Joomla Firefly Template

Joomla Template Firefly is really one of the most popular templates out there. This template was made by Yootheme and to date this is still one of the most powerful templates out there.


Get it here:

Link

Getting error 10002 'Security Header is not Valid' SOLVED

I've been getting error 10002 'Security Header is not Valid' when trying to use the Paypal API with NVP php sample code. I started hacking at the project of integrating Joomla Virtuemart with the paypal DoDirectPayment API. I first made a standalone php file which calls the API to process a hardcode transaction. The file works when I load that single file directly no problem. I can check the transaction online at the sandbox. Then when I try to load this file during the checkout process in Joomla it gives me the error 10002 'Security Header is not Valid'. I then dived into the code and found out the way to solve is to replace the line

global $environment;

with

$environment = 'sandbox'; // or 'beta-sandbox' or 'live'

make sure you cut this line from outside the function
function PPHttpPost


This should solve your problem. Then you can experiment more and pack the string from your session, and your API should work no problem. Drop me a line if you have any question.

How to reset Windows XP NT password from BackTrack 3

How to reset windows xp or NT password? You can download a version of Linux called Backtrack 3(BT3), basically it is a version of Slackware Linux that is built with all security tools. For the purpose of this experiment, you can download either the CD version or the USB memory stick version. The tool that you need to unlock XP password is called chntpw, and if you can find a version of BT3, then you can find it in the path
/pentest/password/chntpw

the windows password file can be found at

[mount point]/WINDOWS/system32/config/SAM

then you can goto the /WINDOWS/system32/config directory and type

/pentest/password/chntpw -u administrator SAM

you can clear the password of the administrator account.


Enjoy

PayPal Php SDK

Recently I am at a project regarding integrating the paypal direct payment pro at a coffee shopping website. Over at Paypal there are a lot of documentations on how to install the php sdk for one to test. However when I was trying to type in the command line

C:\>php install.php

I get the error message

C:\phpsdk>php install.php
INSTALLATION ERROR:
Please cd to the C:\phpsdk and run install.php

at the designated directory, I get the error message telling me to cd to that directory of /php-sdk/ then try it again. But I AM at that directory! I tried looking online and checked the version of php and other software inside XAMPP, and I couldn't find the problem. Then I jumped into the code of the install.php and found that the error. When I was unpacking my data, I had the folder named phpsdk, and that's where php keeps flaging me. The problem is the NAME of the directory (not the path to it) holding php-sdk HAS to be "php-sdk" exactly. And after this error, I basically got the SDK setup and got sandbox to deal with payments in no time.

Install website payment pro Paypal API in Joomla virtuemart

How to install PayPal Pro US recurring direct payment for virtuemart?

1.copy the files to related folder.

2. Go to your VirtueMart Payment configuration screen (add payment)
3. Name the new Payment Module as whatever you prefered .
4.Set Code: PP_RE
Payment class name: ps_paypal_prosub
Payment class type: credit card
5. Click save
6. Edit the new Payment Method again and click on configuration
7. Fill out form and MAKE SURE WHETHER YOU WILL USE SANDBOX .
You also need to enter your PayPal API signature information which you can find in your PayPal Profile (click API Signature) in your PayPal account.
8. Click Save

• 9. Make sure it's enabled.

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DD-wrt X86 Installation How-to

