There are a few solutions that are close to this.  http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/#remote-jsonp shows how to use jquery ui to do an ajax lookup on the geonames web service.  This would work but I found that the responsiveness of the geonames free service to be slow and inconsistent.  The free service also limits you to 30,000 searches a day or 2,000 an hour.  This is a lot for a small application but is still just another dependency that I would rather do without.

I found a free database of city zipcodes here: http://federalgovernmentzipcodes.us/ and parsed it with a ruby script to produce a couple of javascript arrays.  It turns out that all the city/state/zip combinations can be stored in a javascript file 1.1mb in size.

At this point you can fairly easily use jquery to add the necessary events to a form field so that it will automatically populate the states from the stored array, then it will automatically populate the city from the selected state, then it will automatically populate the zip from the selected city.  Alternatively, if the user enters a zip code it will automatically populate the city and state.  Since this is all done in javascript it should work in any CMS or custom code.

You can download the code here: citystatezip-js.zip

It requires jquery and works in all the major browsers including ie6.  I included the ruby script in case you need to customize the js arrays with other data.

Something happened Sunday that made me very glad that I chose NOT to store anything that I would not want shared with the world on Dropbox. They made a coding error during an update that allowed ANYONE to access ANY account there with ANY password. Although even with the doors wide open any of my data would have been singled out and downloaded, it makes me uncomfortable that it happened at all.

I will continue to use Dropbox the way that I have in the past, but now I am a little more wary of what I am willing to move off of my servers and into the cloud.  If your business needs a little or a lot of help understanding the ins and outs of what cloud based services are and how they can benefit your businesses, call us here at Softwyre.  We have been in and out of the cloud for years now.

For more info on this, you can go here: Wired Magazine or just Google it!

My name is Troy Brazile – the newest addition to the Softwyre staff.   I am a 22 year veteran in the IT industry, and have worn many hats during my career.  In those 22 years I have:

• Sold Commodore PET, C64′s and Amigas to Arkansas schools,
• Repaired printers, computers and monitors back when it was still safe to take a soldering iron to a circuit board,
• Designed and implemented Novell, Windows and Linux networks,
• Been a SQL DBA, and a HP Master Accredited Systems Engineer in Microsoft SQL Server,
• Worked for a Forture 500 company as a Sr. Manager responsible for leading  nearly 60 engineers,
• Self-studied and acheived my ISC2 Certified Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) certifications, and
• Led countless time-constrained and challenging Windows AD, Exchange and SMS global migration projects.

And this coming Saturday, April 16, 2011, will mark the one-month anniversary of my latest and likely lifetime endeavour – joining Steve Wade and the team of talented engineers at Softwyre!

I have known Steve a long time.  We worked together almost 15 years ago and have kept in touch ever since.  I chose the corporate path initially while Steve chose the path of creating Softwyre.  And over that time, I have watched Steve’s “part time” web & applications design business grow into a company that has designed some of Arkansas’ most visited websites, developed applications enabling their customers to be recognized in the INC 500 list of fastest growing companies, and provide remotely managed 24×7 technology services to small and medium businesses that saved them REAL money.  After spending nearly a dozen years in corporate America, I decided to make a career change midstream to join Softwyre… and thankfully Steve agreed to let me in on his ‘good thing’.

I chose Softwyre because I wanted to contribute to their mission of helping businesses grow and thrive through smart use of technology. Through managed services, cloud based computing, and an uncanny knack for utilizing the web and social media to market organizations and businesses, Softwyre is making a difference by helping people with technology. I want to leverage my experience to help make a difference, too. 

It’s been exciting so far, and I look forward to watching OUR business grow by helping YOUR business save money and grow. Let me know how Sofwyre and I can help you!

Follow me on Twitter! @tbrazile and @Softwyre

 Yes, hardware.

Facebook opened the doors of their new Prineville, Oregon data center to the public. This is one of the same data centers that Greenpeace identified as ‘wasteful’ in their “Facebook: Unfriend Coal” campaign.  However, Greenpeace was looking at it from a single angle – that the data center was supported by power plants that use coal.  To them, it appeared that the only ‘green’ in Facebook’s planning was in the dollars.

But Facebook had something else in mind.  The building’s location was specifically chosen because it is located in an environment specifically designed to take advantage of cool, dry nights.  This allows for mostly passive cooling with no traditional ducts, refrigerated air or internal plumbing. During the summer months, humidity and evaporative cooling are added by misters and fans which “pull” the chilled air through a series of washable mesh filters.  Servers include very little waste in design, including custom cases and no paint to minimize lost energy in cooling.  The average ‘traditional’ data center design shunned by Facebook’s engineers has a 1.5 rating, meaning that it ‘spends’ 1.5 watts of power for every 1 watt utilized, wasting 50% of the power consumed through inefficient design.  In contrast, Facebook achieved an amazing 1.07 rating, which translates to a data center that is 38% more efficient than their competition.

 This would be a real competitive advantage for them.  But Facebook chose instead to make all of the architectural specs, schematics, and CAD drawings for the entire data center publically available so these efficiencies can be replicated around the world.  Their ‘Open Commute’ project opens the door to vendors hoping to participate in ‘open source’ hardware projects and is already being embraced by Dell, HP, Intel, Rackspace, Zynga, and the U.S. Dept. of Energy.  Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston called Facebook’s contribution “…the biggest cost reduction in running severs in a decade.”

