The long and the short is if you want to test out the latest Joomla! 1.6 beta release (beta 9 at the moment), all you have to do is add our own custom feed to the Web Platform Installer!

The first step is to get the Web Platform Installer. The easiest way of doing this is going to Microsoft’s Web Platform download page and then download and install the Web Platform Installer. From here it’ll load and have a list of tabs on the left and some content on the right. At the very bottom left of the screen will be an option button that you can select. This will open up a window which has a text box around the middle with a button that says “Add Feed”. This box allows you to add custom feeds to WebPI to enable my custom Joomla! 1.6 feed to work. In the box put in the following URL: “http://update.joomla.org/webpi/webpi.xml” and click “Add Feed”. Hit ok and the screen should refresh and a new “Joomla!” tab should appear. Under the tab there should be a few options, I’ve tagged Joomla! a few different times (in future I might add nightly builds for both 1.5 and 1.6 to aide testing) but there is only on 1.6 Beta package. From here you should be able to install Joomla! and in theory it should download and configure any dependencies (e.g. IIS, PHP on IIS and MySQL).

As a word of warning, if you’re already set up using XAMPP or similar this might interfere with those environments however if you’re new and wanting to get into testing Joomla! 1.6 Beta on Windows and IIS (we always need more IIS testers), this should make your life much easier!

This is contrasted to the UNIX methodology (as seen in Linux/Mac OS X amongst other recent operating systems) where there is a special user ID and username for root across all system. This user inalienably has god rights. It can bypass almost all file system permissions (NFS does deny root typically) and you can run everything that might not necessarily be permitted such as binding to a privileged port. Linux has the same sort of feature that Windows does as privileges except they call it capabilities. Whilst privileges in Windows are additive (you give someone privileges), capabilities in Linux are more subtractive – you start with everything and spawn processes until you lose them.

Joomla! 1.6 is itself going to have a root user as well. However it isn’t going to be a normal part of its operation. Root for Joomla! is going to behave like it does in Linux, it will have everything and the idea is that it has the ability to fix the access control lock out that you have created. Jooma! has the middle ground here between Windows and UNIX – not only do you have a super user who can do everything (if you really need it) but you also have the regular access control model which can add administrators as well. In some respects its the best of both world.

The article in question is entitled “Understanding Windows NTFS Permissions” and covers the basics of permissions for NTFS. It covers the fact you have read which is really made up of List Folder/Read Data, Read Attributes, Read Extended Attributes and Read Permissions. It also covers that NTFS permits permissions to be inherited but appears to miss the distinction of “This folder, subfolders and files”, “This folder only”, “Subfolders and files only”, “This folder only” when applied to permissions. Each of these actually impacts how permissions are inherited and applied, surely if you’re trying to understand this then explaining the distinctions here would be great and how they apply. He finishes with an interesting observation on the “precedence” of permissions. Now I find this curious because this is something I’ve been looking at late and I’ve been trying to find something that adequately explains it. Perhaps the author of the particular article is dumbing it down for his readers but it just strikes me as wrong. The author comments the following:

The scenario proves that there is a hierarchy of permissions for NTFS 5.0 resources. The hierarchy of precedence for the permissions can be summarized as follows, with the higher precedence permissions listed at the top of the list:

Explicit Deny
Explicit Allow
Inherited Deny
Inherited Allow

Ok, so its an interesting way of explaining it, but to mimic an annoying kid: why? Microsoft says in a dialog just previous that deny overrules allow so why would they so blatantly change the mind? To do so would mean that you would have to understand how NTFS evaluates permissions and calculates the permissions – but weren’t we reading an article about understanding?

This is the core of my gripe, the article doesn’t particularly give you a depth of insight or understanding in permissions that you couldn’t get by clicking things on and off to observe their behaviour. It treats one mildly non-obvious behaviour but doesn’t explain why NTFS would do this. To be honest I stumbled across this behaviour on another web site which had run into the pitfall of believing that deny overruled everything and was trying to understand why his security model was broken. His article hypothesised something much simpler: the algorithm finds the first explicit permission and uses it, if both are set then use the deny. No complex precedence model, something quite simple. And as Ockham’s Razor goes “the simplest answer is often the best”. But interestingly this also fits into the way NTFS appears to have been designed. For container objects, a permission can be set at a level and it can be determined just how deep it should apply: should it apply to just this container, just to subfolders or just to files? Or should it apply to a combination of those?

