Macrotone Blogs

Macrotone blogs upon Joomla, our products and other matters.

Documentation Formats and Joomla

Historically we used to create our documentation using ‘Word Perfect’ but changed to using Microsoft Word, soon after Adobe ‘took over’ Word Perfect.  This has served us well for many years, but unfortunately Word has not kept up with the changes in the Web and the need for short pages of documentation easily accessible by users.  Yes, Word can generate HTML documents but anyone who has every looked at the created output will be struck by the obvious bloated code and its use of strangely named variables making it almost unreadable in its raw form.  This necessitates a cleanup operation on the code before it can really be used.

So the search was on to see it there is anything ‘better’ out there.

The obvious candidate was something known as DocBook which is written in XML, which means that it can be created and edited by virtually any editor upon any platform.  However to ensure good structure that meets the requirements of the DTD, something more robust is required.  It also raises the question of how one retains the investment in existing documents and how one can convert them to the ‘new’ format.  One advantage of the XML format is that it is reasonably easy to use XSL transforms to convert it to PDF, HTML  or indeed many other formats.

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Oracle SQL*Developer updated


oracle
Latest updates for Oracle SQL*Developer 3.2.20.09.87 and SQL*Developer Data Modeller 3.1.4 (710).Both available on Oracle Technet.  Required account.

Moving APEX application to the Oracle cloud

Just read an interesting blog post about moving an Oracle APEX application to the Oracle cloud.  Interesting because I have previously used APEX and migrated some of the apps to Joomla.

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Humorous quote

The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they are genuine.

 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

 

From TV program: QI Stephen Fry - 26th Oct 2012

Invoking window.onload multiple time.

Whilst developing our latest component ‘IP Mapper’ I encountered a problem that is possibly known to many but not previously to me.  For that reason decided to make this blog entry.

I was generating javascript code which made a call at the end to the ‘window.load event’.  The code worked perfectly when it was only present once.  However when present more than once only the last call actually worked.

Why did I need it more than once?  Well the code was generated for a specific module, and because the modules could each have very different parameters specified, I had to tailor the javascript for each specific module hence the slightly different code, but each has a different ‘window.onload event’ function call.

I discovered this post by Robert Hahn which describes a solution which I have implemented.

The solution:

function makeDoubleDelegate(function1, function2) {
    return function() {
        if (function1)
            function1();
        if (function2)
            function2();
    }
}
window.onload = makeDoubleDelegate(window.onload, myNewFunction );
Works a treat.

Strong Passwords

Just read an interesting article on Wired that I thought I would share.

It reflects current thinking, and invoked a lot of comments.  Now if Joomla just applied some of the options.

Now that is a suggestion for a good plugin!

Apple tracking iOS 6 users

apple
Apple's launch of the iPhone 5 in September came with a bunch of new commercials to promote the device. Not surprisingly Apple didn't shout quite so loud about an enhancement to its new mobile operating system, iOS 6, which also occurred in September: The company has started tracking users so that advertisers can target them again, through a new tracking technology called IFA or IDFA.

See Business Insider

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High CPU usage MSE and QNAP QGet

We have noticed a problem since we installed KB2754296, which is an update to Microsoft Security Essentials where our CPU usage continually peaks at 100% usage.

Investigation reveals that the high usage is caused by process NisSrv.exe which is the Microsoft Network Realtime Inspection Service.

We use QNAP network devices and there is a small program called QGet which is used to contact the QNAP Download manager.  QGet runs on the PC and communicates with the QNAP process, and is used to provide the QNAP service with instruction as to what files to download.  When the QGet process is running the NisSRV.exe usage goes through the roof,slowing down the PC to a point where its is virtually unusable.

The version of QGet does not seem to matter and we have tested versions 2.1.5.0702 and 3.0.5.1009 and the result is the same.

The version of MSE is 4.1.5220 and in our installed version there is no way in which the Network inspection service can be disabled.

The only conclusion we can draw is that the two programs are incompatible.  We have disabled the QGet program, since it is not really used much anyway, but MSE should never cause the problem in the first place in our opinion.

Possibly we should consider an alternative security program over MSE!

See: QNAP Forum

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Firefox Upgrade offline due to Security Fears

firefox
The latest version of Mozilla's Firefox browser has been taken offline after a security vulnerability was discovered.

Users who had upgraded to version 16 were advised to downgrade to the previous safe release until Firefox developers released a fix.

The vulnerability allowed "a malicious site to potentially determine which websites users have visited", Mozilla said.

BBC article.

Update: Mozilla re-released Firefox 16 today after pulling the browser from distribution Wednesday when one of its developers found a critical bug that could be used by attackers to hijack machines. At around 2:30 p.m. ET, Mozilla turned on its upgrade servers and started pushing Firefox 16.0.1 to users who had earlier downloaded the flawed browser, or who were still running version 15 and earlier.

Oracle announces MySql changes

oracle
At Oracle OpenWorld this week there were a few changes announced for MySql.  Oracle has issued an open source MySQL 5.6 release candidate.

Oracle issued its first MySQL 5.6 preview in July of 2011. For certain types of queries, there has been a performance gain of as much as 200 percent.

MySQL 5.6 includes sub-query optimizations that improve the query execution speeds. The underlying InnoDB storage engine has also been enhanced for throughput performance.

Under Oracle's guidance the number of new features per release has been cut down to be more manageable. While at the same time, there is more effort going into testing and overall quality.

From a release perspective, Oracle believe that users don't want to upgrade their databases often with big feature releases.  It is noted that Oracle has been coming out with a regular stream of maintenance releases though, as the 5.6 release is being developed. The current plan is for major new releases of MySQL every other year. That would place a MySQL 5.6 generally available release for early in 2013.

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