DD-WRT X86 Instalation Tutorial

Written by GrayFox

Sunday, 01 July 2007

In this tutorial I will explane how to install DD-WRT X86 What is dd-wrt DD-WRT is a routing operating system based off of Linux. It was originally released as a third-party firmware for the popular Linksys WRT54G router. Now with it no longer limited by the small 16MB of ram and slow CPU in the WRT54G you don't have to worry about resource usage. Files needed I suggest grabing the latest version of DDWRT X86 the download page is here. At the time of writing this the following links had the latest version. physdiskwrite (needed for Windows) dd-wrt_public_vga Requirements: An X86 compatible pc (i386) or greater with at least 16MB of RAM, 2 network cards, and a hard drive. The files listed above. Test platform For my test platform I used a Pentium 3 450 with 384MB of ram and a 10.4GB hard drive. The network cards were the following: Intel Pro/1000MT Desktop Adaptor Integrated 3COM nic. Linux/OSX Instructions Step 1- Open your computers case and plug in the hard-drive that you wish to install dd-wrt onto. Step 2 - Open up your console/terminal program. Step 3 - Become a super user and enter in your super user password (Or if your on Ubuntu or OSX just type sudo before the dd command.) Example: su Step 4 - Navigate to where the image file is located. Step 5 - Use the command dd to write the image to the desired hard drive /dev/hda =Primary Master /dev/hdb =Primary Slave /dev/hdc =Secondary Master /dev/hdd =Secondary Slave Example: If you wanted to write the dd-wrt image to your primary master drive, you would using the following command. dd if=dd-wrt_public_vga.image of=/dev/hda Live CD The instructions are exactly the same as for Linux but you don't have to put the hard-drive into another machine. I suggest using KNOPPIX or DSL Linux if you want to do a live CD install. Windows Installation To install this on Windows, it's just as easy as with Linux. Step 1 - Open your computers case and plug in the hard-drive that you wish to install dd-wrt onto. Step 2 - Open the command prompt. (Windows XP, 2000, 2003= Start>Run>cmd) Step 3 - Navigate to the directory where physdiskwrite.exe is and where your image is. Step 4 - Enter the following command : physdiskwrite -u dd-wrt_public_vga.image Step 5 - Select the disk you want to install dd-wrt to from the list. DD-WRT After you have imaged the hard-drive boot the machine. You should see a login prompt after everything has loaded and booted. Now plug your switch into your eth1 interface (the second network card in your machine, If you have onboard the onboard will be eth0 and your pci card will be eth1.) The web administration interface can be accessed at 192.168.1.1 and the default username is root default password is admin. DD-WRT Wireless Lan I am unsure if DD-WRT currently supports wireless as at the time of writing this I had not tryed any wireless cards I had. The version that runs on linksys WRT54G supports wi-fi as well as sputnik.

Drupal Must Have's for professional website

1. CCK
http://drupal.org/project/cck

cck image
http://drupal.org/project/imagefield
http://www.drupal.org/project/imagecache

cck Media files
http://drupal.org/project/emfield

2. View
http://drupal.org/project/view

3. Menu
http://drupal.org/project/nice_menus
http://drupal.org/project/menu_trim

4. SEO
http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap
http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect
http://drupal.org/project/nodewords
*http://drupal.org/project/search404

5. Editor/Filter
http://drupal.org/project/bueditor
http://drupal.org/project/codefilter

Optional Modules
Event
http://drupal.org/project/event

Print
http://drupal.org/project/print

Captcha
http://drupal.org/project/captcha

Editor

WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) editor
http://drupal.org/project/wymeditor
WYMeditor is a lightweight XHTML/Javascript WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) editor.

Education Modules
http://drupal.org/project/library

http://drupal.org/project/quiz

Library Modules
http://drupal.org/project/marc

For Education
http://drupal.org/project/phpedu

Adds and maintains expiry dates for user accounts.
http://drupal.org/project/account_expiry

Confused about the similar function of modules? Read the "Comparisons of contributed modules" http://drupal.org/node/266179

===========
Note:
* optional.

More coffee Art from my Sunbeam Paul Bassett

More results of coffee art from my Sunbeam Paul Bassett machine.

How to make Coffee Art

Coffee Art
I'm sure most of you have seen a picture/Video of people making coffee art. It is indeed a piece of Art to master the skills in making a double Rosetta in that small coffee cup of yours. I have an espresso machine at home and I still can't make them on a consistent basis. Kudos to every master on this page here.
Just to show some comparison, I made this!

Installation of Ubuntu LAMP in VMWARE

This is a detailed instruction on how to do the following, I think it's very useful for everyone out there who is trying to set this up.

READ

Enjoy!

