All posts by shannah

Steve Hannah is a 28-year-old software developer currently studying and working at Simon Fraser University in beautiful Vancouver British Columbia. He specializes in web information systems and prefers Java, PHP, and Python as programming languages. He is a Christian and worships at Christ Church of China in Vancouver.
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Open Office Base for Taxes!

With only 15 odd days left before taxes are due, I think I’ll try something a little risky in the spirit of learning. I will be creating a database using Open Office Base to manage my books. With my business, things just got a whole lot more complicated, and I need something to track the flow of money.

You may ask: Why not just use one of the dozens of business programs out there (e.g. MYOB, Simply Accounting, etc..). Answer: I’m a computing scientist, not an accountant.

I actually have Simply Accounting, but got frustrated because it seemed way too complicated. I figure all I need is a simple database to track my income and expenses, and categorize it into the prescribed tax categories.

My ulterior motive is to get a little dirty with Open Office to see if it is a good as I think it is. If I am to find a slick way of integrating Dataface with Open Office, I must first get good at just using Open Office..

What do you think… is this foolish?

Software Development

SnapZ Pro X as close to Mac Spyware as you can get

A while back I installed a program called SnapZ Pro X – an application for OS X that allows you to do better screenshots than the built-in OS X ones – you can do movies and stuff too.. Worked OK, but the movies didn’t turn out all that well so I decided not to register it.

The problem is that it overrides the OS X screen shot ability so I can’t take screen shots anymore unless I get rid of it – and now the demo is expired and all of my screenshots end up with watermarks on them. So i try first to run the uninstaller that came with it.. But it gives me an error message saying that an error occurred and that I should contact SnapZ Pro support… It seems to me that this is probably intentional and they are just trying to develop leads… very shady…

I have searched my hard drive for anything with SnapZ in the name, and have removed everything that I could find… but this thing is still there.. somewhere… aghhh!

Be warned! Do not use SnapZ Pro X!

Software Development

Dataface to Open Office: You complete me

I just ran across the latest release of Open Office.org (version 2.2.) which includes the holy grail of database development: Base. This version contains a built-in database that moves into the realm of filemaker for ease of use. It allows power users to develop tables, views, queries, forms, and reports inside of OpenOffice. What’s more, once you have registered the database, you can use it in the other parts of open office (like Writer and Calc). This is the way it ought to be.

It now looks like Open Office is a perfect development environment for DBAs that need to unroll database solutions for clients. It is available on just about every OS under the sun so there are no compatibility issues. All of the databases are stored in the Open Document format – so a database can be shared and copied.

What really interests me, however, is the fact that these great tools can work with existing SQL databases like MySQL with minimal hassle. That, and the fact that the DBs are stored in an open format.

Here’s the idea: Dataface can create .odb files (the database file format for Open Office) on the fly that will allow users to interact with the database application using the quick and easy Open Office interface. For some things, a web interface is just too clunky. I’m not sure how deep this rabbit hole goes, but I intend to explore it to its limits to see just how much Dataface can be integrated with Open Office.

Software Development

SSHFS

If you’re a web or software developer, chances are you’ve been frustrated before by the inconvenience of having to SSH into the remote server all the time to work on files. You can’t use the cozy development environment you set up on your own machine. You have to use the server’s tools. (If you really like command line vi then this post isn’t for you).

What if the server doesn’t have the programs installed that you need to do your thing? If you don’t have sufficient access, you may have to get the admin to install the programs for you, and often times they won’t.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just mount the server drive and work on the site like they were sitting on your local hard drive? I just discovered SSHFS, which allows you to do just this.

Apparently SSHFS (secure shell file system) has been available for some time on unix/linux, but there was no equivalent on Mac OS X until recently: The MacFUSE project enables SSHFS and many other types of file systems to be mounted just like they were a local hard drive on Mac OS X. Its as simple as opening SSHFS, entering your connection information and your server hard drive will be mounted in finder like it is a local drive. You can run all of your favorite programs on the files.

In my case, what I needed to do was run a patch using then patch command. The server didn’t have patch installed, so I mounted the server using SSHFS and used my local version of patch to patch the files. What a time saver!

This ranks as the best thing since sliced bread in my books.

Software Development

CAS4PAS Mission – The further adventures of Plone 2.5

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Okay.. I’m still at this Plone 2.5 upgrade thing. The early reports saying that the upgrade from Plone 2.1 to 2.5 is a snap are indeed correct. Unless you are using CAS for authentication.

Since Plone 2.5 uses PAS (Pluggable Authentication Service) which is very different than the way 2.1 handled authentication, it is necessary to do away with the old way to do CAS auth.

Begin rant ….

The single biggest complaint about the Plone/Zope community is that they think that backward compatibility is optional. They don’t think twice about breaking old code in favour of new features. Undoubtedly PAS is a superior way of handling authentication and permissions than the old way, but couldn’t they make it backwards compatible with the old way of doing things. It is ridiculous to think that every time I have to upgrade to a new version that I have to spend a week or two feeling around the bugs and bases of the code and configuration just trying to make it work again. This paragraph is written out of anger and frustration…. bahh!!

End rant …

Okay, back to rational thinking. Here is what I have done so far:

  1. Downloaded CAS4PAS 1.0.0-1 and installed in the Products directory.
  2. Restarted Zope and added a CAS Helper to the acl_users folder of my Plone site – then copied the settings across.
  3. Downloaded and installed the new version of PloneCASLogin (because the old version doesn’t work with PAS).
  4. Went to a different browser and tried to log in using CAS.
  5. The login button takes me to the CAS login page OK, but when I return to the Plone site, it says that there was a sign-in failure.

At this point I went back to the download pages for the Plone CAS Login and CAS4PAS products to see if I was missing anything. I noticed a patch to make it compatible with CAS 2 (not sure if my server is CAS 1 or 2, but I thought I might as well download it anyway to see if that was the problem.

  1. Downloaded and ran the patch
  2. Restarted the server and tried to log in — same problem!
  3. Scoured the internet for information from others having the same problem. Found one helpful post here.
  4. It suggested that I try to disable the “Challenge” feature of the credentials_cookie_auth in acl_users.
  5. Same problem!

That is where I sit right now… No clues, so I’ll dig deeper into the code and see what I can find….