Brandon M. West

Using a Vodacom/Vodafone 3G Card on Mac OS X

Brandon West — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 15:12:16 +0000

I'm in South Africa at the moment and my CDMA phone is useless here. I got a Huawei wireless USB modem from Vodacom to use, but for the first few days I had it I could only get it to work on my virtualized Windows machine. I finally managed to get it working by allowing OS X to do the configuration and dialing rather than the Vodafone Mobile Connect software.

Here's how I managed it:

Open the Network panel in System Preferences
Click the + symbol in the lower left to add a new interface and select the modem.
Go to Advanced options.
Select "Generic" for the Vendor and "GPRS (GSM/3g)" for the model. Enter "Internet" for the APN. This seems to matter, as I tried a few other strings and could not authenticate.
Enter *99***1# for the telephone number and save the configuration.

To connect, you must first have the Vodafone Mobile Connect application installed, as there is no way that I found to enter the PIN via OS X. Plug in your modem, open Mobile Connect, and enter your pin. Then go back your network preferences, select the interface you've just configured, and click connect. If all goes well you should now be connected. I am not sure if this will work in locales other than South Africa; the phone number to connect may well be different.

Posting a Lead to SugarCRM from Drupal via Webform

Brandon West — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:33:19 +0000

I was helping a friend solve the issue of capturing a lead to Sugar 5.2 from a form in Drupal 6 and my searching was not turning up a clear answer. This article was a good start but was a bit out of date and missing a couple steps. On the issues page for the SugarCRM Drupal module, I found a couple other useful hints. This guide should work for Drupal 6 and SugarCRM 5.1+.

First, download these Drupal modules: SugarCRM Webform Integration and Webform. Extract these archives to your server and activate the modules in Drupal.

Create a new file named leadCapture_override.php in the root folder of your SugarCRM install on your server. Open the file and paste the following code:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21

# set up the array of usernames and hashed password
$users = array(
'Your_User_Name' => array('name'=>'Your_User_Name', 'pass'=>'Your_User_Hash','userid'=>'Your_User_Id')
);

# identify the web site user by id so we can assign the lead to them
$assigned_user_id = $users[$_REQUEST['user']]['userid'];

if( !isset($_POST['assigned_user_id']) || !empty($_POST['assigned_user_id']) ){
$_POST['assigned_user_id'] = $assigned_user_id;
}

# if we have an Opt-In field, we want to get rid of any Opt-Out field that we may have
if ( !empty($_POST['email_opt_in']) ) {
unset($_POST['email_opt_out']);
}

# convert opt out to an explicit binary boolean
if ( isset($_POST['email_opt_out']) ) {
$_POST['email_opt_out'] = 1;
}

Now you will need to enter your configuration's user values In the $users array declaration (line 3 above). First enter the SugarCRM user name that will be assigned every lead coming from Drupal. Once you have the user name, replace Your_User_Name in the code above with it.

To get the userid and pass values, open your SugarCRM database with a database admin (such as phpMyAdmin) and run the following query: SELECT id, user_hash FROM users WHERE user_name='Your_User_Name'. Replace Your_User_Id with the id value, and Your_User_Hash with the user_hash value.

The next step is creating your webform. For the purposes of this article I am assuming that all the fields you need to capture are already setup in Sugar. If not, maybe this screencast can help. If you need any help creating the webform, more information can be found in the Drupal documentation.

Once you have your webform created, you will see a SugarCRM Settings area on the webform configuration screen.

In the Sugar Form is posted to field, enter http://yoursugarinstanceURL/index.php?entryPoint=leadCapture. Lead Source can be whatever you'd like. The SugarCRM User field must match the value you entered for Your_User_Name in the leadCapture_override.php file created earlier.

Congratulations, your Drupal form should now capture leads in Sugar.

Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.

Indexing Legacy Data with NHibernate.Search

Brandon West — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:36:52 +0000

While configuring NHibernate.Search, I ran into an issue while attempting to batch process a million or so legacy records. When I created the index directly from Lucene.Net, things were speedy and working as expected. When I created the index via NHibernate.Search, the indexer was generating way too many index files, numbering into the hundreds of thousands. As a result, the number of file operations was increasing drastically with each iteration of the indexer, such that the FullTextSession.Index call would never finish.

I spent a long time messing about with different merge factors and max file parameters for Lucene.Net, but I was never able to make it work as I expected. The solution ended up being to force an optimize on the index after a certain number of records. Optimizing a Lucene index is analogous to defragging a harddrive; it orders and compacts the thousands of splintered .cfs files into one big file, thereby solving the problem of having to scan a growing number of files before each write.

Here is my generic CreateIndex method that includes periodic optimization. This ended up solving the problem and allowed me to index 1.5 million legacy records in about 3 hours. This code depends on a specific finder implementation, as well as a generic method for optimizing an index, but it should be enough to get the idea across.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57

public static void CreateIndex(int batchSize)
{
Type type = typeof(T);

//Get the query object for the type to be indexed
object finder = Find.Factory.ResolveFinderFor(type);
var method = finder.GetType().GetMethod("get_All");
var objectQuery = method.Invoke(finder, null) as IQueryable;

IFullTextSession fullTextSession =
Search.CreateFullTextSession(NH.CurrentSession);

var total = objectQuery.Count();
var iterations = total / batchSize;

const int optimizeThreshold = 10000;
var optimizeThresholdCounter = 0;

//Find the generic optimize method
MethodInfo optimizeMethod =
typeof(IndexHelper).GetMethod("OptimizeIndex");

//Make it generic for the type in question
MethodInfo genericOptimizeMethod =
optimizeMethod.MakeGenericMethod(type);

for (var i = 0; i < iterations; i++)
{
var subset = objectQuery.Skip(i * batchSize).Take(batchSize).ToList();

int startCount = (i*batchSize);
int endCount = startCount + batchSize;

optimizeThresholdCounter += batchSize;

var tx = fullTextSession.BeginTransaction();
foreach (T instance in subset)
{
fullTextSession.Index(instance);
}
tx.Commit();

fullTextSession.Flush();
fullTextSession.Clear();

//If we've hit the threshold, optimize
if(optimizeThreshold != 0 &&
optimizeThresholdCounter >= optimizeThreshold)
{
genericOptimizeMethod.Invoke(null, null);
optimizeThresholdCounter = 0;
}
}

//optimize the index one final time
genericOptimizeMethod.Invoke(null, null);
}

I hope this saves someone some headaches - I know I wasted a lot of time finding this solution.

Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.