Tag: images

Fixed WordPress memory problems on 1and1

A ½-cup of Pasta
A ½-cup of Pasta

Well … sorta. I can’t upload any size of image, but previously I was limited to about 0.3MP (640×480). Now I can upload up to about 1.5MP without the dreaded Memory error. I can also use WordPress’s Auto Upgrade feature again.

Daddy Hogwash’s “WordPress 3.0 Upgrade Complete after Solving Fatal Error: Out of Memory Issue” is what fixed it. His suggested number of 40M fixed the auto upgrade problem, while I upped it to 64M to get larger images to work with my host, 1and1.com.

 

Update: There is no fix for this. Memory limit on my kind of hosting is ~34M. Any higher is not allowed. This seemed to work for a while, now doesn’t.

the subtle image editor in WordPress 2.9

While I still like 1&1, they have a fairly modest hard-coded PHP memory limit. This means that some WordPress plugins will exhaust memory, and fail.
I’d been wanting to set up Scissors for Catherine‘s blog so she could more easily edit images without having to learn GIMP. But it wouldn’t work, running out of memory at every turn, and trying to set PHP’s memory limit locally cause WordPress to fail completely.
So I was pleased to see that WordPress 2.9 had an editor built in. The upgrade went smoothly (I don’t miss the days of rm -i *.php and making sure you didn’t vape your config file), but I couldn’t seem to find the editor. (It’s early, I’m old.)

It’s called up by that quiet little button under the image details:

Works just fine. It probably zaps all the image metadata (Scissors did), but we’ll see how it goes.

big boy’s book of big things

Christmas came early. With money from Carlyle, I bought a reproduction of Knight’s American Mechanical Dictionary, a three-tome work from the 1870s which catalogued mechanisms, devices and machinery known at the time. It’s the ultimate nerd read.

You can browse two electronic versions online:

  • at UMich; large page images.
  • at Princeton Imaging; in DjVu format, this is a little easier to read if you have the right plugin.

I have to say, though, that the dead tree version is a splendid read.

Energy Saving Tips for Canadians, #1: a name thing

Canadians are remarkably profligate in their energy use, and I think I know why. It’s not to do with the oft-cited scale of the country, the size of our houses, our cold winters or our hot summers, it’s something simpler than that; it’s what we call our electricity.

Power here is generally known as hydro, and with it comes images of tree-lined rivers with bears happily fishing for salmon. Local electricity companies tend to have that watery thing in their name: Toronto Hydro, Hamilton Hydro, London Hydro (Crieff Hydro is something quite different, though). Some happy green images, eh?

I propose that we stop using the term hydro, and replace it with the snappier smog belching, nuke leaking, only fractionally hydro. It’d certainly make yer average Kathy or Doug drop their double-double (or donut, or dumaurier) when they got their smog belching, nuke leaking, only fractionally hydro bill in. Energy use would plummet, and at no cost to anyone!