from the desk of stinkpot

i was getting this error: “There was an error connecting to the server, Please verify the settings are correct.” when trying to use wordpress’ automatic update function. turns out the problem was that my ftp server was disallowing local connections. to fix, i had to uncomment the line: “local_enable=YES” from /etc/vsftpd.conf and restart the vsftpd […]

Recently, my Omnifocus sync with my WEBDav database broke.  I was getting “Internal Server Errors” when trying to sync, and saw the following errors in my apache2/error.log: [Sat Apr 30 11:18:39 2011] [error] [client 67.87.173.230] The locks could not be queried for verification against a possible “If:” header.  [5\ 00, #0] [Sat Apr 30 11:18:39 […]

it can be surprisingly tricky to add white space (i.e. a line-return) in a wordpress post. here’s one way to do it: switch to the “HTML” view of your post editor.  wherever you want to add a new return, insert “<br />&nbsp;”

create an appropriate conf file here: /etc/awstats/ perform initial build:/usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=my.domain.com add to crontab: $ sudo crontab -e 3,33 * * * * /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=my.domain.com -update >/dev/null

to get a random post from your wordpress blog, use this little php snippet: <?php $rand_posts = get_posts(‘numberposts=1&orderby=rand’); foreach( $rand_posts as $post ) : ?> <a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”>Chance</a> <?php endforeach; ?>

you can make a link to the newest post in a wordpress blog with just a little php: <?php $latestposts = get_posts(‘numberposts=1′); foreach($latestposts as $post) : setup_postdata($post); ?> <a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”>Newest</a> <?php endforeach; ?>

if you get these errors when trying to have wordpress automatically update your plugins: “To perform the requested action, connection information is required” “Failed to connect to FTP Server“ try making sure that your webserver owns your wordpress directory. i fixed everything by going to the root of my wordpress directory and entering: /home/wordpress/> sudo […]

for some reason, my uploaded photos in gallery weren’t uploaded correctly: no thumbnails were appearing.  checking my debugging logs yielded the following error message: Executing: ( “/usr/bin/convert” “-quality” “100″ “-size” “800×800″ “-geometry” “800×800″ “~/g2data/albums/artwork/Edit – Steffi.jpg” “jpg:~/g2data/tmp/imgk_MWuJOs” ) 2>”/tmp/g2dbglFFbOl” file_exists(/tmp/g2dbglFFbOl) filesize(/tmp/g2dbglFFbOl) fopen(/tmp/g2dbglFFbOl, r, 0) feof(Resource id #169) fgets(Resource id #169, 4096) feof(Resource id #169) fgets(Resource […]

to setup my server to use a static ip address i edited the file /etc/network/interfaces to include the lines: iface eth0 inet static name Ethernet LAN card address 192.168.2.100 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.2.255 network 192.168.2.0 gateway 192.168.2.1 of course, whomever provides you with your static IP address should also be giving you the appropriate information […]

if you’re controlling squeezecenter on a linux machine, it’s slightly non-obvious how to start, stop, or restart the squeezecenter.  here’s how it works (at least on my debian box): >> sudo /etc/init.d/squeezecenter [start | stop | restart]