Agora RC Update

Joel Larkin — Thu, 21 May 2009 03:40:20 +0100

Agora 3.0 RC came out (not recently however I just got around to updating to it). Unfort. they changed the way linking worked slightly so my plugin for JomSocial didn't work. I've updated this slightly and it should work. Feel free to test it out and let me know what you guys think.

Word Flyer/Insert Printing

Joel Larkin — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:01:44 +0100

I often need to create flyers or insert pages for bulletins on 1/2 of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Unfortunately this usually means cutting & pasting which can often lead to trouble. Below are some easy to follow instructions for Word 2007 on how to print the same page twice giving this same effect without worrying about the cutting & pasting.

1. Select from the Page Layout Tab/Pane the bottom

Updated Agora Plugin

Joel Larkin — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 06:00:00 +0100

After a few days of downtime I decided to spend some time today updating the Agora Plugin. I've been working on other things but wanted to circle back and make some improvements.

Created a "Language File" allowing you to specify what will be displayed when no posts show up.Created an additional Plugin Parameter called Date Format which allows you to change the format of the date (I didn't like Day Month Year). This uses the PHP Date Function so check the manualRead More...

Agora JomSocial Plugin

Joel Larkin — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:00:00 +0100

I developed a plug-in to JomSocial to address a need on our church website. The need was to have forum posts from a particular user show up on their profile. Unfortantely we use Agora which doesn't seem to get much development. I based this code of the FireBoard plugin AzrulStudies developed. You can download this from www.myne.org/downloads.html

ChurchInfo and the Built-in Birthday Query

Joel Larkin — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 06:00:00 +0100

Our Church uses a Church Member database system called ChurchInfo. In our Church we track members and regular attenders separately however we do similar things for each group (like track birthdays). The system out of the box only allows us to report members birthdays. This is kind of annoying and requires running a "free-text" query to get around.

Recently I got a request from the church secretary (my wife) to change this behavior. They wanted to have a drop down box selecting thRead More...

Windows 2008 Hyper-V

Joel Larkin — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 05:00:00 +0100

I decided rather recently to rebuild my VMware Server running on RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) with Windows 2008 Enterprise Core running Hyper-V. I currently use a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with approximately 16GB RAM and Dual Quad Processors. To make matters more complicated I don't run any Windows Machines at home, I only have my corporate laptop running Vista. This meant that the only PC I had was in a different domain than the Hyper-V server.

This is my first Read More...

Windows 2003 QoS and ISA

Joel Larkin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Recently I got the question of QoS at work. There were a few questions that were asked surrounding it, most specifically the following:

How does the QoS Engine Work?How does this compare to a Hardware based solution such as Cisco?Does this impact scalability?I was unable to answer the questions off the cuff so I did some research.

I specifically wanted to know:

How does the QoS Engine Work?How does this compare to a Hardware based solution such as Cisco?Does this impact Read More...

Cisco VPN Client

Joel Larkin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 05:00:00 +0100

The Cisco VPN Client for Vista works great unless you want to run the 64bit versions. I installed Vista Enterprise 64bit with Service Pack 1 onto my Thinkpad T61p recently. This install went very easily and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Lenova had 64bit versions for all their software. I then went to look for a 64bit version of the Cisco VPN client and was surprised that they haven’t announced support for, nor published a beta for the Read More...

Annoying SSH Connection Attempts

Joel Larkin — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 06:00:00 +0100

I've had various servers over the years running SSH but recently I've seen more and more brute force attacks from various locations around the world. I've recently been looking at modifying the hosts.deny file for the IP addresses that attempt more than 1,000 invalid connections per day however this shouldn't be a manual process in this day and age so I turned to the internet for an answer.

I came across this utility: DenyHosts (http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/). ItRead More...

Blog entries