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The Creative Process

MyCountR PRO
MyCountR PRO

Had a hugely satisfying day yesterday sitting at my computer totally immersed in the creative process of programming. Before you laugh this off as old age geekiness. Some people, myself not included, can create music. Others can draw or paint. I am truly envious of them.

On the other hand, I can make all sorts of computers do all sorts of clever things in many different ways. And I can do this using clean and clever code. In doing this I can bring utility, and in some cases, quality to the lives of others. That is indeed the underlying motivation behind all of the programming I do.

So, watch out in a week's time or so for my next app, MyCountR PRO when it appears in the App Store – it was conceived, designed and crafted by yours truly.

 

 

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Firefox – sec_error_revoked_certificate Issue

When Firefox web browser checks a security certificate, it also checks with the issuing authority if the certificate is valid. It appears that, near a certificate’s expiration date, the issuing authority may release a new certificate. The two certificates have conflicting expiration dates.

For reasons unknown, this caused Firefox to report a sec_error_revoked_certificate error and refuse to allow you to connect to the site!

To resolve this, presumably at the same time reducing the security of your browsing, complete the following:

For PC Users:

  1. Open Firefox.
  2. Go to Tools the top menu and select Options.
  3. Click the Advance tab.
  4. Click the following button:
    Encryption, then
    Certificates, then
    Validation
  5. Check “Do not use OCSP for certificate validation.”
  6. Click OK and restart Firefox.

For Mac Users:

  1. Open Firefox.
  2. Go to Firefox in the top menu and select Preferences.
  3. Click the Advance button.
  4. Click the following buttons:
    Encryption, then
    Validation
  5. Un-check “Use the OCSP to confirm the validity of certificates.”
  6. Click OK and restart Firefox.
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Odd currency conversion from Paypal

I was about to buy an eBook about iPhone application development for $USD7.99

Safari2Luckily enough I happened to notice that the currency conversion to AUD was not only wrong, but out by a factor of 100! I was just a whisker away form sending the lucky seller over $1,000 AUD

It seems to be an issue with Paypal, rather than the specific site, although I cannot prove this assertion. If you’re buying on Paypal from Australia I strongly suggest that you check the amount you are about to send before clicking on “Pay Now”

Anyone else seen this?

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Joomla Markdown Extension

As a result of a request from a reader of this blog, I have prepared a new Joomla extension which I have christened “jMarkdown” to partner with jTextile. Why would I do this? Well I remain absolutely convinced that even the best of the WYSIWYG editors for blogs and CMS are basically useless when it comes to editing text or restyling content. Wherever possible I use “Textile markup”:http://textism.com/tools/textile/ for content intended for publication via the HTML. This is a matter of personal preference, many others use “Markdown”:http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/. Elsewhere in this blog you’ll find jTextile, a Joomla 1.5 extension which supports the textile syntax

Anyway, jMarkdown allows you to prepare articles for Joomla 1.0 using the “Markdown”:http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ syntax. jMarkdown, when activated, will convert the text into html for display purposes.

You can download jMarkdown “here”:http://s3.amazonaws.com/files.4results.biz/jMarkdown.zip. This is a prerelease version and does not include any documentation. Just install the extension and activate the plugin in your Joomla 1.5 site.

As usual feel free to comment or ask questions here.

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Flex2 shipping module for VirtueMart on Joomla

Just a quick post here to say that I have released a VirtueMart shipping module for Joomla 1.5.

Suffice to say that it provides a flexible mechanism for calculating shipping with separate scales for “Domestic” and “International” orders.

The idea for this module, plus core source code, was derived from an existing module “flex” by Micah Shawn which is contained in the current VirtueMart distribution.

You can download the module from HERE. Installation instructions are in the included README file.