Computer just shuts off suddenly, no noise, no beep

My computer is setup such that it is connected to my living room's LCD. And I have been watching video on it ever since. I've had an ugly computer case for a long time, and I think it is time to move to a new silverstone case to add that little something missing in my living room. After relocating the guts of my machine, I find that my new machine is shutting down very randomly. It is not a restart, it's just a sudden shut down which left my computer in a state of ON but not functioning, ON but fan not working, ON but power supply fan stopped.
First suggestion of such problem is usually overheat. I tried cleaning the CPU fan/ heat sink, operating while the case is opened, also taking the hard disk out of the box to cool it down. All of the above doesn't work.
Then I start to think whether it is a power supply issue. The silverstone case has a front LCD display which draws power from the computer. My system might be on the boarder line of voltage requirement, and when it is under load it draws over the limit of my powersupply, thus killing the system. However this doesn't seem to be the problem.
I then decide that it might be a piece of hardware that is not connected properly to the motherboard when I moved it. I tried reconnecting every cable. I took out all the RAM, took out the video card, tightened every screw, but still no result.
I then suspect that the power supply is providing bad shape of power to the computer, unfortunately I don't have an extra power supply at home to test that. I took out the power supply then I turn my computer on, and viola, it is working fine.
There are a few possible outcome of this problem,
1. I still haven't fixed it.
2. The power supply is overheating
3. Parts of the power supply is hanging loose, therefore when I change the orientation of the placement of the power supply, it works. (I rotated it 90 degrees with respect to the horizon)


I will replace the power supply with a better one, and hopefully it will solve my problem.

Photoshop Video Tutorial

My recent purchase of a DSLR Canon 400D had got me interested in digital editing in photoshop. Here are more information on that subject, enjoy.

READ

33 tips to enhance human photo with photoshop

Check out this link for tips for body enhancements, enjoy

Read

Full VC contact list from CA from docstoc

I was browsing around and saw this list. This is quite interesting.

READ



Venture Capital Firms in California (full contact info) - Get more free documents

Mattel CEO has some reporting to do

Mattel CEO has to face Congress in the coming week. Wall Street Journal reports that Mattel's Chief Executive will have to testify for their procedures for hazardous toys and their recent recalls. On the other side of the globe in the APEC, the presidents of the two countries were fighting on the same topic. Chinese president insist that this issue will not be overlooked by Beijing, the country's capital. New Zealand also jumped onto the bandwagon and accused China of poisonous toothpaste and fire hazardous pajamas. Later reports shows that New Zealand's jumped the gun on these issues, third party report shows that these products are still within the safety limits. Chinese merchants went on further to say that most of these products are designed in the US, they should share some of the responsibility in their end product.

Chinese Merchant Suicide on Mattel's recall

The head of the factory who supply toys to Mattel had hung himself after receiving the news that nearly 1 million of his toy is returned. I just think this is a sad story. Zhang Shuhong of Lee Der Industrial Co. Ltd cannot carry the financial burden, thus, decided to take his own life. Not only is Mattel heavily affected, so is the Chinese export industry, along with the suppliers of the Lee Der Industrial Co. Ltd. This will have a chain of effects in the Hong Kong and China's toy manufacturer.

Panda Virus in China

[photo:xinhua]

The recent Panda Virus (熊猫烧香) is creating quite a stir in China. Our factory is heavily hit by this virus and it is very costly for us. A portion of our ERP is down and cleaning is very complicated. A source code of the virus can be found in akykia's blog. The virus was originally started in mid Feburary before the Chinese New Year, and it has spread very quickly around China. Some reported that the virus has undergone mutation to an even more deadly virus. It is believed that the virus will expand itself from the port 139/145 on the same network. Therefore please block those ports appropriately. There are independent fix for this virus on most of the big china anti virus websites. However, make sure to disconnect your computer before trying to fix it.

Installation of SugarCRM on cPanel

Recently I was looking at different ERP services for our company, and I came across this open Source CRM program, as many of you know SugarCRM is a powerful Open Source CRM. So I took the chance to try to set it up on public hosting services with cPanel. It is actually quite simple, I am not an internet GURU, but it took me less than an hour to install it. Here are the steps

1. Download SugarCRM from SugarCRM. Make sure to download the full installation package (not the one with the bitRock Installer).

