My Quick Fix

Problem
While doing web development, I frequently need to insert lorem ipsum into a text field or textarea. To do this – bearing in mind that I don’t really like or use bookmarks, too messy – I tend to google “lorem ipsum”, hit lipsum.com, select/copy the block of text, and then return to my form field and paste it.
I wanted a quicker solution, and as I find myself using IE more and more to develop in now (thanks to the excellent ‘Developer Tools’ extension – never thought I’d say that!) my lorem …

Problem
Parallel resistances can be are hard to understand because your dealing with a ratio not a sum. If you had two 10 ohm resistors connected in parallel, the total resistance accross the two would be 5ohms – this much is fairly easy to grasp because both resistors would share the current equally. But as soon as the values are different, each resistor handles a different share of the current.
Solution
To work out the total resistance accross 2 or more resistors connected in parallel you need this formula:
Rtotal = 1 / ( (1/R1) + (1/R2) …

Problem
A coleague wanted to change the default ‘browse’ path that the JCE ‘Image Manager’ and ‘File Browser’ plugins use. By default when you use the plugins, the contents of the ‘Stories’ directory will be displayed. It seems that even if you go into the plugin settings ( under ‘Components > JCE Administration > Plugins > [plugin name]‘ ), and set the ‘File Directory Path’ setting, it still doesn’t change the default path!
Solution
Navigate to Components > JCE Administration > Groups as shown below:
Choose Groups from the main menu…
Then select the group you want …

Problem
Just now, I needed to move a website running Joomla 1.5 and VirtueMart 1.1.2 from the development server, to the live web space. After I had moved the data, and the files, and updated the path in Joomla’s ‘configuration.php’ file, it seemed to work ok, but all the links in the VirtueMart Admin area still pointed to my development server.
Solution
After doing a ‘find in files’ for my development server’s name, I found two more paths that need changing in VirtueMart’s own configuration file. This is the file:
/administrator/components/com_virtuemart/virtuemart.cfg.php
The following two paths …

Problem
In Joomla 1.5, at present, there is no way to set the template applied to an article or category  based on the section that article is in. Templates can be set by menu item, but not by the overall section they reside in. This means that if multiple templates are being used, each time a new article is added, changes have to be made to the template setup too – very tedious. All I wanted was to be able to create an article or category, add it to a certain …