luminousmonkey.org

MYOB ODBC - Brutal Deluxe

Wednesday 09 July 2008, 09:14 WST —

No, this is not about a metal band from London, England.  It’s a reference to Speedball 2, I just thought to would be more interesting to say then “Part 2″.  Anyway, I now have WindowsXP running quite nicely under VirtualBox.

By the way, the wallpapers are from VladStudio.com, I liked them so much I got a lifetime subscription.  Anyway, the first step is to get MYOB up and running, this is pretty easy, just install it as you would any normal application. Now I’m doing a full install of MYOB Premier 11 from the 2008 compliance CD, which automatically installs the ODBC driver, you may have to install the driver seperately if your situation differs.

Ok, now with MYOB installed, it’s time to setup the ODBC driver, now when I subscribed to the developer program I got a CD with all the MYOB software, I also got a developer key file, this file is what enables write access to my MYOB file.  Also, as long as you’re a registered MYOB developer, your customers can call up and get ODBC enabled for their company files, I really don’t know much about that as everything I’m doing is for my company already.

The key has to be saved somewhere the host machine can access it, as the key file is used all the time.  Ok, so, on WindowsXP you would:

• Open Control Panel.
• If you’re in Classic view, you would then go to “Administrative Tools”, otherwise “Performance and Maintenance”, then “Administrative Tools”.
• Open Data Sources (ODBC).
• I prefer adding a user data source, but system datasource follows the same procedure.
• “Add”, then select “MYOB_ODBC”.
• Give your datasource a name, this is what’s going to be used to reference it from Rails.
• I don’t bother with a description, I’m lazy.
• Select your company file, we have our MYOB company file on a Solaris server running ZFS.
• It will now give your more options, such as a username and password, and developer access fields.
• Enter the username and password (Having a dedicated user for the Rails app is a good idea).
• Enter the path to the MYOB application .exe, default is “C:\Premier11\Myobp.exe”.
• File Access is Multi-user Access, with TCP/IP.
• Finally browse to your developer key file.

Phew, it’s interesting to note that the ODBC driver asks for the MYOB executable, that’s because the ODBC driver is simply a bridge to the MYOB program, it runs MYOB in a special, no interface, mode.  This is one of the reasons it’s good to have a dedicated Rails MYOB user account, I found that sometimes I was getting the username and password prompt coming up on my desktop.

It’s also interesting to point out, that the ODBC driver does a big job of abstracting SQL calls to the MYOB program and the results.  However, when we start getting down to getting some Rails code operating on it, we’re going to find out how much of a pain it is that the ODBC driver is simply an abstraction.

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VirtualBox on Solaris

Tuesday 08 July 2008, 12:33 WST —

As part of the new MYOB intergration system I’m working on, I thought it would be a good idea to have the Solaris server also run a copy of Windows.  Why? Well for MYOB and the ODBC stuff of course.  (You can find more info in a previous post).  Anyway, there seems to be a pretty good post “Exploring Sun’s xVM VirtualBox” detailing on how to install it, and because I’m lazy and don’t actually want to keep walking over to the Solaris box all the time, I also installed VNC on the server, unfortunately there isn’t really an up to date howto on getting VNC up and running on Solaris 200805.

However, I found this post, which gave me enough info to get it up and running:

• Make sure xvnc package is installed (SUNWxvnc)
• Edit /etc/X11/gdm/custom.conf (details in the link)
• Edit /etc/services
• Start the vnc service.

Just a note, VNC will not work properly if you’re using Compiz, be sure to disable it.

If, like me, you’re installing from CDs, then it’s probably easier to copy an image of the CD rather than try and use the host cd drive directly.  VirtualBox doesn’t seem to be able to find them.  Also, if like me you want to run WindowsXP as a guest OS, and use host based networking, then check this page for the post by Hasham.

The important part is to have your virtual MAC address match the MAC address in VirtualBox.

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GVim on OpenSolaris 200805

Tuesday 24 June 2008, 07:41 WST —

If, like me, you like the development environment of a unix machine, and, like me, decided on playing with OpenSolaris.  Then, maybe, like me, you found it annoying that Sun decided on having the SUNWvim package, but, for some reason that only the clever engineers at Sun know, they haven’t compiled in gui support.

Solaris uses Gnome by default, so, why?! Even if they could offer a SUNWgvim package, that would be cool.  Anyway, I digress.  If you’re a fan of using gvim for development, you may have tried compiling it on your machine and run into difficulty.  As in the configure script doesn’t seem to detect gnome, or the gtk libraries.

Hopefully, this may help you out.  You need to make sure you’ve got the development headers, etc installed.  Now I haven’t actually figured out what headers I needed, because I kept adding them until it worked.

Anyway, you can always try the following:

• SUNWgnome-libs (Should be in by default I believe)
• SUNWgnome-common-devel
• SUNWxwinc
• SUNWxorg-headers

Then it’s just a matter of:

./configure --enable-gnome-check

When doing the configure, it should mention that it found GTK, and you should be good to go. If it doesn’t work, then you may have to install more packages that I forgot to mention.  Sorry!

