Magento: Create a free shipping coupon

On it’s best days Magento is hard to work with. I had to do a lot of tinkering to get a free shipping coupon to work. Here’s how:

1. Go to System->Configuration->Shipping Mehtods and enable Free Shipping, but set the minimum amount to a high number such as 1000000
   1. If the number wont take, try adding a .99 to the end
2. Under Promotions->Shopping Cart Rules and create a new promotion
   1. Fill in all of the required information on the first page and make sure to make it active
   2. You can leave the conditions page blank unless you want to allow this for only certain products
   3. Under Actions
      1. Set the type to Fixed Amount Discount and leave as 0
      2. Set Free Shipping to “For matching items only”
      3. Leave conditions empty

It doesn’t make much sense, but it works!

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jQuery Validate – Override default messages

If you need to override the default error messages in the jQuery Validate plugin it’s hard to find the information in the documentation. Depending on which message you want to override the statement will be a variation of
jQuery.validator.messages.TypeToChange = ‘whatever’;

For example, to change the invalid email message use:
jQuery.validator.messages.email = “Invalid Email.”;

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Setting up a NATed VirtualBox FTP and Webserver with ProFTPD

A few quick steps to setting up a NATed VirtualBox FTP and Webserver for development. I’m going to assume you’re using some variant of linux.

1. Install ProFTPD – for debian this would be apt-get install proftpd
2. Add a user using the useradd command. Ex: useradd username -p password -d /apps -s /bin/false
3. Edit the following lines in /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf
   PassivePorts                  65532 65534 #Change the range as necessary, but keep it small
   RequireValidShell               off #If you disabled their shell using the command above make sure this is set to off, this is important for PASV
   MasqueradeAddress               127.0.0.1 #Or whatever address you have set for your guest IP, this is important for PASV
4. Restart your ProFTPD server /etc/init.d/proftpd restart
5. In VirtualBox go to Devices->Network Adapters and click on port forwarding and create the following rules:
   Name,Protocol,HostIP,Host Port,Guest IP,Guest Port
   ftp,,21,,21
   ftpdata1,,65532,,65532
   ftpdata2,,65533,,65534
   ftpdata3,,65534,,65534
   web,,80,,80

That’s it! You should be able to connect to the guest webserver and ftp server. Make sure you check PASV for your FTP client.

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LaCie 2big Unresponsive/Wont Wake Up – Fix

Just a quick note because I couldn’t find any good answers on other forums. I purchased a LaCie 2big NAS recently and it seemed to have some really killer features such as automatic dynamic dns updates and a built in SFTP server.

I immediately noticed one huge problem though, every night the system went in to some kind of dormancy mode that it would never wake up from and became completely unresponsive. If you are experiencing the same issue, here is how I fixed it:

• Log in to the web interface
• Click on Eco Management
• Uncheck Deep Sleep Enabled
• Set turn off Hard Drives to Never

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Solution: Windows 7 ICS stopped working after a week

I have been sharing my cell phone tether connection for about a week over an ad hoc network and suddenly it stopped working. After banging my head against a wall for about an hour I finally figured out how to fix it and wanted to share.

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