The affiliate program is available here http://www.thinkovi.com/aff/

The payout schedule for now if at the begging of each month for all affiliates that have over 20 USD in balance and delivered at least 2 sales.

Earn money fast and easy with ThinkOvi! affiliate program.

Well, here is a simple solution for you to reset your Joomla password in a few easy steps:

1. login to your site hosting control panel and look for phpmyadmin access
2. lookout for your Joomla database, select it, and open an SQL query window and type in it this query:

UPDATE  jos_users set password=md5(‘mynewpass’) WHERE username=”admin”

Now you will be able to login with mynewpass for the account admin, but i would advise a little bit of creativity in choosing another pass.

If it still does not work, give us a call, we might be able to help you faster in recovering your Joomla admin access details.

• insights for the term “future” shows an increasing in search around the end of the year in December, Canada users having an increased interest in the feature, followed by countries like India and Australia

• insights for the term “jobs” gains the highest interest in month July and decreases slowly until December, and then rebuilding the interest in the next year, Zimbabwe having an increased interest, followed by Kenya, Pakistan, and then again India

If you have found similar insight patterns, please care to share with us…

Through our experience, here are some good joomla hosting companies we recommend, list will continue to be updated:

- hostgator.com – from 4.95$ /month for Unlimited disk space and bandwidth

- steadfast.net – from 24.95$/year , they seem to have very responsive support even if the allocated disk space is not that large

- siteground.com – from 5.95$/month , they can also provide free domain name when singing up for a longer period

Usually the unlimited offers are just a selling point, nothing is unlimited, so make sure when signing up to read the full agreement details.

If you have a good host to recommend, please comment to this post and we will put it up. Good luck!

Lets analyze some of the tasks that can be done only by the use of a secure command shell:

1. Creating a backup for your files – this simple tutorial from DebianHelp shows how you can create a tar backup of your files, which can include one or more directories and files

2. Creating a mysql database backup for one or multiple databases can be done by using the mysqldump utility, this tutorial might be of further use

3. Sending your backup to another location, presuming an  ftp server, can be achieved with the wput utility

Basic usage:  wput ftp://[username[:password]@]hostname[:port][/[path/][file]]

4. Advanced tools to look into:

rsync: open source utility for fast incremental file transfer

bacula: open source network backup tool

cron: linux job scheduler that can be used to automatize the backup and transfer process

The utility is actually written in PERL so it can run on any number of hosts that support PERL scripting, and while it has many config options, here is the actual command we used to transfer an email account from our server to Google Apps Mail account(GMail is the same) from a Linux box:

The command

imapsync \

–host1 thinkovi.com –user1 email@thinkovi.com –password1 mypass1 \

–host2 imap.gmail.com –user2 new@gmail.com –password2 pass2 \

–ssl2 –ssl1 –authmech1 PLAIN –authmech2 LOGIN

• bear in mind that this utility will work only for email servers supporting IMAP protocol.

• also, in the above code notice we have used SSL for both connections, and PLAIN authentication for the original server and LOGIN for the imap server at google

Result Message

++++ End looping on each folder ++++
++++ Statistics ++++
Time                   : 257 sec
Messages transferred   : 170
Messages skipped       : 0
Total bytes transferred: 12914745
Total bytes skipped    : 0
Total bytes error      : 0
Detected 0 errors

• worth mentioning, the utility really worked and our gmail account contained in the end all email messages and folders from the original IMAP server

The full usage options(“imapsync –help“) and more information can also be found on the imapsync linux man page here.

Please, thank the author (Gilles LAMIRAL) by giving him a book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/1C9UNDIH3P7R7/

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)subpage1/subpage2/mypage.html$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Itemid=91&page=mypage$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mynewurl.com/index.php?mypage=new

What the above condition does is redirect /subpage1/subpage2/mypage.html?Itemid=91&page=mypage url to http://mynewurl.com/index.php?mypage=new

Obviously, you need to replace the above names with your actual site names

The second RewriteCond with QUERY_STRING is only needed if the url you want to rewrite has additional parameters like mypage.html?pages=mypage for instance

Data recovery

As you might know, disk drives, specially in high usage areas like hosting enviroments, have a tendency of crashing from time to time.

Most crashes you will encounter are related to bad blocks on your hard drive which in some cases will stop your operating system from booting, leaving your server at a stop. There are several utilities which can help you detect and fix the bad blocks at a software level, like the FSCK(file system check) available for Linux, or CHKDSK and SCANDISK for Windows, however there are situations when the bad block can’t be fixed, most of the cases due to a critical error.

