Site showing blank screen (WordPress) for a few hours

I was faced with a blank screen this morning when trying to respond to a comment someone posted to my site. I did some digging and found this on the WordPress Support pages

It seems my site is consuming a bit too much memory as it has grown over the years, so I expanded my php memory allowances to 16M. This has solved the problem. For the technical persons out there, you just need to up the settings in your php.ini:

# edit your php.ini file, mine is in /etc/php.ini
#
$ vim /etc/php.ini

# change the 'memory_limit' variable to 16M
#
memory_limit=16M

Hope you all did not miss my site too much while it was down! ;-)

Running Ruby unit tests in Eclipse (AbTLinux project)

I have been playing with running the diverse unit tests and constantly having the problem with needing to be root (su is requested if you run these tests as a non-root user).

The solution was rather simple, just start your eclipse with sudo and the results here are that you see the unit tests executing in the eclipse console. Some are failing as we are in the middle of implementation:

MacPorts MySql server install howto

I have a nice new macbook and wanted to setup my development tools; eclipse, php, macports, and mysql. Here is the steps to get mysql server working (mysql5 in my case):

# install server and the launch script
# needed to start it. (I like the -v option
# to see what is happening.)
#
$ sudo port -v install mysql5 +server

# initialize the setup as mysql user.
#
$ sudo -u mysql mysql_install_db5

# start mysql and set your root password.
#
$ sudo -u mysql /opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin/mysqld_safe &
$ sudo /opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin/mysqladmin -u root password '[new_passwd]'

Ubuntu MySql allowing TCP connections

A default setting for the Ubuntu mysql database is to not allow external TCP connections, to get this to work one needs to adjust the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file as follows:

$ sudo vim /etc/mysql/my.cnf

# change this line from 127.0.0.1 to your ip.
#
bind-address            = [your-server-ip]

# then just restart mysql server.
#
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart

Ubuntu Firefox 2.0.x and Flash player not working

Well, another bit of upgrading has borked out the flash player in my Firefox 2.x browser. I took a bit of a look around and saw that the package flashplugin-nonfree was installing its libraries in /var/cache/flash-plugin-nonfree and that only the mozilla installation was symlinking to it.
To solve this issue try this:

# change to the firefox install directory for your plugins
# and symlink to the flashplayer library.
#
$ cd /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins
$ sudo ln -s /var/cache/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so

# now restart firefox and it should be fine again!

Should you be missing sound in your flashplayer, see my previous post on Ubuntu upgrade and Firefox Flash player sound problems fix!.

First ride in 2007!

Yesterday the weather was so nice, 12 degrees and sunny, like spring in the air! The weather promised to be the same today but the sun did not pop out at all and the temperature remained at 6 degrees.

I decided to take a ride anyway and see how it felt. Took a tour to Oss en back through Rosmalen, 30km and my toes were frozen! I really need to buy some winter over-shoes…