influenced dot net

Currently when enabling SSL on shopping cart pages in Actinic, Actinic will no longer be able to link up Secpay transactions to orders.

After numerous hours debugging, I figured out what was going wrong.. when SSL is enabled on shopping cart pages, Actinic provides Secpay with HTTPS callbacks - as you’d expect. It also sets a parameter which Secpay needs if the callbacks are HTTPS. However for some reason at this moment in time Secpay won’t use the HTTPS callbacks - the request is never sent to the server

I don’t know why this is happening, I even used the alternative method of informing Secpay that the callback is HTTPS - via the ‘options’ parameter.. no dice

The solution I’m currently using is to modify the ‘OCCSecPayScriptTemplate.pl’ file, inserting a line after the following block of code:

# to enable Diners cards, remove the ‘#’ from the start of the 2 lines below
#$sOptions .= ‘,’ if ($sOptions ne ”);
#$sOptions .= ‘diners=true’;

the line to change the callback URLs back to HTTP is:

$::sCallBackURLAuth =~ s/https/http/;

Bleeding Edge has a few good tweaks for Thunderbird - I like Thunderbird but it can be seriously crap with large IMAP inboxes.. huge delays when doing things as it does some voodoo magic in the background etc.. and now that Google Mail have opened up IMAP access it’s even more useful

If you combine the above tweaks with Lifehacker’s new ‘Turn Thunderbird into the Ultimate Gmail IMAP Client‘ article, then you should be rocking!

I thought I was getting a lot of DenyHosts emails recently and the statistics page on the DenyHosts website seems to agree with me!

I wonder what’s caused this sudden surge in attacks

Oh how many seconds I have wasted continuously re-logging-in to Facebook.. Finally they’ve added a ‘remember me’ to the login screen.. about time!

We’ve had a few customers over the past few months inform us of a ’security warning’ with regard to our e-commerce websites checkout pages (SSL secured). Recently a kind customer sent us a screenshot of the problem and it became immediately apparent what the issue was..

Apple up until the most recent versions of Safari did not bundle the StarfieldTech root certificate with Safari. Therefore if a Safari user visits a GoDaddy SSL secured site (GoDaddy retail StarFieldTech Certificates) then a warning dialog will pop up informing the user that ‘Safari can’t verify the identity of the website “xxx.com”‘.

The easiest solution is to upgrade Safari to the latest version.. and alternative is to install the StarfieldTech root certificate manually by visiting the following URL: StarfieldTech root certificate

Yesterday something went a bit weird with my parents DSL.. it was working all right up until then. Apparently around 4:30pm, the router lost its connection and then reconnected. My dad told me there were a few BT vans in the street so I’m not sure if they were messing with DSLAMs in the green boxes something like that.

Anyway, what happened after the reset had me a bit stumped until this morning when I realised what was happening. The symptoms of the problem were that basically only a few random websites were working.. Google happened to be one of them and a handful of others. The others would sit on ‘loading’ but never actually load the page. MSN messenger wouldn’t work. SSH would work until a certain number of characters had been transferred… that was what made me think of MTU..

So I managed to view a few sites about Tiscali MTU via Google Cache. They all said Tiscali’s recommened MTU was 1500, however that’s what the routers WAN interface was already set to. I Googled a bit more and found BT’s DSL recommended MTU was 1458… 10 seconds later I’d changed the Speedtouch 510v4 to use this value and everything worked!

So there you go, 15 hours of downtime because of some shitty MTU problem! Hope this solves the issue if anybody else encounters such a weird problem!

My feed reader of choice, Google Reader has had quite a makeover

I much prefer this new interface, it looks more like bloglines now but a couple of things really impressed me..

Infinite scroll

In the screenshot I’ve selected “All Items”, Google Reader will pull approx 20 at a time, when you near the bottom of the list a further 20 are added to the bottom.. scroll forever!

Mark as read

As you scroll through stories reading them, as a story comes into your view and reaches the top, it is automatically marked as read

I’ll continue to explore the new features but it seems like a winner to me.. more later!

I wanted to be able to embed videos from various services into forum posts on CoopersGuns Health, Fitness & BodyBuilding Forums so I decided to have a play with modifying the bbcode processor and here’s what I’ve come up with..

