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.

claimID/microid for WordPress: fixed!

I like the idea of claimID — a simple web ID system — and have been trying to mark all my online content with it. I installed Richard K Miller’s MicroID Plugin for WordPress, but it didn’t seem to want to correctly fingerprint the top level of my site.

A little sleuthing (even with my zero PHP skills) showed that claimID thought the URL of my site was http://scruss.com/blog/, while Richard’s plugin thought the URL was http://scruss.com/blog. The trailing slash made all the difference to the claimID fingerprint.

All I had to do was to edit the URL in my claimID page, get the site verified, and this blog is so mine …

the outside world

Finally got something useful done with the Thinkpad with the broken backlight. Thanks to lots of help from Paul, and a critical bit of advice from Stephen, it’s now living on my network and visible to the outside world.
What had me initially confused was that both my modem (a SpeedTouch 546) and my Netgear router have NAT firewalls. I had to declare the router as a DMZ on my modem, and the Thinkpad a DMZ on my router. Also, the router’s DynDNS support was only reporting its IP address as seen behind the modem, so I had to turn that off and use dynDNS from the modem.

Security hole? Perhaps; but it’s not as if OpenBSD is the least secure or most widely-used OS. I’ve really only got sshd and thttpd running, so there’s not much to chew on

my letter to etymotic

To: Etymotic Research Inc. Customer Support

I recently placed an order with you for accessories for my Isolator ER-6i headphones. I was very disappointed when UPS added an additional brokerage charge of approximately US$27 (plus taxes and duties) to the order. Since the value of the the order was only $43, your courier’s brokerage charge was almost two-thirds the value of the goods ordered.

Please consider using another courier for Canadian orders. USPS/Canada Post’s brokerage charges are much smaller, of the order of $5.

I would also like to note that none of your agents in Toronto seems able to stock these spares. I visited all three of the dealers mentioned on your website:

  • Long & McQuade had no stock, and didn’t seem particularly keen on ordering any for me.
  • Carbon Computers, though very helpful, only had eartips for the ER-6, and didn’t know that they wouldn’t work with the ER-6i.
  • CPUsed sold me an incomplete bag of ER6-14 eartips; only 6 tips for the full price of 10. When they weren’t assuring me that they’d work with the ER-6i, they were trying to sell me a set of Shure E2C headphones, which they said were better.

Up until now, I have been widely recommending your products. Until I know that you’re serious about supporting your Canadian customers, however, I cannot recommend your products to anyone in this country.

I (heart) languagehat

languagehat, on begging the question:

This is one of those issues that is catnip to the adolescent language-lover but which a sensible person grows out of. I too used to enjoy tormenting people with the “truth” about the phrase, but I eventually realized that, whatever its origins … I had never seen or heard the phrase used “correctly” except by people making a point of doing so (cf. “hoi polloi”); in current English usage, “beg the question” means ‘raise the question,’ and that’s that. I got over it …
[T]his … is a sign that the language has sailed on, leaving wistful archaists treading water and clutching at the stern.

blog entry for dad

My folks have been visiting for the last couple of weeks (we’re just about to leave for the airport), and Dad asked for some links we discussed. The following will probably make little or no sense to other readers:

Mozilla Update :: Extensions: New Tab Homepage

Ah, New Tab Homepage brings happiness to this Firefox user. I rather got to like the lightweight Epiphany browser during my mini-itx odyssey. When you opened a new browser tab in Epiphany, it loaded your home page. The supposedly more advance Firefox never did this.

New Tab Homepage fixes this, and doesn’t add any other tab-related cruft that I couldn’t use.