Interestingly I’m on the hunt for something that formally explains how NTFS permission inheritance works, I had thought this article would tell me but it doesn’t. It tells me a lot of what I know already but doesn’t actually enhance my understanding. I had read an article a while back that informed me of this ‘quirk’ in the behaviour but at the time didn’t think much of bookmarking it – and it is in fact this article that I’m looking for, and thankfully I just found it.

The article in question is “How IT works: NTFS Permissions” from the November/December 2005 issue of TechNet Magazine. It introduces the concept of “discretionary access control lists” (DACL) and also explains how they work. It explains that the DACL is checked in order until a match is found with the DACL created with denies first, then allows starting with the object and then incrementally for each item it looks for a match until it gets to the end at which point it denies. The single article just cleared up exactly how it worked, why it works and how it behaves explaining the behaviour. At this point I understand how and why it works, not just know that it works in a particular way – this is the difference between understanding and knowing.

What that page contains is these three facts:

1. Wordperfect supported relational mail merging
2. Word doesn’t support this.
3. Don’t attempt it in Word.

Whilst it doesn’t explicitly say “don’t attempt it in Word” it gives you four options, the first three were really far too time consuming for the project so I tried the fourth option where Word uses a database field object to handle the relational part. Eventually through hacking things a bit and the support of importing the data into Access and creating a few queries in there I managed to get a product. The problem is that this database object seriously limits your flexibility and forces you into a table autoformat. The article comments that you have a lot of flexibility with the all of 5 check boxes and styles it presents for you to customise. The end result ended up that I managed to get my data set out with a whole heap of errors (some do not have valid entries in some other tables which caused Word to popup a warning box for those entries even though errors were supposed to be ignored) to the point that no matter the orientation the table ran across the page. What I really wanted was the equivalent of mysql’s \G command (vertical tabulation).

End result: I wrote something in PHP to output a PDF to do the same trick in less time than I wasted in building the bodgy Word solution. As I comment else where I don’t have Microsoft for doing what they’re doing, I hate Microsoft for doing what they’re doing _badly_. They copied things but they don’t do a good implementation. They copy things and omit useful features (relational mail merges are really the domain of Crystal Reports, and Microsoft is happy for it to be that way) along the way that users had under older packages. This is my gripe that things take a step forward for two step backwards.

Recently I released JDiagnostic, a tech demo of a tool that I hope will evolve into a launching pad for a wide range of useful tools, tests and diagnostics. At present it solves the above stated problem: MSAD integration. Its a step by step wizard configurator for Active Directory, with tests along the way. At the end it configures the LDAP SSI and Joomla! LDAP mambots with as much details as it can (what you’ve supplied) leaving you hopefully with a consistent and working Active Directory setup, without the pain of having to read through logs to see what is happening.

You can check out JDiagnostic on the Pasamio’s Projects FRS page.

So my Mac has three different indexing tools: Google Desktop Search, Spotlight and Quicksilver. This is in contrast to my work PC (Windows XP) which has Google Desktop Search and Windows Indexing Service (which does poorly on large itemsets such as the contents of your hard drive…most of the useful items I find using this tool is not what I wanted originally but something else thrown up in the list for some reason, completely irrelevant, but interesting to read. There is another tool I use, RockIt Launcher, which is a Quicksilver equivalent for Windows except its catalog is limited in scope and usefulness, plus it has to be manually reindexed.

Linux by comparison seems quite poor, really only having Beagle desktop search, but that would discount the other options available. For example I do a few things differently on this platform: I launch terminals using my function keys (alt-f5 to f12 is bound to local and remote terminals (via ssh)) which means I get access to those applications. alt-f2 brings up the Linux equivalent of the ‘run’ dialog, except with completion. This is my equivalent for Quicksilver as I usually know the app name (as with quicksilver) to launch it. The last app launch/search is the deskbar I have on my lower panel, which has a list of commands run through it (could be desktop search, dictionary or app launch) so I can click that to quickly get to applications or type in the text box to get feature almost identical to Quicksilver. The last app launch point is my ‘drawers’. These are little panels that extend down with Quick Launch icons. They’re grouped so if I’m doing a particular task I know which drawer to go to so that I can launch multiple similar applictions. iIts also handy for eclipse, which has the same name but is three different installs.

So for me, my main use of search is application launching and occaisionally going to find the file I want. Mac has lead the way on the desktop, Google provides another awesome solution, Beagle is very nicely integrated into GNOME and now that Vista has (finally) shipped a few months ago it has search built in. So finally everything is getting indexed, making things easier to find for those of us who have too much information.