JoseOlivos.com

As most of you know, I am an avid mixed martial arts fan! I am a member of many MMA-oriented forums and communities, but I am finding that there is no forum for amateur fighters to showcase their talents or promote their careers.

I am planning to launch the iCageFight.com community, but am searching for a sponsor to promote the site. I contacted TapOut, but they are not sponsoring at this time. Oh well, I will keep trying to find a sponsor.

Attention designers! If you are interested in developing the brand for a fan-built MMA community, please drop me a line. I plan to integrate all of the changes, so no need to know HTML or other technologies.

I took several weeks off to decompress from the last project and to wait for the next contract to ramp up. Well, with the time off I was able to complete the administration component of the application, nice!

The main application is nearing completion, but I am finding minor inconsistencies in the user interface that need to be resolved. I estimate the public pages are approx. 70% complete at this time.

I am starting a new contract soon, so I am not sure how long it will take to complete the balance of the public application. Some of the extra features will have to wait for now and revisited in the near future.

Check out iFindFast.com, it is a sample website powered by the Prado framework and Google Custom Search. From zero to published website in less than 1 hour. I installed the framework, added template, developed home page, unit tested, and done!

I understand that using a PHP-based framework is overkill for a simple search, but the sample is just that a sample. I plan to extend the site to include custom search tools and products, so keep an eye out.

After numerous attempts to realize two personal projects, I am pleased to announce that design and development for Ranthead.com is going strong. The project is a social messaging application. Yep, another one of those sites!

Over the next several months, I will post project updates with relevant previews. The requirements definition and project scope phases were challenging, but those hurdles have been overcome and it is time for heads down software design!

Lastly, I am searching for a dynamic, passionate, and creative graphic designer to help me develop the brand identity. If you have experience in identity and user interface design, please contact me to discuss the project requirements.

If you are an Apache user you are familiar with the mod_rewrite extension and its URL manipulation capabilities. Well, IIS has lacked URL rewriting capabilities for many years until now. IIS 7.0 includes the Redirect Engine module, nice.

What do you do if you want an alternative to the IIS 7.0 offering? Well, I use 3rd party extensions to provide the URL rewriting function. There are many rewriting extensions available, including URL Rewriter from Managed Fusion.

Managed Fusion released version 1.3.1 of their URL manipulation engine on February 1, 2008. Options, options, options. Always nice to have technology options available to us and this is no different. The URL Rewriter works great!

First, I have to reiterate that I HATE Vista. Every operation requires confirmation and it is a resource HOG! Rest assured I will install XP Pro on this notebook, but for now the P.O.S. operating system will host a PHP/MySQL development environment.

Anyway, this post is not about Vista. Instead, it is about running MySQL 5.0 on Vista. I discovered the config. utility (MySQLInstanceConfig.exe) would not run due to a typo in the executable manifest.

This is a documented bug that is scheduled to be fixed in an official update. I am not going to wait until the update is released, so I downloaded Resource Hacker and fixed the manifest information.

Ten minutes well spent. The config. utility executable is patched and runs on Vista. If you want to fix the manifest yourself, follow the instructions below (screen shots are on their way):

1. Download Resource Hacker
2. Extract files to the folder of your choice (<program files>\resource hacker\)
3. Run the ResHacker executable
4. Open the configuration utility (<mysql bin>\MySQLInstanceConfig.exe)
5. Find text “asAdministrator” (only one instance found)
6. Replace text with “requireAdministrator”
7. Click the Compile Script button
8. Save the executable
9. Exit Resource Hacker
10. Enjoy!