kiosk
I also accomplished a lot in kiosk over the weekend too. Finalized some of the installation processes, and started working heavily on the modules in the Administration Control Panel. I also refined major parts of the framework to fit better with the overall goal of being a “plug-n-play template system.”

Linux
Finally, I have been spending my weekend trying to get my media center PC up and running again after a Ubuntu upgrade. Not sure what caused the FREAKIN’ issue, but I am not very appreciative about it. Overall, this is the first day I have tried to fix it since I discovered it being down on Saturday morning, so it might not really be a “major” issue.

Aside from that though, I also had a lot of things going on at home. I have been prolonging fixing my main system as it continuously frustrated me, but today I decided to give it another try and to get the second power supply to properly control my hard drives, while my main power supply powered the motherboard and video card. FINALLY today it worked! Now my main system finally has all its hard drives running which is sitting at a total of 5 right now, in a while, I will be adding more, but 5 is good.

I also got my secondary system (used for development/testing of Linux updates before preforming them on my main machine) up and running today with a major overhaul. I also have two 120 GB drives in there for storage as well and I am thinking I will mirror them and use it for backups, but that will be decided later. Right now, I have it installing Feisty (https://wiki.kubuntu.org/FeistyFawn/Herd1/Kubuntu) as I want to see what eye candy comes out of it and see if I want it on my main machine.

Also, cpCommerce released v1.0.4 this week! I re-added the MySQLi support. It also has several fixes by other members who spent countless hours learning how to use SVN and contribute to fixing the bugs.

Well, I really do not have anything more to add at this moment. I am looking forward to a 4 day work week and then I will be gone for 8 days as I am going down to TN for Christmas (I may even take Kami – my wife along… hehe).

cpCommerce had the PayPal IPN Gateway Implementation put into the build about a week ago and it seems to be holding out, that or no one else has had a lot of time to do any testing. I feel it is getting close to lose 0.06 all together now and allow for a much cleaner version to take its place. Right now there are not a lot of new features in the works, in fact, with me being so busy, a lot of the work is on hold until I can find someone to take my spot or help alleviate all the things I do for cpCommerce. Who knows, time will tell, as I may eventually find more time to do these things.

As for me, I am doing fairly well. I am about to add 16 DVDs to my collection from signing up with Columbia House and then inviting a friend. In the end the 16 DVDs will cost just a little under $70. Now that is what I call a GREAT STEAL…err…I mean…DEAL!

Plans for upgrading my computers are always being thought out, and hopefully one of these days will come true. I know what I want to get, but the new question is: “What do you really need?” and I am struggling with that one, as honestly, right now, I don’t need an upgrade.

Well, that seems to be everything in a nut shell over the recent weeks. I hope all of you are enjoying your jobs, school, or whatever ventures you are currently involved in.

As soon as I tried to SSH into the system to make a backup, I was quickly greeted with “Host not found.” CRAP! How can they do this to me! I paid for a freakin’ year of service that guaranteed 99% uptime and now I am at 30+ hours of downtime. My members are going nuts, I am getting countless emails asking “WTF? Is cpCommerce still kicking or did it fall under?” Who knows what will happen now!

I am very tempted to move cpCommerce to yet another new host. One that has proven to be very stable and hasn’t let me down yet. In doing so, I am also likely to upgrade to a reseller account and then even market selling cpCommerce hosting!

Around 9:44:28 PM today, I received an email stating my site should be back up. HAHAHAHA! It is not! First off, the morons copied my files to my public folder as ROOT! What kind of moron does that and then does not change the ownership back over to me! Secondly, they did not reinstall my databases that I had a lovely 2 MINUTES to try and backup! Finally, they missed my shell scripts entirely! I had 3 very important shell scripts and none of them are on the server. I use these scripts to do numerous maintenance tasks from uploading new source code to making and retrieving backups.

Does anyone have a good idea how to go about requesting a refund of my money due to the lack of guarantee supplied to me when I signed up? 30+ hours definitely fails the 99% uptime guarantee. They better have this all fixed by Noon tomorrow or else I am moving it.

Following the bug fix, my grandparents came down and told me they had finished the work they needed to do on the Conference Computer, so I could now make a clone of its hard drive. They wanted a clone of it made, as they plan to do a major software upgrade on it and do not want to lose all of the data they have. I must admit, I am in love with the NTFS tools Linux has. It didn’t take me long to make another hard drive (one that is larger in size) work exactly the same as the old hard drive.

To start out, I first needed to make an image of the conference computer’s current hard drive. This can done by running the following command:

# ntfsclone -s -o /media/software/backup.img /dev/hdc1

Now, the “-s” stands for “Save Image”, the “-o” is for the output image path and filename, and then the whole command ends with the partition on the hard drive you want to backup/clone. Following this step, I then made a copy of the MBR (Master Boot Record) and of the Partition Table, so my cloned hard drive would have the exact same configuration as the original. To make a copy of the MBR and the Partition Table, I did the following commands:

# sfdisk -d /dev/hdc > /media/software/master-hdc.dump
# dd if=/dev/hdc bs=512 count=1 of=/media/software/master-hdc.mbr

Now, I used the command sfdisk to do this and the first command makes the partition table and the second of course writes the copy of the MBR. Now the only part left, is to write all of this data to the new hard drive so I can have a clone. To do this, I simply ran the following commands:

# sfdisk /dev/hdc < /media/software/master-hdc.dump –force
# dd if=/media/software/master-hdc.mbr of=/dev/hdb
# ntfsclone –restore-image –overwrite /dev/hdb1 /media/software/backup.img

The first command write the partition table to the new hard drive and I had to use –force as my hard drive already had a partition table, however, you may want to use –force just for precaution The second command, write the MBR to the new hard drive which is needed if you wish to boot this hard drive. Finally, the ntfsclone command is used to write the image we made earlier to the clone hard drive, this way we have two hard drives that have the same exact data. How sweet is that! All of this took less than 20 minutes to do on a 40 GB NTFS formatted hard drive and cloning it to a 60 GB NTFS formatted hard drive.