2. Goto your cPanel setup screen. If you want your sugar to be a subdomain (e.g. sugar.yourdomain.com) then you can first add a subdomain. Goto your cPanel login screen, and click on "subdomains" under "Domain". I have one setup under sugar, so I type in
"sugar" in the empty box where you can add subdomains, and select the domain where you want to add this under. Click on the add button and you will see a successful message.

3. When that is done you need to setup a MySQL account, go back to the login screen for cPanel, and goto "MySQL" under "database". goto the empty box where it says "Db:________Add Db" and add the database, for this you might want to use something like sugarCRM. After that you will need to Add user, type in the username and password you want to use for your database, this is the master password for the MySQL database(we call it the Database_username, and Database_password). Hold on, we are not done yet, we need one more step, we need to add that user to that specific database you have just recently created. Look under the under the "Database" label and local "User:_____ Db:_____", select the user and database name that you have just created and click on the "Add user to DB" button. Remember that the way cPanel labels the database is yourdomain.com_yourDBName, in this case it is yourdomain.com_sugarCRM. Now you are ready for installation.

4. The reason we download the SugarOS without the installer is cPanel already has MySQL installed, so we can just create it there. Now we need to upload the Sugar to the FTP server onto cPanel, there is a few ways to do this. You can either setup a user account for the site's FTP and upload with an FTP agent, or you can upload with the built in Java FTP agent. I went with the second option, which was quick and easy. Goto "Ftp Manager" under "Site Management" and choose "UnlimitedFTP". Now you can upload the unpacked content to the FTP server. Adding the subdomain should create a default directory under your "public_html" directory, go there and unload all your content. For my installation, I used sugar.yourdomain.com, so I just uploaded all the content to public_html/sugar/

5. After the long wait of the upload, goto http://yourdomain.com/sugar/. The installation is now more than half way. Skip the default welcome page and The system will perform a system check, if they are all green then you can just click next. On the next page (step:3) you will be quizzed of the recent names that you just made up. Let's first start with the questions:

Host name : localhost
Database Name : yourdomain.com_sugarCRM
Username for SugarCRM: Yourdoma_sugarcr
The user name only takes the first 8 char and the last 7 char for database username. You should always verify the user name and database name in the "MySQL" menu under "Database", make sure to include the full name, a copy and paste can ensure that you got the full name with the _ in between.
Password for SugarCRM: Database_Password

These are nothing more than the names that you have created before. Next is a few clicks on if you needed demo data. I wanted a clean install, so I went with only the privileged user choice.



6. The next page asks you of more question, you need to type the URL of the subdomain to make this work. The URL should be sugar.yourdomain.com. Then you have to decide an administrative password. Type that twice and click on next to goto the confirm page. Make sure everything is typed correctly and you can wrap up the installation with the "finish" button. Installation will start and will only take a mater of seconds. After the installation finish you are asked if you want to register. Answer all questions and you will be redirected to the default login page.

Congratulations! you have just installed SugarCRM on your domain!

ERP decision on our Factory

We manufacture PCBs, for those of you that doesn't know what this stands for, it's Printed Circuit Board. It is basically the piece of board that you see, usually green, when you open any electronic device. We have a factory in China and Office in Hong Kong. And recently we want to improve our efficiency by installing ERP (or catch up with the 20th century). And we are going thru the decision phase, there is the good old famour Oracle, SAP and the PCB industry favorite Paradigm. All the big shots knows how to make a good ERP, but they might not fit our industry. Paradigm is famous, but the user feedback from our buddies in the industry doesn't seem promising. There's a great gap between what you want and what they are offering, they are rather big, thus doesn't give you much support if you are a small company. Changes has to be made by their headquarter, and you have to pay a premium to get that service. That's why we search for other local sources. To our surprises, one of the local ERP makers has a solution for PCB ERP. And we are thrilled to see that they have a very flexible system, plus they are of a similar size to us, which probably means that we are one of their bigger customer. They also have consultants that knows the PCB industry, their software is designed specifically for the PCB industry. They are also offering to Consultant services for our PCB production. These guys at Welcome ERP 迎新集团 are showing that they know what they are doing. Their references seem to respond well to their product. They do have very competitive pricing, and they know businesses that spreads across the boarder like us, so it should be a good fit. I will update more on the decision process.

