Pat Howe's Blog

Example drag and drop in HTML5

This short article walks through an example use of drag and drop on a web page using the dragNdrop API of HTML 5. Everyone should know that drag and drop means you can move an object from one place and drop it in another place on the screen so I won’t go into any more detail than that. This article is made up of a step by step guide to building an example web page to demonstrate the functionality. There are some explanations of the actions and code along the

Protecting yourself against scammers

It might be April Fools Day but this short article on protecting yourself from scammers is not a prank and for the thousands of people who get scammed every day it is no laughing matter. If there is one group of people who relish a crisis, it’s the scammers. These criminals are looking to exploit the most vulnerable when they need help the most. They don’t see it as a crime. They see vulnerability as weakness that they can and should exploit. It is human nature to trust others until

Using Excel to calculate league position

Last year, I started writing an article on using Excel for a football league to work out the positions in the league table based on the results. I never finished it but then during the current pandemic and the uncertainty over completing the current football seasons I started playing with Excel again. So, this is not really a technology article, although in the Excel examples, I have used some useful Excel functions. This is also not an important article considering the global crisis surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Those of us

Copying a WordPress site to another location

I had a few articles in mind for this month but looks like I run out of time. This article is actually something that was rather complex but has been made very simple thanks to a WordPress plug-in. I want to back up and restore my WordPress site to another host with a different URL. For example, if I wanted to build a site on one server and then transfer it to another. It would normally require a lot of database update queries if the URL changed. The Duplicator WP

Reverse engineering and generating databases in Visio

This article shows you how to connect to a database and populate a diagram with its tables, relationships and properties. For this I will use an Access database but it could be any data source where you have its driver installed. I want to represent a relational database structure on a diagram but I want it to show primary and foreign keys, unique indexes and the relationship structure between tables. I also want it to contain any parameters, constraints or other logic associated with the tables. I also want to

Add Confluence to a Server with a Jira installation

This article is really a continuation of my previous article about installing Jira Software on an Ubuntu server yourself, Installing Jira on Ubuntu Linux with MySQL. However, this focuses on Jira’s sister product, Confluence. The Confluence product is great for team collaboration and can be used for many different purposes. You can set up a Wiki for your company or applications. For me, however, I mostly use it for requirements documentation and Jira reporting. To be able to do the latter, you need to link to a Jira instance and

Add Jira Service Desk Server to previous Jira installation

This article is really a continuation of my previous article about installing Jira Software on an Ubuntu server yourself, Installing Jira on Ubuntu Linux with MySQL. Unlike, Jira Software where every user counts towards the license limitation, Jira Service Desk differentiates between Agent Users and Customer Users. You only license Agent Users in the Service Desk. On the server that I am using in this example, I installed Jira Software and thought I would add Jira Service Desk too. If you don’t already have a version of Jira installed on

Running multiple versions of PHP on Ubuntu

I have a situation with the PHP websites on my Ububtu server. I would like to upgrade the server to PHP 7.3 but some of them may fail to run under that. Therefore, I am going to install PHP 7.3 whilst keeping PHP 5.6 as my default in Apache until I am satisfied I can safely switch and remove PHP 5.6. I actually upgraded the server from 14.04 to 16.04 earlier this year but kept PHP 5.6 and have not installed any 7.x versions. Getting Prepared for PHP 7.3 To

My Web Minder email changes

This is a message for My Web Minder hosting customers that are using the mailbox feature of their accounts. A security update is taking place right now on all mail servers to help prevent non-legitimate accounts (spammers) from using these servers. It started yesterday and will continue all of the week until next weekend. The default port for SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol), i.e. outgoing mail traffic is being switched off. Some mail clients already try a different port first but then settle for 25. A mail client is the

Upgrading Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04

I previously upgraded an Ubuntu server from 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS (LTS = long term support) but didn’t document the steps. So this time I thought I would. This article has been a long time coming. I was lucky enough (depending on your view) to still have a server running 14.04 LTS as it is out of support now. I have Let’s Encrypt’s Certbot on this server so I will show what to do when that fails. Other non-Ubuntu-bundled installs will need attention after the upgrade too. Before starting

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