JGB Industries

Enter to Tab

John — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 01:12:05 +0000

This code from Scripterlative uses JavaScript to change the behaviour of the enter button. Really handy if you’re building forms where your users may hit ‘enter’ to go to the next field, and accidentally submit the form before they’ve finished filling everything in.

Grab it here:
http://scripterlative.com/files/entertotab.htm

[N.B.: This code is provided by the author as 'GratuityWare' - that is, if you want to use it permanently you need to donate an amount of your choice to the author.]

Virtuemart – eway payment method

John — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:29:09 +0000

Joomla’s Virtuemart shopping cart component has a built in payment module for eway – one of the big gun online credit card payment processors.

The ‘normal’ way for a website to set up Virtuemart is to have transactions tied in to user accounts, but if you want to set it up differently so that people can buy stuff from your site without logging in you can do that too.

The way the eway processor works is by sending XML to eway’s server with all the details of the transaction – name, email, credit card number etc.

The problem is that it grabs this information from the Joomla user database, which isn’t much help if you’ve set up Virtuemart to enable transactions without logins.

That’s where this code comes in.

[This code was provided by fredzebu and Gygash at the Virtuemart forum (see post at http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=57773.msg200107).

Open the file administrator/components/com_virtuemart/classes/payment/ps_eway.php and do the following;

1. Replace

$qt = "SELECT * FROM #__users WHERE id='".$auth["user_id"].”‘ AND address_type=’BT’”;

with:

$qt = "SELECT * FROM #__vm_user_info WHERE user_id='".$auth["user_id"]."' AND address_type='BT'";

2. Replace:

$eway->setCustomerEmail( $db->f("email") );

with:

$eway->setCustomerEmail( $db->f("user_email") );

This will correctly set the customer details(Firstname, Lastname, Email, Address).

3. Add this code to the beginning of function doPayment():

$db = new ps_DB;
$qt = "SELECT * FROM #__vm_orders order by order_id";
$db->query($qt);
$rows = $db->loadObjectList();
foreach($rows as $row)
{
$order_id=$row->order_id;
$order_id+=1;
}
$CustomerInvoiceDescription=htmlentities( $this->myCustomerInvoiceDescription );
$CustomerInvoiceDescription.="$order_id";

then replace:

"".htmlentities( $this->myCustomerInvoiceDescription."".

with

""."$CustomerInvoiceDescription"."".

and replace

"".htmlentities( $this->myCardName )."".

with

"".htmlentities( $this->myCardHoldersName )."".

Finally, replace

replace$eway->setCardHoldersName( $payer_name_is + '' );

with

$eway->setCardHoldersName( $payer_name_is . '' );

There - done.

Downloading Chrome behind a firewall

John — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:11:08 +0000

Google Chrome’s installer doesn’t work behind corporate firewalls.

This link fixes that (provided you’ve got access to downloading exe files):

http://filehippo.com/download_google_chrome/

[N.B. – this seems to be a silent installer – nothing comes up on the screen when you update an existing version. Once you re-open Chrome all the work is done.

Eraser Shield

John — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:08:24 +0000

I hadn’t heard of this thing and neither had 95% of the people in my office, so it’s news.

The eraser shield is just a very thing piece of aluminium with various holes cut in it. You stick it over your penciled work and use it to shield the bits you want to keep from the deadly eraser, while still allowing you to erase bits you didn’t want.

It took me ages to find this, but a good arts supply store should stock them.

If you’ve got the patience (I didn’t) here’s a video where one is apparently used.

Thanks to Dave O’Neill and Dave Stock for getting me onto this one.

WD 2TB Drive

John — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:06:33 +0000

I hadn’t always seen the point of external hard drives, but then I stumbled upon about 3TB of stuff that I wanted (in a mystery location) and went out and bought this.

It’s 2TB – ‘2000GB’ – although really that means (2,000,396,288,000 bytes, or 1810GB thanks to kilo/kibi debacle. Still, that’s more storage than all my other drives put together, so it would be rude to complain.

Though it is external, it’s not ‘portable’ – i.e. you can’t move it when it’s on like a laptop. It has a USB2 cable and a power adapter which sucks 12V DC (twice as much as the USB port outputs (5V), but you could in theory run it straight out of your computer like this).

USB2 is plenty fast enough to watch DVD quality movies on the go (480MB/s) – haven’t tried anything better than that but at this stage can’t see why I’d need to.

Using it as a media server on your network is possible – but make sure your router is up to is – my wireless router isn’t quite there.

When you get any external HDD drive, make sure it’s formatted in NTFS, not FAT32 format
FAT32 doesn’t let you copy single files over 4GB (e.g. movies).
If you’re getting one, try here.