I’ve got another post up over at Group 3 Solutions. We’ve turned our attention away from WordPress Plugins over to Joomla Plugins this time around. First up is Joomla Tabs & Slides. The post gives some background on tabs as a concept and then shows how to easily implement them in Joomla using this plugin. Enjoy!

Was looking into Kindle publishing at Amazon for a friend and discovered that it’s a real pain in the neck. Here’s a thread breaking down the basic “what do I have to do to my Word doc to make this thing work” questions. Also, forget about simply uploading your existing PDF files or anything with tables. Buh buh formatting. Here’s a thread listing all the formats that Kindle “supports.” Problem is, it really only supports HTML. They use a special page non-HTML break tag, which explains some things. Headers, footers, and page numbers need to be removed. The forums are chocked full of complaints about the lack of publishing tools, and I couldn’t agree more. What a mess.

Been tinkering around with custom Joomla 1.5 component development. Here are some helpful getting started links with “Hello world” -level tutorials:

1. vojtechovsky.net
2. softmarket.ro
3. packtpub.com

As previously mention here, we had a library CD stuck in our kids’ 20″ iMac (Intel). You can see the previous post to get up to speed if interested, but the bottom line is that is has been removed. It took four suction cups, a TORX 8 and TORX 6 driver, along with various other jewelers-type Phillips heads, two people, a bright flashlight, and about an hour and a half on a clean, padding tablecloth. Whew.

The instructions I mentioned in the previous post were designed to open a similar unit up and remove the hard drive, so our proceedure was slightly different but not on the points that mattered. The key, in the end, was that even once you expose the optical drive and remove it from the plastic housing that holds it in the unit, you still won’t be able to get the CD out without physically dismantling the optical drive… which, as it turns out, is a simple matter of remove 3 or 4 eyeglass-style Phillips screws, removing the top casing, and voila… the CD is just sitting there waiting to be removed. It was this particular step (the removing of the top casing) that Apple was wary of; the Genius had told me that if their policy is not to use/trust optical drives once this has been done. I’m not sure why, though, since the unit is not hermetically sealed like hard drives, and there was basically nothing that could be broken in the operation, provided you simply removed the CD and closed the thing back up.

Anyway, mission accomplished! We’ve tested the unit with blank discs (that we didn’t care about) to see if the eject mechanism is working, and all seems well. What a relief! Mental note… get AppleCare whenever possible. =)

A month or so ago we checked out some CDs from the library and popped them into the kids’ slot-loading iMac at home. The first CD didn’t eject. It has some sort of metal security strips affixed to the top, and is covered with a thin layer of clear plastic to keep the metal strips down. On top of this are also some other library labels. Bottom line: it’s too thick to come out of the optical drive on its own. There’s no manual eject button, and the usual means to trigger an eject “work” but fail to provide enough force to eject the CD. The powered eject mechanism inside the drive just isn’t strong enough.

What to do? A trip to the Apple Store didn’t help. At the Apple Store they confirmed by fears that there’s no way to get it out short of removing the optical drive from the iMac and dismantling it to extract the CD. Apple doesn’t trust dismantled optical drives to be put back together (can’t say I blame them) and so charges for a replacement optical drive. In the end it would cost around $300+ to get the CD out and have a workable optical drive. Ugh! I asked the Apple Genius about getting the thing apart and mentioned my success with a Mac Mini and the “putty knife method.” He let me know that it was much more complicated than the Mini and involved… wait for it… suction cups. Yes, suction cups.

Stupid library CDs.

After the success of my MacBook Pro upgrade, I’m going to attempt this repair myself. Don’t have much to lose. =) cNet has a great set of instructions on getting the iMac unit apart. I have all the tools ready, so it’s just a matter of getting the time. There’s also a brief video about the process.

Great article about Twitter from Snapps’ Rob Novak, a high-profile Lotus consultant/developer and good friend to my colleague Carol Dobies. Over at his Lotus Rock Star blog, he makes the case for Twitter, and likens it to a cocktail party. Money quote:

Just something to consider if you’re squarely in the “why would I care” camp…Twitter and other social media are like going to a cocktail party, like one I went to Thursday at the Mentor Summit in Vegas. I expect to talk to lots of people, care about what some of them have to say, filter a lot of personal stuff that doesn’t affect me while looking interested (how rude!), and come away – if not inebriated – with a few nuggets of great information, some great new contacts, and an idea or two out of the social interaction we have in a group that size. This dynamic – and EVERY networking event you’ve ever attended – is very similar to consistent use of social media in a targeted fashion.

