tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-46139037565189957052012-02-02T08:01:56.462-05:00<p><strong>Semi-official blog of <big><a href="http://1stopit.net/">1stopIT.net</a></big></strong></p><p>Thoughts on databases, web content management, business web applications, and other "IT stuff"</p>IPnoreply@blogger.comBlogger111100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4613903756518995705.post-35412653592902406962012-01-23T08:00:00.005-05:002012-01-24T10:33:53.789-05:00

Out of the box, most content management systems provide a very basic publishing workflow that consists of two states: "unpublished" and "published". Although it may be sufficient for a site of a very small organization or a personal web site, most large, mid-size, and even many small organizations will probably need more complex workflows. In this post, I will describe a very simple (therefore,

IPnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4613903756518995705.post-30996566153789949112011-12-09T01:42:00.002-05:002011-12-09T08:33:11.869-05:00

About twice a month, I look at the "Answers" section on LinkedIn. If I come across a question I think I am qualified to answer and if I have time, I answer it. Over the past 15 months or so, I have answered 18 questions, of which four were selected "best" and two more - "good". Today, I noticed that LinkedIn actually lists five most prolific "answerers" of the week (it's called "This Week’s Top

IPnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4613903756518995705.post-39308893089100617152011-11-25T23:55:00.008-05:002011-12-09T08:32:31.226-05:00

Today, I was messing with the ubiquitous "Like", "+1", "InShare", and "Tweet" buttons. The "Tweet" button is the only one that degrades gracefully to a hyperlink if JavaScript is disabled. The others just disappear. I wonder if Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn have even tested their buttons under those conditions. Or, maybe, they are "crappy by design". Either way, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn

IPnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4613903756518995705.post-58371861892066538542011-10-26T22:33:00.022-04:002012-02-02T08:01:56.626-05:00

Run cmd to start what in the old days we used to call a "DOS box" and run one of the following (replacing the "9.1" with whatever your actual version of PostgreSQL is): NET START postgresql-9.1 (for the 32-bit version)NET STOP postgresql-9.1 (for the 32-bit version)NET START postgresql-x64-9.1 (for the 64-bit version)NET STOP postgresql-x64-9.1 (for the 64-bit version)from the Windows 7 command

IPnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4613903756518995705.post-82619113241677414092011-01-16T16:17:00.015-05:002011-12-26T10:36:48.303-05:00

Moodle 2.0 fails to backup courses (and quizzes) returning the following error: "DDL sql execution error". It appears that this error occurs if the database user does not have the permission to create temporary tables. I did not have time to dig deeper, but adding the CREATE_TMP_TABLE privilege (in addition to the obvious SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER) appears to

IPnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4613903756518995705.post-69359592651345936922011-01-06T15:10:00.017-05:002011-08-11T16:54:12.324-04:00

PostgreSQL 8.3 and 8.4 may fail to install on Windows with the following error message: "An error occurred executing the Microsoft VC++ runtime installer". PostgreSQL 9.0 may fail with a different message: "Unable to write inside TEMP environment variable path", but the actual reason appears to be the same. It turns out that the installer requires Windows Script Host to be enabled (there might

IPnoreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4613903756518995705.post-36050398785953755362010-05-01T13:38:00.042-04:002011-10-09T14:08:17.255-04:00

It is up to you to decide how bad this is for you, but for me, as a software engineer, it is definitely BAD (Broken As Designed): When you create an album and/or upload photos (or any other images) to an album on Facebook, no matter what the privacy setting for the album is, your pictures are public. Let me give you a couple of simple examples: The privacy setting for this profile album is

IPnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4613903756518995705.post-36968370106964546442010-04-25T12:10:00.018-04:002011-08-30T08:01:02.609-04:00

Yesterday, for reasons I cannot explain myself, I upgraded my Skype (for Windows) from version 4.0 to the latest version 4.2. In about an hour, I noticed that it didn't ring if my speakers were off. I definitely did not like it because, unless I am listening to something or watching a video, I try to keep them off. I thought that my setting Ring PC speaker had gotten cleared during the upgrade. I

IPnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4613903756518995705.post-87573837224456454582009-06-23T21:42:00.403-04:002011-12-10T13:18:10.355-05:00

I spent several weeks looking for an easy way to import data from DBF files (the application was written in FoxPro for DOS at least 15 years ago) into MySQL on a regular basis. First, I looked for a utility to perform one-step conversion (DBF to MySQL). No luck there (not that I didn't find any, just none of them worked). Then, I figured, I could convert DBF files to CSV files first and then

IPnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4613903756518995705.post-2373180445051002052008-10-17T14:21:00.038-04:002011-11-30T11:51:17.853-05:00

A couple of days after I wrote the post Terror Watch List Glitches, more disturbing reports about the problems with "terror-watch-list"-related systems started popping up. Most were saying that the expected upgrades (worth half-billion dollars!) might not fix the problems and might even create new ones. All the fuss seemed to be about "project RAILHEAD", which is supposed to replace Terrorist

IPnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4613903756518995705.post-61423772586746237862008-08-22T10:34:00.000-04:002010-05-26T21:42:04.140-04:00

Having watched a couple of Drew Griffin's reports on CNN about "terror watch list" glitches, I started thinking about "them glitches" from the database and enterprise application design perspective. It is not easy to tell what is wrong without any technical details (of course, they are all classified), but I still tried to answer these questions: How does a law-abiding citizen get on the no-fly

IPnoreply@blogger.com0