Having looked at the code it’s easy to see the error, in line 371 the code says this:

'https://plusone.google.com/u/0/_/%2B1/button#url=' . $linkurl_enc . '&size=medium&count='

Whereas the ampersands should be encoded as & (as they are in all the other services), just change the line to read this and all is well.

'https://plusone.google.com/u/0/_/%2B1/button#url=' . $linkurl_enc . '&size=medium&count='

Update – I entered the bug onto the forum and the developer responded within a few hours saying it will be fixed for the next release. It’s nice when a developer is so responsive.

Here’s the forum thread.

To force the app to download through a browser was very easy, just edit your .htaccess file to add the following line (assuming you use Apache of course).

AddType application/vnd.android.package-archive apk

Now the phone browser will force a file download so it can be installed by the app installer, easy.

It’s easy to fix just following the instructions on the Virtuemart formum

To summarise you just locate the file administrator/components/com_virtuemart/classes/htmlTools.class.php and find this line at line 899.

$link = vmCommonHTML::hyperLink( $image_link, $text, '', $title, 'rel="lightbox'.$image_group.'"' );

Replace it with this instead.

$link = vmCommonHTML::hyperLink( $image_link, $text, '', $title, 'rel="shadowbox'.$image_group.'"' );

However a work colleague recently asked me to help migrate a Jooma 1.0 site to Joomla 1.5. Their site was a small online shop using the Virtuemart shopping cart.

In the end someone else did the work but it got me looking at Joomla in more detail.

It took me a while to work out the sections and categories as well as all the modules but after the rather steep learning curve I can see that Joomla is a very powerful CMS.

I made a test install using WampServer and had the site up and runnig in just a few minutes. The install instructions are very easy to follow and the install went very smoothly.

After that I installed Virtuecart, Joom!Fish and Ninja shadowbox.

JoomFish makes adding translations extremely easy (I live in Denmark so many sites are in Danish and English) and getting a basic site working was a pleasure.

Card Processing Fees

Looking at Joomla got me thinking about on-line shops so I investigated the cost of processing card payments in Denmark. Most people here use Dankort (a debit card) but to use this you have to sign up with PBS to get a merchant ID. Looking at their costs made me realise that a problem is the cost of traditional card processing companies.

PBS charges are shown here. For an account that only accepts Danish cards you pay DKK300 per month for 100 transaction (that’s about US $54) which seems a ridiculously large amount for a completely automated system.

If you want to accept VISA/Mastercard etc. then the prices is US $145 per month for 500 transactions.

I’ve read quite a few articles on companies trying to break this monopoly, most recently this one in Wired.

Hopefully these start-ups can change the balance of power and really open up micro payments and on-line shops to the masses.

$("#element").css("background","rgba(255,63,73,0.5)")

The last value of 0.5 is just the opacity. Of course this doesn’t work in IE so you need to use.

$("#marker").css("filter","alpha(opacity=50)")

Finally to get the RGB values from the hex colour codes you can use these functions I found here.

function HexToR(col) {return parseInt((cutHex(col)).substring(0,2),16)}
function HexToG(col) {return parseInt((cutHex(col)).substring(2,4),16)}
function HexToB(col) {return parseInt((cutHex(col)).substring(4,6),16)}
function cutHex(col) {return (col.charAt(0)=="#") ? col.substring(1,7):col}

I should also mention that the HTML editor is pretty terrible especially when compared to CKEEditor, for example.

As an example, if I write some style rule like this using the source code:

style="border:0"

then after saving the editor manages to mangle to HTML so it looks like this:

style="BORDER-TOP:0;BORDER-BOTTOM:0;BORDER-LEFT:0;BORDER-RIGHT:0

It manages to expand a simple rule plus add ALL CAPS into the mix (which will not validate as valid XHTML by the way).

But to get back to the point, since the editor is not supported I end up with a very small textarea in Firefox that’s hard to use.

To try and solve the problem I tried the Firefox addon called Resizeable Textarea but this doesn’t work in Firefox 3.6 plus it requires manual resizing every time.

The solution that worked for me is the Stylish addon that allows me to override the CSS rules for any site. I simply made a new rule to resize the textarea looking like this.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document url-prefix("http://intranet/login") {
textarea.epitextareaeditor  {height:20em !important}
.episize500 {width:800px !important}
}

A similar extension, called Chrome Stylist, is available for Google Chrome that works almost identically.

If you look at http://ofallevil.com/ using Firefox and Firebug you can see the server runs Apache on CentOS 5.2, but the link to Microsoft loads all the data from Microsoft running IIS 7.5

It’s silly but it brought a smile to my face today.

To use this simply use this line in you config file.

LogFile="/usr/share/awstats/tools/logresolvemerge.pl /home/iis_logs/iis_logs/ex* |"

Here I’m using logresolvemerge to join my IIS log files in the format exYYMMDD.log. This line will feed all the log files from oldest to newest to AWStats so it can process them. It works incredibly well and is very fast.

Feature wise it’s the same as the Windows version but the performance is fantastic, it starts in under a second and page loads take fractions of a second. The whole browser feels incredibly fast, in fact faster than anything I’ve tried before.

I recommend that if you’re running Debian or Ubuntu you should give it a try and see what you think.

IE 7 certainly isn’t perfect but it’s a damn site better than IE 6 especially in term of rendering and performance on JavaScript heavy pages.

Since IE 7 was released in October 2006 maybe we’ll get IE8 in March 2012! Of course I understand that it has to be thoroughly tested against all company applications; but to be honest we don’t have that many and of those I’m pretty sure many actually use Java so it doesn’t have a lot to do with the browser.