 Saving money and the planet makes me want to click the LIKE button.

 Read the full press release here: Facebook Launches Open Compute Project

Backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, etc.. These can be pretty complex subjects for people to follow.  As a consultant to small and medium business these are very important areas that we spend a fair amount of time keeping up to date on.  There are MANY options that are available these days to backup your data.  How you do it is usually not nearly important as just doing it.  In an effort to keep things simple we thought we would give a shout out to a couple of products that we have and do use regularly and have no problem recommending to customers.  Again, there are too many products and solutions to list here, so we are just going to give you a couple to look at.

Home users that want to backup their data simply safely and effectively might want to take a look at Carbonite.  It is simple to use, easy to install, and highly rated by people who use it.  It is available for Macs and PCs, and it is a pretty low cost piece of software for the piece of mind that it can give.   http://www.carbonite.com/en/

Small Businesses all the way up to Enterprise have trusted the Backup Exec Solution from Symantec for backing up their data for years, and so have we.  The product line for backups once you get into small business can be a little confusing, but Symantec has the bases covered when it comes to backing up.   http://www.symantec.com/business/backup-exec-for-windows-servers

We are not suggesting that these are the only products available, or even the best products for everyone, but we do know that these products work for most people.  Maybe one day I will find more time to write a complete article on some of the other types of backup configurations that we use ourselves.  But for now, if you aren’t backing up, please, please, please, make a copy of your important data and store it somewhere safe today.  It really saddens us when we get a desperate call from a new person saying that they think that they have lost their data, and it is expensive or near impossible to recover it for them.

We would love to hear some creative ways that our friends are backing up their data!  Let us know what you are using!

Backing up your Facebook Account

After talking to one of our engineers about the problem, it was suggested that I just restore from the Time Machine backup.  I haven’t been too familiar with Time Machine in the past; however I figured I would investigate doing this.  After a few minutes on the Apple support site I was convinced that this would work and I was relieved to know that I wouldn’t have to spend hours installing software and searching for the little things, such as the fonts that were installed on the system before the crash.

It took me a bit to locate the OSX disks, as they were stored away, after the move to Softwyre’s awesome new office.

Once I started the system recovery, I realized that I have never used a recovery system that is so user friendly.  With a few clicks of the mouse the system took care of the rest.  Sure it took a while to recover everything, but Time Machine saved the company and me, hours of manual work.

In conclusion, I must say that this has taught me the beauty of backups.

Are you sure you are backing up?  If not, Contact Hardwyre/Softwyre, we back it up!

Overriding Components with Specific Hooks

Okay, let’s say we’re building a table to display data for the front or backend of a component.  First we need to have the foresight to realize that having too much data on the page is bad and that we want some pagination.  Since we’re skilled Joomla! developers (or we’d like to think we are), we know that Joomla! packs pagination capabilities we can draw upon in the JPagination class.  Check it out in /libraries/html/pagination.php if you haven’t seen it before.

Fast forward a bit and we’ve built our table to use JPagination and it’s great… except we don’t like the output and we’d like to rearrange to look a little nicer.  Well that’s not a problem at all.  If you took the opportunity to poke through JPagination, you probably noticed this little block of code:

$chromePath = JPATH_THEMES.DS.$mainframe->getTemplate().DS.'html'.DS.'pagination.php';
if (file_exists( $chromePath ))
{
	require_once( $chromePath );
	if (function_exists( 'pagination_list_footer' )) {
		return pagination_list_footer( $list );
	}
}
return $this->_list_footer($list);

What this block of code is doing is essentially saying that if /mytemplate/html/pagination.php exists and it has a function called “pagination_list_footer” then call that to display the output.  Otherwise call the default class’ “_list_footer” function.  All we need to do in this case to get a custom display is create that file and function.

Overriding Component Templates

Overriding components with hooks is rough because many times we don’t know the hook exists.  Until I sat down and looked through JPagination, I had no idea there was a hook there for an output override.  Unlike those, overriding templates is much easier for us thanks to the great way template files are implemented.

Let’s look at the directory structure for article of com_content as that is a piece which we will likely want to override fairly often.

- /com_content
  - /helpers
  - /models
  - /views
    - /archive
	- /article
	  - /tmpl
	    - default.php
		- default.xml
		- form.php
		- form.xml
		- pagebreak.php
		- pagebreak.xml
		- index.html
	- /category
	- /frontpage
	- /section

The important things to notice here are the contents of the tmpl directory as those are the pieces we can override.  default.php is the main file we’re interested in as it controls the display of all articles.  In order to override it, we need to place an override file in our template.

- /templates
  - /ourTemplate
    - /html
	  - /com_content
	    - /article
		  - default.php

Once this file and directory structure are in place, Joomla! will call our default.php file when it renders an article.

Overriding Module Templates

This is really no different from components but we should go over it because the module directory structure looks a little bit different (but not too much so).  For this example, let’s say we’re going to override mod_mainmenu.  First, we find our template file.

- /modules
  - /mod_mainmen
    - /tmpl
	  - default.php
	  - index.html

Next we copy default.php over to our template like so…

- /templates
  - /ourTemplate
    - /html
	  - /mod_mainmenu
	    - default.php
		- index.php

And that’s it.  We can modify the template default.php and see the changes on the website as Joomla! will prefer that one to its own.