Macrotone Blogs

Macrotone blogs upon Joomla, our products and other matters.
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Windows 7 Networks connectors suddenly stop working

windows7Had an interesting problem this morning which while not difficult to fix took up a lot of time investigating.

Yesterday the laptop was working perfectly fine, connecting to the internet via the wireless connector. This morning the wireless connector failed to make a connection to the hub.  Very strange, but even more so when all other PC devices were working fine, and even the plugged in network adaptor was failing to make a connection.  Running the command line ‘ipconfig’ command didn’t even display the network adaptors as existing!

Looking at the network adaptors didn’t show anything unusual in the control panel. They were present and enabled and running fine.  However the network trouble-shooter said there were problems with the adaptors but couldn’t say what was wrong.  A fat lot of use they turned out to be.

Looking at the system activity the only events that I could see were that yesterday afternoon I upgraded ‘Tortoise SVN’ to the latest 1.8.1 version and this morning it looked like ‘Trusteer Rapport’ had also updated itself. Now the machine was fine after the Tortoise upgrade, and presumably the network connection must have been fine if Rapport had upgraded itself.

Uninstalling ‘Rapport’ did not resolve the problem, so tried using System restore to a point prior to the ‘Rapport’ update, but this also failed to resolve the problem.  At this point I decided to uninstall the two network devices (using Device Manager), and then use the ‘discover new hardware’ option to reinstall them.  Surprise, surprise the main network adaptor suddenly started working.  At last a clue.

I then proceeded to perform system restore again to the latest point and then uninstalled, and rediscovered the adaptors.  The main network adaptor worked straight away, but because I had obviously removed the wireless connector details, all of the ‘automatic’ connection details for the adaptor also were lost, so it was necessary to re-enter the connection keys etc.

So the only thing I can conclude from this is that the ‘Trusteer Rapport’ (version 3.5.1208.41) must somehow have impacted the network adaptors, something which even uninstalling didn’t resolve. For those unfamiliar with Rapport it is security software that is used to protect secure sites such as banks etc. Quite why it should impact the network adaptors is not quite so clear. Searching on the web didn’t discover anything similar reported but then again perhaps it is still ‘new’ and nobody else has reported it yet?

Considering Metadata for our Joomla extensions

The use of Metadata within web pages to provide a ‘richer’ and more tailored data structure is not new.  The term metadata is defined as "data about data". The term is however slightly ambiguous, as it can be used for two fundamentally different concepts (types). Structural metadata is about the design and specification of data structures and is more properly called "data about the containers of data"; descriptive metadata, on the other hand, is about individual instances of application data, the data content. In our context we are really talking about ‘data about data content’.

We say it is not new because many years ago we worked upon implementing some of the ‘Dublin Core’ metadata into some specific sites that we were working with.  The focus now seems to be the use of the vocabularies as defined by ‘schema.org.  This is no doubt influenced by the fact that it was promoted by Microsoft and Google themselves.

Deciding to implement it is not for the faint hearted especially if the ‘intended’ target is composed of entities that do not easily fit into one of the defined ‘standards’.  As an example we have looked at our ‘Problem/Issue/Bug Tracking’ application.  At first glance it looks to be a ‘Product’, but the products are those that are sold, or available to hire etc.  The output from our ‘Issue Tracker’ is a set or series of ‘reports’ which describe reported problems or improvement tasks for a ‘product’ hence perhaps they should instead be an ‘Article’.  Here again they do not really fit into the current ‘standard’.  The best we can come up with would be a ‘CreativeWork’, and more specifically a ‘SoftwareApplication’, but even here we would need to add some specific custom extensions, which is possible with ‘schema.org’ to more accurately reflect information that should be in the meta tags. We require the metadata to describe the output from the application and not the application itself.

At the moment the jury is still out as to whether we wish or desire to add an automated mechanism to our application to generate the meta data automatically.  We will probably continue to monitor the situation before deciding whether to implement it as a feature or not, especially as it is not certain whether including it will improve the page rankings within Google, since the exact details of the algorithm used by Google is their secret.

Free Toad for Oracle 12.0.0.61 released

Toad World - Connected IntelligenceWe are pleased to note the release of Toad for Oracle 12c is available on the Toadworld site. This is hot after the official Oracle release itself.

We have used the tool for more years than we care to remember, and it is highly recommended. They are invaluable for good database development and support.

10 Top Time-Saving Tech Tips

Saw this video and just had to share it. It's amazing just how many things one doesn't know about even on the simple things. I bet there are is at least one thing here that you didn't know.

 

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Reclaiming a disk'€™s recover partition space.

Windows 7Occasionally we make use of an old ATA or SATA disk that has previously been used as the main disk in a laptop, that has long died and gone, by placing it in a small portable case.

Then we usually reformat the disk to make it generally available.  There are occasions when there are system or recovery partitions present upon the disk and these situations it is convenient to wish to clean off all the ‘old’ unwanted data off of the disk.  The present of the system and/or recovery partitions normally means some special technique has to be employed to recover the space that these areas occupy.

One can always purchase a third party product to perform this task, but why should one when a perfectly useful utility is provided with Windows 7.

