Monkeyless

After my web host tried to upgrade Apache, but ran into a cPanel/WHM bug and had to go back to the old Apache version, I suddenly had a WordPress install that wasn’t working right. I would get the following error whenever I tried to get to any page in the administration end of things:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 55431 bytes) in /home/sitedir/public_html/wp-includes/plugin.php on line 158

My theory is that some default PHP memory limit was changed, but they didn’t respond to my support forum post asking about that. So I had to troubleshoot it myself. Luckily, it wasn’t hard to fix, and here’s what I did.

(Continue reading…)

Ok, I had pretty much ignored the whole Facebook Beacon privacy controversy that’s been going on over the past few weeks. I kept seeing references to something, and just didn’t get interested enough to find out what was going on. And now it’s too late. No, wait, not too late. Just in time.

So I add something to my queue on Blockbuster Online. I wasn’t expecting to get a little DHTML-ish window sliding in at the bottom of the screen saying that they were letting all of my friends know what movie I just added to my queue. Really? Is that something that people really want?

I know Blockbuster was tying themselves in with Facebook, since on several occasions over the last few weeks they’ve asked me to link my Blockbuster and Facebook accounts for all kinds of nifty cool features. No thanks.

But now Blockbuster is automatically sending Facebook my queue information, even though I never linked the accounts? I guess just because that Firefox profile had a valid Facebook login cookie, Facebook’s Beacon javascript was able to submit the update anyway? Why were they asking me if I wanted to link the accounts in the first place, then? And they want to spread this to as many web sites as they can? I wouldn’t mind if the user controls over Beacon that apparently used to be available were actually still available, but they aren’t.

So I decided that the easiest solution — at least for now, I have a feeling they’re going to give in to Interweb outrage soon enough — was to block them.
(Continue reading…)

This is a weird one. The MGM Grand offers high-speed wireless and wired Internet connections. Being somewhat security-conscious — and being in town for Black Hat and Defcon — I figured it was safest to use the wired connection so that people couldn’t sniff everything I was doing.

Luckily (apparently) for me, the wired connection didn’t work. I follow the Ethernet cable around to underneath the desk, where it’s connected to a black box with an antenna sticking out of it, and a power plug that’s not plugged in. Sure enough, the MGM Grand’s wired Internet connection just goes to a D-Link bridge onto their wireless network, so you’d only get a false sense of security if you used it. You’re really using an unencrypted wireless network when you’re plugged into that Ethernet cable.

Just something to be careful of.

Interestingly, their network also blocked access to my home computer for the first day I was here. I couldn’t SSH into my home machine, and couldn’t even ping it. But it was up, I was able to SSH to a friend’s Linux box and connect to my home machine from there. So I had to wind up tunneling SSH over SSH so I could use my home machine as an encrypted proxy connection to protect everything. I had to SSH to my friend’s machine, and then tunnel an SSH connection over that connection to get to my home machine. Then I could tunnel my web browsing over that connection.

And then the next day I was magically able to connect directly to my home computer. Weird stuff. Maybe they were blocking my connection to try to get me out of my room and back to the casino so I could give them more money.

I haven’t been able to get into my Gmail account for 40 minutes now, and it’s a lot tougher to deal with than I would have expected. No more Google Chat (or Gtalk, or whatever it’s really called), no idea what e-mails I’m missing. At least I can still get to my Google calendar.

Has anyone else’s Gmail account been down this long also? I’ve been getting some combination of the following three errors every time I try to get into it:

Temporary Error (502)

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to log in while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try logging in to your account again in a few minutes.

Oops… the system was unable to perform your operation (error code 766). Please try again in a few seconds.

Oops… the system was unable to perform your operation (error code 767). Please try again in a few seconds.

Yes, those last two are almost the same, just one’s a 766 and one’s a 767. I wish they didn’t say to try again in a few seconds when it’s been 40 minutes. Every time I see “a few seconds” I get my hopes up and think that maybe I’ll be able to get back into Gmail soon, but so far it hasn’t worked out.

So, is it just me, or is anyone else having problems also?

UPDATE: Back up ten minutes later, down for 50 minutes total. Looks like I wasn’t the only one. I did lose the chat that I was in the middle of when it crashed, there’s no sign of it in my chat history. Interesting. Or not. At least it’s back. Time to update my local copy of my Gmail account from their POP3 interface. I always get a little worried that my e-mail is all gone forever whenever that happens.