While this doesn’t happen constantly or too often, it would be nice to think that there might be ways to recover data that might be business critical, and here is how:

DDRescue is recovery tool that will help you create an image of your hard drive, skip the bad blocks, and restore it on another hard disk! It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors. While this utility mostly runs on unix systems, it can deal with any type of disk drive data, whether it’s a linux system, windows, mac osx or something else.

We found this article to be fairly instructive giving all the restore procedures to handle a hard disk failure recovery.

If you are lucky, and the bad blocks were not containing some important booting data, your new cloned hard drive could be popped inside the server and ready to boot from it, resuming your server activity! If not, well you are still lucky you just need to do some more work to get the server up and booting again, fairly a system administrator job.

There are also hardware failures, when your hard disk might become unaccessible at a hardware level, in which case the best way to do is ship it back to the manufacturer company and let them replace the faulty parts, your important data might still get saved.

Best and always, make sure you always keep proper backups of your important data. Good luck!

DDRescue help: ddrescue -h

GNU ddrescue - Data recovery tool.
Copies data from one file or block device to another,
trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors.

Usage: ddrescue [options] infile outfile [logfile]
You should use a logfile unless you know what you are doing.

Options:
  -h, --help                    display this help and exit
  -V, --version                 output version information and exit
  -b, --block-size=      sector size of input device [default 512]
  -B, --binary-prefixes         show binary multipliers in numbers [SI]
  -c, --cluster-size=  sectors to copy at a time [128]
  -C, --complete-only           do not read new data beyond logfile limits
  -d, --direct                  use direct disc access for input file
  -D, --synchronous             use synchronous writes for output file
  -e, --max-errors=          maximum number of error areas allowed
  -F, --fill=            fill given type blocks with infile data (?*/-+)
  -g, --generate-logfile        generate approximate logfile from partial copy
  -i, --input-position=
    starting position in input file [0]
  -m, --domain-logfile=   restrict domain to finished blocks in file
  -n, --no-split                do not try to split or retry failed blocks
  -o, --output-position=
   starting position in output file [ipos]
  -q, --quiet                   suppress all messages
  -r, --max-retries=         exit after given retries (-1=infinity) [0]
  -R, --retrim                  mark all failed blocks as non-trimmed
  -s, --max-size=        maximum size of input data to be copied
  -S, --sparse                  use sparse writes for output file
  -t, --truncate                truncate output file to zero size
  -T, --try-again               mark non-split, non-trimmed blocks as non-tried
  -v, --verbose                 verbose operation
Numbers may be followed by a multiplier: b = blocks, k = kB = 10^3 = 1000,
Ki = KiB = 2^10 = 1024, M = 10^6, Mi = 2^20, G = 10^9, Gi = 2^30, etc...

SquirrelMail Logo

I have to admit, the gmail and yahoo new email interfaces are great, if you don’t mind the advertising, and very easy to use, however i have been using for a long time SquirrelMail to access the email directly on my server!

While the interface that comes with the cpanel installation is very basic, there is one thing i would have liked to have, like in Yahoo, when you get an email, the page title automatically changes with the number of unread emails!

Now, squirrelmail already have this auto-refresh thing, so here is what you need to do in order to get the titles of the top frame updated:

1. locate and open on your server the squirrelmail/src/left_main.php file
2. locate this line

/* Print unseen information. */
if ($unseen_string != '') {

3. Add this code just before the if statement

if($mailbox == 'INBOX'){
   if ($unseen_string != ""){
      $line .= "<script type='text/javascript'>top.document.title='Inbox ".$unseen_string."'</script>";
   }else{
      $line .= "<script type='text/javascript'>top.document.title='No unread messages'</script>";
   }
}

Now, your squirellmail should look like this when getting a new email

And obviously, this will only work for the INBOX folder!

Happy squirrelling

Microsoft Web Platform

It seems that, earlier this year, Microsoft released a small application called Web Platform Installer , a utility meant to be dead simple to install a range of web applications and get your website up and going fast on a IIS server.

Beside the usual Microsoft web applications support like ASP.NET and SQL SERVER, they also added support for PHP, facilitating this way the installation of a range of web publishing tools like Drupal, Moodle and WordPress, hope I see some Joomla! there as it’s fairly popular.

Would also be nice to hear they also added support for Python, so that we can start serving code to Google, kidding , but it wouldbe nice.

A small review of this service can be found here , thanks to Louis Simoneau.