from the desk of stinkpot

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 chown -R www-data:www-data [...]

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 id #169, 4096)
feof(Resource id [...]

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 to fill in here.

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]

i came across this idea on the internets and thought it was quite clever. it uses wget to send an http stream to madplay, a command-line mp3 playing program that lacks built-in support for playing network streams. here goes:
wget -q -O - http://localhost:8000/stream.mp3 | madplay -Q –no-tty-control -o /dev/audio2 -

if you’re finding that your lightbox images are opening up behind your wordpress posts, try finding your theme’s css file and setting the content:overflow parameter from “auto” to “hidden.”

upgrading wordpress can be a pain, especially given how vague the official upgrade instructions are.
here’re some actually useful instructions i found on the wordpress forums, courtesy of “nolageek”; of course, they assume you have ssh access to your server.
1. Download backup of database.
2. Upload unzipped Wordpress to /wordpress-new via FTP.
3. Rename current /wordpress to /wordpress-old.
4. [...]

it took a little while to get my lightbox effects working with my wordpress blog [example] and my gallery2 setup [example].
here’s what i had to do:

to get the lightbox loading before the page finishes loading … i didn’t use lightbox, i used slimbox.
to get slimbox resizing images to fit the user window, i turned to [...]

to integrate the digg button onto your wordpress blog and have text wrap around it, insert this piece of code inside of your blog themes’s index.php file, right before the line that says “php the_content(’Continue Reading …”.

if you’re self-hosting your wordpress blog, wordpress notification e-mails won’t work out of the box.  instead, you’ll need to install postfix first:
$ sudo apt-get install postfix