Month: October 2007

WordPress 2.3.1

WordPress 2.3.1 is now available. 2.3.1 is a bug-fix and security release for the 2.3 series.

2.3.1 fixes over twenty bugs. Some of the notable fixes are:

  • Tagging support for Windows Live Writer
  • Fixes for a login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than
    their WordPress Address
  • Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries
  • Link importer fixes

…

The part that interested me the most was the tagging support for Live Writer. After a little research I figured out that I did not need to anything except refresh my blog account. To test this feature I created a new post and placed my tags in the field at the bottom of the Live Writer window called keywords. After publishing my post the browser confirmed that the tags were correctly entered. That is simple!

WordPress 2.3.1

25 Code Snippets for Web Designers (Part7)

Every web designer finds it handy to have a collection of code snippets such as javascript effects, pieces of html and widgets that they incorporate into their designs. Lets take a look at recent examples of these …

This is an interesting collection of snippets that I need to investigate further. The creativity in web development never ceases to amaze me.

25 Code Snippets for Web Designers (Part7)

Tracking down the cause of a 537 login problem

Recently I re-installed my desktop software on to a different disk drive and I started getting several event ID 537 error messages in the server security log. The workstation was not showing any operational problems so this is a low priority problem. The biggest problem is that the shear number of errors distorts my server monitoring report. Its annoying me about a non-critical problem. Somewhere in my past I had fixed this problem but unfortunately I could not remember how I did it. In fact I am not sure I ever knew how I fixed it! This particular error occurs with a status code of 0xC00002EE. Microsoft has an ambiguous explanation for this error message. Suffice to say there explanation was not helpful. Yesterday I got annoyed enough to solve the problem.

If you search the web for the 537 event ID, you will find several proposed solutions. Here are some of the solutions:

  1. Check to see if your workstation has a different time than the server.
  2. Remove HP printer monitoring software.
  3. Remove network interface card monitoring software.

None these solutions applied to me so I had to dig deeper into the problem.  The first thing I found out was that these errors appeared in clusters of three at periodic intervals. It looked like something at the workstation was triggering this error at periodic intervals so I started browsing the event logs on the workstation for an error at this time. I found that the automatic certificate enrollment was failing. Hmm….

When you look at the error message for the automatic certificate enrollment, you can see that it was failing because the “RPC server is unavailable”. So I cranked up the certificate snap-in and saw that the computer did not have a computer certificate. I also figured out that I could trigger the enrollment error by manually asking for a new certificate. Although there are a lot of causes of enrollment errors, I quickly focused on problems related to the ISA 2004 server and the RPC filter. ISA is a great firewall but sometimes it can be over protective. One of the recommended fixes was  to turn off “strict RPC Compliance”.  So I disabled that option, restarted the ISA firewall, and manually asked for a certificate. No Luck! I got the same error.

The next trick that some people advised was to disable the RPC filter in ISA. So I disabled the RPC filter, restarted the firewall, and manually asked for the certificate again. This time it worked and I have a computer certificate that is valid for a year. I enabled the RPC filter and restarted the firewall to put everything back to normal.

This morning I checked the log file on both the server and the workstation. Both log files look normal. The errors are gone and no new errors have appeared. Since I believe that I am running a fully patched ISA server, the RPC problem is a curious problem. For kicks I checked the date on the rpcflter.dll. It looks like the latest and greatest version so I suspect that the RPC problem probably lies elsewhere. Oh well! At least I know how to get rid of the problem for a year.

Importing invoices into QuickBooks using AutoIt Script

For several years I have successfully used the QuickBooks IIF format to import bills, checks, and employee hours. I have been less successful with invoices and I was unable to import payments. Several times I considered writing a C# or VB program to import the data but I backed off because it looked like it would take too much time. I looked at AutoIt but felt it would have a steep learning curve, too. Yesterday I decided to give AutoIt a try and after a couple of hours I was able import both invoices and payments.

Since I am the treasurer for a Habitat for Humanity affiliate I have a strong need to make sure our mortgage tracking system is kept in sync with QuickBooks accounts. I use an Excel spreadsheet to reconcile mortgage payments we record in the specialized system with the actual bank deposits. This is where I find the errors since we use one person to record the payments and another person to record the deposits. For each mortgage payment I must allocate it to principal, escrow, and late fee. If everything works fine, then both systems have the correct values for each individual home owner’s mortgage and escrow accounts. I set up an invoice for the principal owed when the home owner closes on the house. Every month I enter invoices for the escrow and late fees due. Habitat does not charge interest. On an average month I need to enter 30 to 40 invoices and 30 to 40 payments. As you can see, I have a vested interest in seeing that this project be quick and accurate.

The present script is a work in progress. I feed the data into the script via a VBA macro I created in my spreadsheet. The macro writes out the payment values as AutoIt code onto a new worksheet. Then I paste this code into my AutoIt script, save the script, and run it. Crude but effective. The code for the invoice screen was pretty straightforward and I am letting it run automatically. The code for the payment requires human interaction since I must allocate the payment to the different invoices. It pre-fills the payment screen and then asks me to allocate the payment and save the payment before proceeding. I click on a popup to process the next payment.

Before next month I will have the macro writing out the code to a text file that I can “include” in the script and include a little bit more error checking.

Updating my blog to WordPress 2.3 and migrating existing UTW tags to the WP native tags

Well, I finally updated this blog to WordPress 2.3. After I upgraded WordPress to version 2.3, I imported my tags from Ultimate Tag Warrior and then I made several changes to my theme before everything looked normal. To get there I had to:

  1. Replace the UTW function in my index.php, single.php, and archive.php files with this function, <?php the_tags(‘Tags:<ul><li>’, ’</li><li>’, ‘</li></ul>’); ?>. I had trouble finding the documentation for this function and Rich did not provide a good example of how to use it. After some guessing I came up with the correct parameters to generate valid html for an unordered list.
  2. Rename/delete my tag.php page. It interfered with the native tag support.
  3. I followed Rich’s suggestion and added the Executable PHP Widget widget to my blog. I used this widget to create a new tag cloud widget to replace my UTW tag cloud widget. I reduced the maximum font size down from 36 to 24 to get it to fit in my sidebar
  4. I added the wordpress-23-related-posts-plugin for related posts to replace the similar UTW function. I added the function call to display the related posts just under “the_tags” function call in my index.php, single.php, and archive.php files.

SVN access available! – phpWebSite

Version control access has been restored to the phpWebSite project.

SVN access available! – phpWebSite

I had a bright idea last week.  One of the annoying aspects of phpWebSite maintenance is downloading individual modules, expanding them, and copying them over the existing modules. Why not use Subversion to update the core and mod  directories of phpWebSite? The procedure would be the same as that advocated by WordPress here. Since I recently added the Subversion client capability to my remote host, the update process would be much smoother, less error prone, and consume less bandwidth.

As a test I checked out a copy of the development version of phpWebSite to my PC. I run a local test site under Windows using XAMPP. Yea, I know I am weird thinking I can run phpWebSite under windows. I then copied over the files I needed from my existing configuration and renamed the directories. Then I went into Boost and updated the modules. After fixing the windows specific errors with updating FileCabinet and menu(i.e. creating directories did not work) modules, all of the modules are now updated and I am ready to update the site using subversion next time.

Now to make this whole scenario work for a production site we need a little help from the folks maintaining the Subversion repository. I would like to use Subversion to get the stable version rather than the development version. If they would create a tag for the stable release like the folks at WordPress, then I could use the Subversion “switch” command to update to the latest stable version. I use the switch command with WordPress to update my test blog and this is a slick way to update the files.