Modification instructions

Make the following modifications to forum/includes/bbcode.php

• Find the bbencode_first_pass function
• Locate the end of the function

	// Remove our padding from the string..
	return substr($text, 1);

• Add the following just before the above:

	// [ifilm] and [/ifilm] 
	$text = preg_replace("#\[ifilm=([0-9]+[,][0-9]+[,][0-9]+)\](.*?)\[/ifilm\]#si", "[ifilm=\\1:$uid]\\2[/ifilm:$uid]", $text);

	// [youtube] and [/youtube] 
	$text = preg_replace("#\[youtube=([0-9]+[,][0-9]+[,][0-9a-z\-_]+)\](.*?)\[/youtube\]#si", "[youtube=\\1:$uid]\\2[/youtube:$uid]", $text);
	
	// [gvid] and [/gvid] 
	$text = preg_replace("#\[gvid=([0-9]+[,][0-9]+[,][0-9a-z\-_]+)\](.*?)\[/gvid\]#si", "[gvid=\\1:$uid]\\2[/gvid:$uid]", $text);	

• Find the bbencode_second_pass function
• Locate the part that deals with [QUOTE]

	// [QUOTE] and [/QUOTE] for posting replies with quote, or just for quoting stuff.
	$text = str_replace("[quote:$uid]", $bbcode_tpl['quote_open'], $text);
	$text = str_replace("[/quote:$uid]", $bbcode_tpl['quote_close'], $text);

• Add the following code after the above:

	// [ifilm] and [/ifilm]
	$text = preg_replace("#\[ifilm=([0-9]+)[,]([0-9]+)[,]([0-9]+):$uid\](.*?)\[/ifilm:$uid\]#si", "<embed allowScriptAccess=\"never\" width=\"\\1\" height=\"\\2\" src=\"http://www.ifilm.com/efp\" quality=\"high\" bgcolor=\"000000\" name=\"efp\" align=\"middle\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" pluginspage=\"http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer\" flashvars=\"flvBaseClip=\\3\""."[/ifilm:$uid]", $text);
	$text = str_replace("[/ifilm:$uid]", " />", $text); 	

	// [youtube] and [/youtube]
	$text = preg_replace("#\[youtube=([0-9]+)[,]([0-9]+)[,]([0-9a-z\-_]+):$uid\](.*?)\[/youtube:$uid\]#si", "<object width=\"\\1\" height=\"\\2\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/\\3\"></param><embed src=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/\\3\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" width=\"\\1\" height=\"\\2\"></embed></object>"."[/youtube:$uid]", $text);
	$text = str_replace("[/youtube:$uid]", "", $text); 		

	// [gvid] and [/gvid]
	$text = preg_replace("#\[gvid=([0-9]+)[,]([0-9]+)[,]([0-9a-z\-_]+):$uid\](.*?)\[/gvid:$uid\]#si", "<embed style=\"width:\\1px; height:\\2px;\" id=\"VideoPlayback\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" src=\"http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=\\3&hl=en\"> </embed>"."[/gvid:$uid]", $text);
	$text = str_replace("[/gvid:$uid]", "", $text); 

• Save your changes to bbcode.php and upload the modified file (if you downloaded it to modify)

That’s it.. you can now embed iFilm, YouTube and Google Video videos into your forum posts

Usage

The syntax is similar for all three:

[ifilm=width,height,id]description[/ifilm]

[youtube=width,height,id]description[/youtube]

[gvid=width,height,id]description[/gvid]

Example:
CoopersGuns Health, Fitness & BodyBuilding Forums Post

Due to holidays and now illness (flu!), I’ve been away from the online world for a couple of weeks.. however few posts on my Google Reader subscription list were regarding this new Windows Live Writer.. so I decided to post this from it!

It’s good, I got it setup in less than a minute, detected my Wordpress and can download existing posts and hopefully post new stuff (this :))

The interface is clean and it even downloads your current theme to preview your posts as they would appear on your weblog.. nice

I’ll post a more detailed review after I’ve had more chance to use it, right now however I’m a bit under the weather so will retire now back to bed!