Q) Can you deep link inside a PDF?
A) Yes, but only by specifying PDF page numbers. Can’t link to Bookmarks. Link would look like this:

http://www.domain.com/test/test.pdf#page=3

Q) Can you specify a link in a PDF to open it’s target in a new window?
A) No, not for URL links. They will open in the same window the PDF was in, thereby replacing the PDF.

Q) Can links in PDFs be specified as relative?
A) Yes, for URL links.

Here’s a couple of links worth reading that pertainto Facebook and SEO/SEM…

• How to Make a Fan Page in Facebook
• Why You Need to Make a Facebook Fan Page for Your Website NOW!

Warner Music correctly identified their unlicensed music in a couple of YouTube videos I posted for our Heath High School reunion in 2008. Videos are still there, but muted. Grumble. Will have to get some new music for those sometime soon.

• Here…
• Here…
• Here…
• And here…

Preface: You have to understand that Apple really, really, REALLY doesn’t expect (want?) folks to be upgrading the drive of their MacBook Pros. This was nothing like the nightmare involved in an old clamshell iBook drive upgrade, but boy howdy I’ve never seen so many screws.

Whew. Just a follow-up from a previous post where I mentioned I was considering upgrading the hard drive in my MacBook Pro. Found a walk-through online with photos, so I was somewhat prepared, though I found out too late the Torx driver heads I had were one size too large (doh!). A lunch-break trip to Home Depot took care of that little problem. Everything went pretty much according to plan, with three notable exceptions that I’ll post here for anyone else who may be interested in a similar upgrade:

1. During the initial “cracking” of the case, I got to the step where you remove the top panel (with the keyboard) but couldn’t get the bloody thing detached at the front middle. The article cautioned about this area and said to rock the panel side to side in order to get it to release. I went on for some time (rocking, shaking, inserting plastic objects in the gaps, etc.) before realizing that I had missed a screw that was holding this part together. Heh. One more screw and voila. =)
2. On the way out I was in a hurry and made a really unfortunate but laughable mistake. On each side panel there are four tiny screws that need to be replaced. On the first side: Screw 1… done. Screw 2… done. Screw 3… done. Screw 4… whoa. The screw went too far into the hole. Huh? Yeah. Was it the wrong screw? Nope. Weird. Couldn’t get it out, so would have to come back to it. Next! Screw 5… whoa, same problem. What on earth? Couldn’t get it out, and this was going to be a problem. Screw 6… wait a minute. There are only supposed to be four screw holes on each side. That’s when it dawned on me… I had put the screws into the screw holes for the monitor plug. Heh. Yikes. Had to leave, so I finished up the rest of the job and left two screw holes empty in the battery compartment. I banged as hard as I dared, shook, used my tiny magnetic tools… nothing. Maybe it would come out on the trip home. Nope. At home I tried sticky-tack (sidenote: my sticky tack has been in my desk since college, and it pretty gooey at this point), but no luck. In the end, I put Super Glue on the end of my screwdriver, held it to the screw long enough to get a bond, and then unscrewed it out (even though the screws were too small, the threading still prevented them from just coming by pulling). Same trick on the second one, and voila.
3. One last snafu to mention. In the battery compartment there are three tiny screws that to the casual observer will appear identical to the other tiny screws on the unit. Being a casual observer, natch, I made this error, and put them in the pile with the other small screws. But there is a big difference… these three screws have no counter-sinking bevel, and so if used on the outside of the unit not screw down flush with the case. I found this out the hard way, but noticed and put things right.

Yay! 320GB of goodness. The night before I had used SuperDuper to migrate my main drive’s date onto the new drive by way of OWC’s Mercury On-the-Go FireWire 800/USB 2 portable eSATA drive case. Sheri and I watched a movie on NetFlix while the transfer happened, and I was suprised that it was done by the time the move ended. Man, I love FireWire 800! =)