The command line utility ‘diskpart’  manages the task very easily.  All that is required is to select the disk we wish to ‘modify’, then display the partitions and ensure that it is indeed the correct disk. (After all you do not want to modify the live machine disk!)  Once sure we are 'on the correct disk, select the partition, and then delete the partition specifying the [noerr] and [overide] parameters.  Job done.  Now we can create a single large partition for the whole disk and use it as we please.

See the documentation via the link above for more information.

Reflections on Joomla

b2ap3 icon joomlaI looked at an installation of Joomla 1.5 the other day and was struck by how much has changed and how far the current version has progressed over the years.

The obvious differences in the platform using an MVC structure were obvious but also changes in how plugins, modules and components are installed, exception handling, library changes etc. all combined to make it almost a different product altogether despite the outward appearance.

Having been developing extensions concentrated on Joomla 1.6 and above, it was easy to see how far the Joomla product has evolved.  Whether it is all good is perhaps more subjective. There was a simplicity in the early releases that has in many/some ways been lost as the product has changed. If one takes the ‘blogging’ aspect of the platform, I suppose this is why new products such as 'Ghost’ (to name just one) continue to appear, all boasting of the ‘ease’ of use. These immediately bring to mind the similar claims of Wordpress, Pressword etc.  Perhaps it also goes some way to explain the desire to implement things such as Wordpress ‘under’ Joomla, an admirable step well executed by WP4J or CorePHP all of which strive to bring the perceived ‘simplicity’ and ‘ease of use’ back to Joomla. Whether this is achieved or whether it creates more ‘complexity’ is open to doubt and interpretation.

This is not to say that there is anything at all wrong with the current Joomla onward design, which is after all the way of all things, which continue to develop, just that there is a ‘beauty’ in simplicity, which can often be lost if one is not careful.  Change is not a ‘bad’ thing and should be accepted and welcomed but at the same time one should question  whether it is ‘just change for changes sake’ which is another thing altogether.

SQL Injection Attacks

mysqlWe are experiencing a spate of SQL injection attacks upon our site.

These take the form of appending SQL strings upon the end of valid URL addresses.  A simple Google search reveals that there are many sites where the examples given below have triggered problems. Two typical strings are shown below: 

(/**/sElEcT+1+/**/fRoM(/**/sElEcT+count(*),/**/cOnCaT((/**/sElEcT(/**/sElEcT+/**/uNhEx(/**/hEx(/**/cOnCaT(0x217e21,0x4142433134355a5136324457514146504f4959434644,0x217e21))))+/**/fRoM+information_schema/**/tAbLeS+/**/lImIt+0,1),floor(rand(0)*2))x+/**/fRoM+information_schema/**/tAbLeS+/**/gRoUp/**/bY+x)a)   

Or

+or+1=(/**/sElEcT+1+/**/fRoM(/**/sElEcT+count(*),/**/cOnCaT((/**/sElEcT(/**/sElEcT+/**/uNhEx(/**/hEx(/**/cOnCaT(0x217e21,0x4142433134355a5136324457514146504f4959434644,0x217e21))))+/**/fRoM+information_schema/**/tAbLeS+/**/lImIt+0,1),floor(rand(0)*2))x+/**/fRoM+information_schema/**/tAbLeS+/**/gRoUp/**/bY+x)a)+and+1=1   

As one can see the code is specifically targeting MySQL databases.  We presume that they would then, If successful, make further attempts to obtain more information to make a more specific targeted attack.

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Web slow down?

spamI have previously posted an entry on the latest version of Firefox 19.0.2 where I mentioned that there were speed problems accessing certain web sites, including but not restricted to the BBC web sites.

The following article was posted the other day which may go some way to explaining my observations. Access to the article may be slow, but it describes how a row between a spam-fighting group (Spamhaus) and hosting firm (Cyberbunker) has sparked retaliation attacks affecting the wider internet.

Detected intrusion attempts again

We are seeing a persistent number of web attacks on our site by hackers which seem specificaly designed to attack a WordPress site.

These attacks take the form of Remote File Intrusion attempts. These are where hackers try to force a vulnerable extension into loading PHP code directly from their server. This is done by passing an http(s):// or ftp:// URL in their request, pointing to their malicious site.

They are using Wordpress plugins in the main, so if you are a WordPres site this is something be to aware of. The source of the attacks is a little varied but the IP addresses tend to indicate the US and Canada, but of course these may be compromised addresses hiding the real source.

Now we have BACN in addition to SPAM

spamA new term seems to have entered usage used to describe nuisance emails. Bacn is the term used for all those reminders, newsletters, notifications, limited offers, alerts and other ephemera sent by websites, e-tailers and other services you have used ever since you made your first mouse clicks on the web.

It takes its name 'bacn' because it tries to describe those messages that sit in the middle of a short continuum between which technical folks call spam (fake meat/junk mail) and ham (real meat/real mail). These messages are bacn because they are not quite real messages but are not quite junk either.

It is classed as a problem because it is something you probably want to read, yet not quite yet, and it masks the real email messages you want to read now.

The BBC web site has an article expanding upon the topic you might or might not want to read.

 

 

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