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MYOB ODBC

Thursday 19 June 2008, 14:00 WST —

I have a problem at work. Basically, I have to do the accounts, this means I have to type out the sales orders from our web-based/PHP/MySQL application (that I wrote) into MYOB. This chews up my time, what would be cool was if this could happen automatically, or at least as easy as possible for me.

Enter the MYOB ODBC driver. This basically lets you automate importing and exporting into MYOB, you can get MYOB read access for your company file for about $249AUD. However, write access requires that you sign up for the MYOB Developer Program, this costs about $700AUD per year.

Once you’ve signed up, you get a developer pack sent out, which is basically most of the MYOB software, and access to the MYOB developer forums. Now I’ve been using Ruby/Rails for my webapp development recently, so I went googling for some information for getting MYOB working with Ruby/Rails and came across Pat Allan’s site, Freelancing Gods.

Many thanks to Pat for his post, as it’s pretty much the only decent information you can find on the net about getting Ruby/Rails going with MYOB. Since this sort of information is a bit thin on the ground, and I’ve got such a shocking memory, I thought I should blog some of this stuff.

First off, my situation. I work at a two-way radio company Direct Communications, we sell and repair all types of commercial two-way radios. For our sales, repairs and purchase orders, we used to use an Access database, we have since migrated to a webpage based system. At least, we have for the sales and purchase orders, the jobcard still runs under Access, and are accounts are handled in MYOB. The upshot is, like I said, that I have to manually enter in each and every purchase order, sale, and jobcard into MYOB.

Okay, so to get around this, I have to get the sales, etc, into MYOB without me typing the damn things in. For write access, the MYOB ODBC driver depends on the MYOB program, so you need your ruby/rails app running on Windows. So to start with I got the one-click Ruby installer for Windows. Once you’ve installed Ruby, you’ll need a few RubyGems.

More to come…

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Ubuntu, a Linux distro that’s actually friendly??!

Tuesday 07 August 2007, 12:29 WST —

I often have a play with Linux for awhile then go back to Windows. My distro of choice is generally Gentoo, but I do occasionally play with other distros (I want to make a nice NAS server from Solaris using ZFS), but generally I always return to Windows for the desktop.

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Mmmmmm Latex

Saturday 28 July 2007, 06:55 WST —

Whoops! I mean LaTex, it’s a typesetting program based off Tex which in turn was designed by Donald Knuth, pretty much a god in the area of Computer Science. If you’ve ever done a thesis at Uni with any sort of maths in it I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

Anyway, I’m trying to get ready for Uni and I want to automate the generation of my assignment paperwork, I’m lazy and I’d much prefer to just to have my source code (with unit tests) and have something that automatically build my assignment.

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MAMEhem

Monday 05 February 2007, 17:15 WST —

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted. I’ve got my hands on an old Leisure and Allied arcade machine, Street Fighter II’: Champion Edition to be exact. Currently I’m in the process of converting it into a MAME cabinet.

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Scarface

Monday 19 June 2006, 20:52 WST —

A friend of mine is modding an entertainment PC case to make it more reliable and more swanky looking for his entertainment room. Go check it out. What are you still doing here? Go, leave.

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Healthy Eating

Sunday 02 April 2006, 10:55 WST —

I have been trying to eat better for quite awhile, but you know the usual excuses of not having the time, can’t cook, etc. Well I’m going through another period where I’m going to try again. This time I’ve bought a Wüsthof Chef Knife and so far, this is not a decision I regret.

It’s amazing the difference this knife makes, you may think your kitchen knife cuts, oh no, it’s not cutting, it’s tearing, this thing cuts.

I also bought a marble mortal and pestle, now I thought it was going to be expensive, but it was much cheaper than I thought it would be. Anyway, I now have to find some good cooking resources for beginners, just so I can get some basic techniques down.

I’ve found a blog called, Kitchen Geek which looks just right, or at least a good starting point, I definetly recommend it.

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Immobilisation

Sunday 29 January 2006, 11:04 WST —

Notice, we spell it correctly, with an s.

Yet more car work, this time the immobiliser. Ever since I got it the immobiliser has been, well, crap. Basically sometimes the keyring thingy would work, sometimes it would take awhile to unlock the car. So I ordered a new one through work and installed it Wednesday night.

Took me about 7 hours, why so long? Well for one thing I had to rip out the old one, which was installed incorrectly for a start. Something which I had always suspected anyway, as the starter motor would turn over when the immobiliser was on, something which was a bit odd.

Anyway, a few cans of coke later and copies of the electrical system manual I had figured it out, not only that, but I did a far, far, far, better install job. No electrical tape here, oh no, working for a company involved in the electronics industry has it’s advantages.

Basically every single solder joint is heatshrinked, no shitty T section wiring with insulation tape here (which always gets gunky). All the wires are cable tied neatly and I don’t have two crappy relays just hanging down behind my dash. Which, is another point, whoever installed the last immobiliser, put the shutoff relays on my headlights, which somehow stopped the car from starting.

Anyway, I finished the central locking Thursday morning (which was Australia Day for people that don’t know), and now I have a nice feeling of satisifaction when I use my immobiliser, isn’t doing it yourself just grand?

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