Archive for February, 2008

Connecting MySQL with OpenOffice Base

OpenOffice Base makes it incredibly easy to hook up to a MySQL database. Once this is accomplished you can easily create a front end to browse through your data, edit it, report on it, etc. Below are a few steps I took to create a functional setup:

What I did was:

  1. Have OpenOffice installed
  2. Access to a database (for this example I used my wp_posts table from Wordpress) from the workstation running OpenOffice
  3. Downloaded MySQL® Connector/J and installed
    1. Within OpenOffice clicked, “Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Java > Class Path… > Add Archive…”
    2. Selected “mysql-connector-java-5.1.5-bin.jar” or current version
    3. Restarted OpenOffice (had to make sure the process was fully “killed”)
  4. Created a new database within OpenOffice
    1. Within OpenOffice, clicked “File > New > Database”
    2. clicked the “Connect to an existing database” radio button
    3. selected “MySQL” from the drop down list
    4. clicked the “Next >>” button
    5. selected the “Connect using JDBC (Java Database Connectivity)” radio button
    6. clicked the “Next >>” button
    7. entered the “Name of the database” into the text field
    8. entered the MySQL “Server URL” into the text field
    9. clicked the “Test Class” button and received “The JDBC driver was loaded successfully”
    10. clicked the “Next >>” button
    11. entered as “User name” into the text field
    12. checked the “Password required” checkbox
    13. clicked the “Finish” button and save
  5. Made a form based on wp_posts:
    1. This screenshot is of the form I made to browse the raw data of my Wordpress posts from my Thoughts and Notions weblog and is showing data from this post in particular:
    2. OpenOffice Base wp_posts

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Windows CopSSH Clear

On a default install of CopSSH 1.4.2 I noticed that you cannot run “clear” after launching “Start a Unix BASH Shell”.

Type in “cmd /c edit” to open the MS-DOS Editor and enter the following:

#!/bin/bash
cmd /c cls

Save the file as “clear” and exit the editor. Back in the shell, try running “./clear” and you should receive pleasant results.

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reCAPTCHA plugin error messages

By default, on two of my installs of reCAPTCHA Plugin for WordPress - v2.7, I receive no error message if the captcha is entered incorrectly… the user of the weblog is to assume that they made a mistake I guess…

That is until I wrote this script to check for error messages being passed around on the URL by the plugin:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (window.location.search != "") {
        var searchArray = window.location.search.split("&");
        for (var i=0; i < searchArray.length; i++) {
                var searchSubArray = searchArray[i].split("=");
                if (searchSubArray[0] == "rerror" &&
                searchSubArray[1] == "incorrect-captcha-sol") {
                        document.write("<p><small style=\"color: red;\">The two words in the picture were typed incorrectly.</small></p>");
                }                              
        }
}
</script>

Just drop that snippet into your “comments.php” template. When the captcha is filled in incorrectly, the plugin adds “rerror=incorrect-captcha-sol” to the url. This checks for that string, and if found, writes an error message in red.

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