

Here is the programs manual page.

FALSE(1)                         User Commands                        FALSE(1)

NAME
 false - do nothing, unsuccessfully

SYNOPSIS
 false [ignored command line arguments]
 false OPTION

DESCRIPTION
 Exit with a status code indicating failure.

 --help display this help and exit

 --version
 output version information and exit

 NOTE:  your  shell  may  have  its  own version of false, which usually
 supersedes the version described here.  Please refer  to  your  shell's
 documentation for details about the options it supports.

AUTHOR
 Written by Jim Meyering.

REPORTING BUGS
 Report false bugs to bug-coreutils@gnu.org
 GNU coreutils home page: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
 General help using GNU software: <http://www.gnu.org/gethelp/>

COPYRIGHT
 Copyright  ©  2009  Free Software Foundation, Inc.  License GPLv3+: GNU
 GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
 This is free software: you are free  to  change  and  redistribute  it.
 There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

SEE ALSO
 The full documentation for false is maintained as a Texinfo manual.  If
 the info and false programs are properly installed at  your  site,  the
 command

 info coreutils 'false invocation'

 should give you access to the complete manual.

GNU coreutils 7.4                October 2009                         FALSE(1)

Try googling for the pharse “just another wordpress.com weblog”. Over 141 millions hits for that phrase.

Wordpress.com offers free a free blogging service and when you sign up you’ll just be asked for your username, password, email address, your blog domain and blog title. As a result all new wordpress.com blogs look like this.

Just another screenshot

Wouldn’t it be nice if their sign up form asks for the blog’s subtitle too? Most beginner wordpress user’s barely  knows how to navigate through the admin panel. For some it takes days, even weeks for them to change the blogs subtitle. How could they express their personality when the title says that like other wordpress users they are just one of many?

Instant messaging keeps us in touch with our friends, family, employers and employees. Unfortunately not all of them use the same instant messaging services. These internet messaging services, Yahoo!, ICQ, GTalk, to name a few uses different instant messaging client that you need to install, then launch individually to be able to talk to individuals using them respectively. Even worse most of them saturate your instant messaging experience with tons of advertisement. This guide will show you how to eliminate these hassles with an excellent free software — pidgin.

Pidgin is a software you can download and install to your pc free of charge just like any other instant messaging client. It has support for all of the popular instant messaging protocol. That means you only need to launch one program to be able to chat to your friends even if they are using different instant messaging services. Nifty eh? Another excellent feature is that it’s free of ads.

Pidgin window with protocol icons shown

Installing and Using pidgin

Installing pidgin is easy. Download the installer that is appropriate to you operating system here. Lauch pidgin. You would be presented with a window informing you that you haven’t configures an IM account yet. Simply follow the wizard to add one. Once you have an account configured on pidgin. You may add others under Account>Manage Accounts. Simple.

Enjoy and happy chatting.

Let’s face it often times googling for these files aren’t going to help you find what you’re looking for. There guides on the web claiming to give you relevant search results. But these tricks nowadays is just as useless as the latter. Site builders had caught up with google queries like: intitle:index.of file:mp3 -php, -jsp, -asp.

You’d be better off searching for what you’re looking for in http://www.4shared.com.

Looking for “…for Dummies” e-books? There a more that 350+ of them here.

There used to be an excellent index of e-books here. Unfortunately, for some reason the page is no longer a available. It used to have listing of more than a hundred collection of computer science e-books. Good one’s from o’reilly and Prentice Hall. Pity, I hope the page will be back soon. I’ll keep on checking if it is.