On puplar request, I present you with an extension I wrote to the popular AMBRA.subscriptions component by Dioscouri Design in order to handle EU VAT in user subscriptions. As with all of my code, it's released under the GNU General Public License so that you can freely use it on any website. Read on for the details.

As you all know, every new Joomla! installation comes with a Super Administrator account with a well-known user ID: 62. Nobody really knows for sure why 62 was chosen, but this can lead to your site's security being compromised. Why? It is a very well known value and potential hackers can take advantage of it in conjunction with another vulnerability to take control of your site. Known constants are a security nightmare as made clear in the case of the attack against Joomla! 1.5.5 which caused a lot of sites to be compromised as the researcher who found the vulnerability released it to the general public before the Joomla! team had a chance to fix it.

One easy workaround is to demote this well-known user account down to the Registered level and block it, hanging potential hackers to dry. However, in order to complete our security modification we do need another Super Administrator. The problem is that if you just create a new user his ID will be 63, which is not secure at all; it's a hacker's next best bet. So, we need a way to create a Super Administrator with a random ID, preferably in the 1-61 range which is otherwise unused in Joomla!. This is what we are going to do, folks, without even using phpMyAdmin for the task.

Note: You will be modifying your site's database. Even though the following procedure is well-tested, it's best to practice it on a local testing server first.

This article is currently available only in GreekΠριν από λίγο καιρό αγόρασα ένα πακέτο σύνδεσης Cosmote Internet On The Go, ώστε να έχω σύνδεση Internet παντού. Η μεγάλη πρόκληση ήταν να το κάνω να δουλέψει, παρά τις αντίθετες διαβεβαιώσεις του πωλητή στο κατάστημα Cosmote, με το Ubuntu Netbook Remix που έχω εγκαταστήσει εδώ και λίγο καιρό στο EeePC μου. Ενώ, θεωρητικά, ο Network Manager υποστηρίζει εγγενώς συνδέσεις 3G Internet, τα πράγματα χωλαίνουν λόγω του μη υποστηριζόμενου USB stick της Cosmote (ZTE MF636) και της εμμονής μου... να θέλω να έχω PIN στην SIM! Ο επιμένων, όμως, νικά!

As I have already implied, I installed Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring on my EeePC 900. Mandriva is such a great Linux distribution and almost 100% EeePC-friendly. The first obstacle I had to overcome was the seemingly broken touchpad behaviour. The next obstacle I had to overcome was of much less importance: simulating ASUS EeePC Control functionality on Linux. Thankfully, there is a great software called EeeControl, but it wouldn't install on my new distribution. Hey, I am a Linux guy, so I had to fix this too. It wasn't that hard after all. Interested?

Mandriva Linux 2009.1 is a great Linux distribution, much more elegant than its predecessor. However, there is a serious "regression" to its predecessor. The Elantech touchpad of many netbooks and laptops - most notably all EeePC's - and probably other brands of touchpads behave oddly. For starters, there is no gesture support. Forget tap-to-click, two finger swipe for scrolling etc. Then, the pointer movement is jerky, as if the touchpad is acting as a touch screen!

This problem happened because Mandriva switched from defaulting to the proprietary Synaptics driver to the open-source generic mouse driver. While this switch should be acceptable for their Free edition, doing so in the Powerpack and One editions is - the least to say - annoying, as it totally ruins user experience, especially if you are a newbie. Thankfully, it's quite easy to fix!

As I had written about in the past, I am the proud owner of an EeePC 900 since December 2008. One of the things that was bugging me all that time was that it had to run on Windows. Frankly, I couldn't find a good reason to do so, as for the most part I was using Firefox, Skype and OpenOffice, all available under Linux. That, and it was extremely time-consuming waiting for that Windows XP to start up. So, I decided to install Linux on it.

Sometimes, despite how advanced desktop GNU/Linux has become, it's desirable to have your computer able to boot into Windows without the use of an emulator. If you had Windows pre-installed on the computer at the time you installed GNU/Linux, this dual-booting ability is added automatically on all modern distributions. However, if you want to install Windows after Linux, this seems like a complete headache. Not really! The process is easy.

This article is written while installing Windows 7 Beta on a PC with Mandriva Linux 2009 already installed. Of course, the same procedure – with some minor adjustments – applies with any Linux distribution and any Windows version!

Ever since Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring, the MySQL server included with the popular distro won't play out of the box (on most end-user systems, I have to be fair). If you try to spawn the service automatically, it will give you no reason as to why it won't start, causing a lot of frustration. Trying to spawn it manually with service mysqld start from a root command line will give you a nice, cryptic reply like:

ERROR: hostname cannot be localhost, mysql_install_db is quite unstable
https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=38398

Well... following the link to the Mandriva bug page will cause even more confusion! However, the solution is really, really simple! Just read on . This solution may apply to other distributions as well, but it has only been tested in Mandriva Linux 2008.1 and 2009.0

Since the advent of GTK2 I hadn't really bothered with this old, seemingly outdated, beast called GTK 1. However, there are some useful applications which are linked against it and I'd like to use them. Most prominently, it's the Lazarus IDE (the GTK2 interface is buggy and the Qt interface requires tons of hacks to work). The most proinent problem I just couldn't stand is that the default font used in GTK1 apps looks ugly, so ugly it hurts my eyes and renders GTK1 applications unusuable. Fortunately, changing the default font is almost easy; you do have to edit some configuration files.

One of the most useful  extensions to PHP is suPHP which allows any PHP script to be executed under its owning user privileges. This helps in administering sites which need write access to their files (like, for example, Joomla! does for its tmp and log directories) without the need for an FTP layer or potentially dangerous permissions tweaking. Let's see how you can implement this functionality on a home brew server based on Mandriva Linux 2008.1