Finally, my day ended with going with Kami to her high school’s 5 year reunion. IT COMPLETELY SUCKED! First of all, why bother going to a high school reunion? I know this is popular in small towns, but what is with the need to see old school mates and gossip about those who did not show up? Kami agreed afterwards, that is was boring and not worth it, but she wanted to attended so at least she gave it a shot. I admire that, but it kills me to attend these type of events, as I feel like an outcast. People are chatting away about people I know nothing about and no one explains to me who these people are… Then of course, we get back to my place and my grandparents have to make the whole thing worse by bringing it all up again!

It was already excruciating enough, just let it be! I will not attend one of these again for the rest of my life. They are flat out horrible and pointless for me to be there. The only real reason for me being there was for Kami’s arm candy…or at least that is the feeling I got from it all. Everyone knows the saying: “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Well, let me tell you this, if that is true, a picture would have said a whole lot more than I did AND I WAS THERE IN PERSON!

After all of that hoopla, we went to lock up the church and to let the dogs out, then I went home and watched “The Last Castle”.

1. You have WAY TOO MUCH useless information! I do not need to know how it all works! All I want is a nice table that describes the information you expect from my application, and what I should expect in return from you. Pure and simple, that is all I need.
2. This is partially related to Issue #1 as no one wants to read 72 pages of information. Hell, I do not even want to read 4 pages. I want a table of variable names, their restrictions, and a comment describing their usefulness to you!
3. Considering this manual is “for developers”, it hardly reflects such. The manual has been nothing but a headache for me and I gave up trying to work with you! Why should I bother to put forth so much time finding all your hidden details in a 72 page document!

Okay, so really I only had 1 issue and expressed it 3 ways. Honestly PayPal, how can you provide such a useless document to us? Why not give us exactly what we need to accomplish the task at hand? A variable table for IPN, another table of PDT, etc. It can’t be that hard to produce or maintain!

Now, on a personal note, my day has been good. I woke up around Noon as Kami came over for lunch, and I then played golf for a while, ate dinner, went on a 4.2 mile bike ride, then setup a basketball hoop for Kami’s siblings. YES! Their Dad finally got one for them. I was shocked myself when I saw it. It took us till 9:30 PM to get it up (about two hours) and then we played hoops for a while making sure that when we threw the ball at it, it didn’t come crashing down. Luckily it survived our testing, or else we would all be very disappointed.

After a few minutes of throwing a ball into a hoop, Kami and I headed back to my house to watch some good old television and to cuddle. I love that time , it is very well spent. My day was pretty laid back today, nothing more than the above.

The query I ended up producing was:

  $sql['products']   = "select DISTINCT(A.name), A.id_product, A.thumbnail, IF (D.price <> 0, D.price, " .
                       "IF (MIN(C.price) <> 0, MIN(C.price), A.price)) as `price`, A.subproducts, " .
                       "IF (MIN(C.stock) <> 0, IF (MIN(C.stock) < 0, 1000, C.stock), IF (A.stock = -1, " .
                       "1000, A.stock)) as `stock`, A.description from `{$config['prefix']}Products` as " .
                       "A left join `{$config['prefix']}LinkedProducts` as B on (A.id_product=B.id_product) " .
                       "left join `{$config['prefix']}SubProducts` as C on (A.id_product=C.id_product) " .
                       "left join `{$config['prefix']}Sales` as D on (A.id_product=D.id_product and " .
                       "C.id_subproduct=D.id_subproduct and D.start >= NOW() and D.last < = NOW()) " .
                       "where A.id_category='{$_GET['id_category']}' or B.id_category='{$_GET['id_category']}' " .
                       "GROUP BY A.name order by `{$orderby}` {$direction} limit {$start}, " .
                       "{$config['pageProducts']}";

As you can tell, this is no ordinary query. It is a complex one that makes use of several joins and even if functions. An amatuer in this situation would be likely to split up that single query into 3-4 separate queries and several if statements in PHP. How many of you would have done it in a single query?

Now, it should be cleared up that this method does not stop them from “finding” the download directory by sniffing the header content in the browser, but rather the whole idea is placing the download directory in a spot not accessible by Port 80. To do this, you will need to have a web host who gives you SSH access (though FTP access may be sufficient too).

On most web servers you have a directory called ‘www’ or ‘public_html’. These directories tell the web server they are do be allowed for viewing on Port 80. Now if you create a directory called ‘downloads’ outside of these folders, they are inaccessible from Port 80 and thus anyone with an Internet connection cannot get to that directory by surfing your site (Please realize that if they had FTP access or SSH access, they could still get to it!).

Once you make that directory and chmod it to 0777, you can move all of your current download files from the public directory to the “private” directory. Finally, you will need to update your Configuration area, to tell it where the files are located. For the most part, it should be self-described, other than the fact that by default it will point to: /path to public or www directory/store directory/images/products/downloads/. You will want it to be: /path to your downloads directory/. An example of this path would be: /home/cpradio/downloads/

Now that you have it all configured, your download files are safe from the computer literate.