Joomla: Could not connect to host "127.0.0.1" Error

Monkey uses Joomla as the CMS system for my personal website. For some reason after upgrade to the 1.5.8 verson, there is an error on FTP layer that whenever I tried to install a new extension. It gave me the error JFTP::connect: Could not connect to host "127.0.0.1" on port 21. Which make me cannot install new extension at all. I believe this is the bug in Joomla 1.5.8 or every 1.5.7. I hope someone will fix it in next version.

However I found a way to get around it.
1. Go to Global Configuration FTP Setting to disable the FTP
2. When you try to install a new extension, e.g Components, Plugins, Administrator/Components you need to change to directory property to public writeable. i.e. 777.
3. Install the Components
4. Change the Directories attributes back to 755.

A little bit trouble some compare to before, but it works, and I can keep improving my site and wait for the better next version.

How to Remove Double Quote " " in Excel String

There are some data in Excel Cells with Quotation Marks. e.g. Team "A". When I need to import that data into the database system, double quote is not allowed, so I needed to remove it. The problem is in the formula of Excel, double quote is also used to identify a particular string. With some trail and error, I finally managed to do it using the Excel function substitute(). The syntax is as followed.

substitute(<>, """", "")

I hope the little trick above can save you some times

Input Date in UK Format into Excel

Recently, I have a project needed to extract some data from ASCII format into Excel using VBA. Everything was fine, but I got the problem of in Date Formating. The source Date format is in UK format
e.g. 08/11/2008 for 8th Nov, 2008. However, when the date was read into Excel, it changed into US format automatically, and become 11th Aug, 2008, which obvious was wrong. After some reason I finally managed to solve this problem by using the following 2 steps

1. Change the Regional and Language Setting in the Control Panel form English (US) to English (UK).
2. Format( ) function in VBA. The sample code is as followed.
 Cells(1, 1) = Format("08/11/2008", "mm/dd/yyyy")

The above function can force the VBA to read the input string and change it to the US format, which I believe is the default format embedded in Excel.