I have several WordPress blogs, most of which are running out-of-date versions of WordPress just because of the hassle of updating them. I know the good folks at WP/Automattic make it pretty easy, but you still have to make a backup, FTP a ton of files up to your server without overwriting your theme, upload, or plugins directories, and run the upgrade script. It’s a hassle.

I have one blog running from Fantastico, and upgrading it is nice and easy. Two clicks and you have a backup of the old install along with your upgraded install. No problems to date. So I wanted to try to get Fantastico to upgrade my other WordPress sites where I installed it manually.

The only issue is waiting a little longer for Fantastico to provide the new version, and for my web hosts to provide the new version of Fantastico. But since I’m so slow at upgrading manually, even with some hyped up security issues, that seems like a lightning fast response time in comparison.

(Continue reading…)

I was working on someone’s laptop that was running XP SP1, and desperately needed SP2 and some other important patches (and, apparently, needs automatic update turned on.)

I go to Windows Update and start installing Service Pack 2. It’s working on it, working on it, on and on. But it’s not making much progress. Well, the progress bar is about 75% of the way through the install, and it’s now finishing up, or cleaning up, or something like that. But it’s been doing that for an hour or two.

The hard drive is chattering, and stuff is happening, but it’s just not making any progress, so I leave it there overnight. I figure the next morning it’ll either still be trying to do that, in which case I just stop it, or it’ll be done.

But I wound up with an error instead. Just a typical application error and the offer to report the error to Microsoft. Sure, why not. And it then directs me to a Windows Error Reporting web page for more information about the error. That page says:
(Continue reading…)

Looks like WordPress 2.1 (code name Ella) was released a little less than an hour ago. Look at me with my breaking geeky news.

Anything good in the new version? Let’s take a too-much-time-on-my-hands point-by-point look, just because I can.
(Continue reading…)

Dreamhost recently started something new where they are reducing the amount of disk space and bandwidth that you get with each hosting plan every day. For example, right now for the “Level 1″ hosting plan, it says you get 194.5 GB of disk space, and “On Jan 15th starting Disk drops to: (Sign up TODAY!) 194 GB.” Bandwidth for that plan is 1.945 TB today, and 1.94 TB tomorrow.

Of course, they keep adding to your disk and bandwidth every week (1 GB disk and 16 GB transfer for that plan), so the 1 GB of starting disk that you lose if you wait two days will be added back after a week, but you’d always be 1 GB behind someone who signed up two days before you.

I’ve been thinking about signing up with them, because that much disk space would be great for off-site backups of my irreplaceable data. And so I did.
(Continue reading…)

I installed wipfw today, because I needed a simple Windows firewall that could do egress filtering to block traffic to certain external IP addresses, and with my Windows XP SP1 setup, that’s just not possible. SP2 adds some better outgoing filtering to the firewall, but you still can’t just plug in an IP address.

But after installing wipfw, I just couldn’t find the config file. The install.cmd installer said, at the very end:

SUCCESS. Default action is ALLOW
Log files are located in C:\WINDOWS\security\logs
Change wipfw.conf file for your taste.

But I couldn’t find a file called wipfw.conf anywhere on my system, and the documentation online and in the zip archive didn’t mention anything about that file, which seems like one of the more important configuration items to mention.
(Continue reading…)

I’ve had a weird problem ever since upgrading to the latest version of Mozilla Firefox, version 2.0.0.1. The browser’s CPU usage would keep going up the longer that Firefox was running.

So after a day or two of the browser being open, it would be using 20% to 30% of the CPU. I’ve seen that once or twice before with some Flash advertisement that used a lot of CPU, and when I closed the page with the offending ad, the CPU usage dropped back down. But with this issue I could close every tab and just have one blank one open, and the CPU usage would still be high.

I had to close Firefox completely and restart it to get the CPU usage back down. I wound up killing firefox.exe from the Windows task manager once or twice a day rather than close Firefox normally, since if I killed it unexpectedly it would give me the option of restoring my session and getting all my tabs back.

Today I finally broke down and searched around for the answer.
(Continue reading…)