Yahoo has screwed me over with their domain registration service

Hi,

I know this isn't exactly the right place to fuel this, but I felt that I had to write this somewhere, and this is the only blog I have, so here goes,

I had always been a victim of domain registration. I was a dissatisfied godaddy customer before. It all started from the day when I borrowed a friend's computer to check on my domain settings and paid the domain registration on his computer. I registered some domains because I felt that I wanted to have my name as the domain site. So I never got to the point of building my site, I just paid to get my name reserved. However, in the next year when my renewal fee is due, I was ready to pay for my renewal. I then found out that I don't hold my domains anymore, all the domains are held with my friend's account with godaddy along with his own domains. It was very strange how something like that could happen, maybe the mix and match of cookies within the browser, or the logging of the IP address when you are paying that result in something like that. I called godaddy with both of us on the phone and they said they couldn't transfer back the accounts, it had to be that way. The only way they can do it is to cancel the domains and then register it with my own account. Being a not so happy customer, I jumped ship to yahoo. At the time it was offering $9.95 domain registration, so I jumped even though my year on godaddy still had a few months left. Then I realize it's a good time to register all the family members in my family for their domain names too, they might be worth something later. That was in 2004.


It is now 2006, by now most of you would probably have heard of Google (the provider of this free blog space). And most of us are aware of the new service they provide, Google Applications service. As a domain holder ( or as I thought I was ) I wanted to give it a try, since all my domains are hosted in yahoo, and I don't want to pay an extra dime to get extra email services. Google is offering service so that I can use it with my domain name(free), and they give you free email (with 2 GB) and some free service like calendar, webpage hosting design, etc. I followed all their instruction on how to setup email and www, I changed the C Name record and MX record on server. It was very simple cause Google gave instruction specifically for Yahoo Small Business Domain. I waited a few days then went back to check. It wasn't working, so I checked the MX records, maybe I didn't add the dot at the end of the records which is causing all these confusion. I added it and it says it needs 48 hours to update. So I waited another 2 days. I thought Google should've given better instructions, it's not a very difficult task, how come it's taken me 4 days. Then I checked in today.

And then the bad news strike.

I asked my colleague to check on why it's not working, and he found out that in fact the domain that was registered with Yahoo is in fact not taken. Then I check all my other domains of my family members, some of it shows that they are registered to OTHER people. I thought it might have been an hacker attempt on my domains. However, when I search the domain information, I found them not specifically located to a specific company or country. Some of it seems legit because of my family name SO, only a handful in the world would get it. And seeing some of the address are actually in Hong Kong makes me believe that it might not be of hacker attempt.

I then go onto the Yahoo domain name service to see if my domains are available, they are in fact available. But all this time my account in Yahoo Small Business has been telling me that I own those domains. Even up till now. I paid for the service 2 years ago, and I renewed a few of them last year. They had taken the money from my credit card, and it's a legit transaction. There are a few sites that are still under my name, but that's because these sites are registered within the last year. I simply can't believe how a big company like Yahoo cannot do something as simple as registering domain names, I sincerely hope that this is some kind of hack, otherwise I will probably take some legal action against yahoo. I really do like most of those names cause they are of my family's firstlastname.com. Which is hard to come by. A few of them are already taken and that really sucks. I was thinking of giving the domain names to them as their birthday present or something in the future, plus I've been paying all that money to them, it's not a lot, but still.....

I have captured all the necessary screens and I have sent them an email to "remind" them about my domain. I am waiting for their email right now and thinking of what I will do in the future. Anyone any suggestions? I doubt if I will get it back, cause there are people using those domains already.