Fixing the WordPress Memory Size Error

Posted on August 17, 2009 by Jeff

one of the only reoccurring problems I have with WordPress is with the Automatic Upgrade feature.

As the WordPress team continues to push out point-releases that address security, stability, etc, having the automatic upgrade feature is a huge time saver. However, whenever I clicked on “Upgrade Automatically” I was being greeted with an error message like:

“Fatal Error: Allowed Memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted”

Frustrated, I typed the error message into “the google” and came across Chad Johnson’s excellent post addressing the cause of the problem. You should read the full write-up over here, but here’s the quick summary:

The error message is a result of WP using up it’s allocated memory. By changing the amount of memory set aside for WP, you alleviate the problem. Simple, eh? Here’s how you do it:

1. Open the file “wp-settings.php” found in your WP root directory

2. Find the line that says ‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’

3. Change the 32M to 64M

4. Save, upload, and upgrade automatically with ease.

Thanks to Chad for the tip and for saving me just a little bit of my sanity.

Review: Western Digital My Passport Studio

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Jeff

This weekend, the wife and I are heading up to Northern California for an extended weekend of mad-fun.

I rented two L-series lenses for my Canon 50D and in anticipation of shooting a ton of photos, I decided to purchase a portable hard drive to serve as a backup point for my MacBook Pro.

I had a few must-have criteria for the drive:

- Had to be powered by the laptop, no extra power bricks to pack and then forget in the hotel room

- Wanted Firewire 800 b/c 2.5″ HDD’s are slow enough without slamming them through a USB 2.0 connection AND all of my computers (including Misty’s) has FW800 so why not take advantage of the speed?

- It had to be pretty as if it had earned the right to sit next to my MacBook Pro—which is nothing less than a work of modern art.

I had a few models to choose among from Iomega, LaCie and Western Digital. I decided to go with the WD My Passport Studio Edition. The “Studio” label could have been replaced with “Mac User Edition” b/c it is clearly intended for the mac crowd. As you can see in these photos, the external case is nearly identical in material and color to the MacBook Pro.

Included in the box was the drive (320GB), a felt-drawstring bag and a cable for all three connection types that were each about a footlong to accomodate a portable workspace size. In some casual testing, transfer rates via FW800 are crazy fast. In fact, I was able to transfer 1GB of RAW photos in about 20 seconds.

Overall, I’m really happy with the performance and fit-and-finish of the drive. WD backs it up with a 5 year warranty and at $129 USD on Amazon
you can’t go wrong.

just add vodka with a twist of FUCK

Posted on May 22, 2009 by Jeff

hey joker!

remember that time when you totally fucked up and spilt an entire liter of tonic water all over your hipster-kitchen-bar and in doing so engulfed your most precious worldly possessions with sugared-seltzer-water?

that was rad! …here are some highlights that you may have missed when you were cursing and biting yourself…remember how:

- your new macbook was placed neatly at the bar in front of the barstool you sit at each morning while trying to solve the world’s heath problems? yeah! that tonic water totally fucked that up! dude, that macbook was LITERALLY floating on a river of hurt…THAT TASTED LIKE TONIC WATER! dude, by the time you got to it, the soda water was still fizzing! it was as if your hopes and dreams were fizzing away! HA!

- oh..DUDE…remember how you laid the keys to your Jetta next to the Macbook? and ‘member how you think driving a Jetta is something non-capitalist-pigs purchase b/c they want german-engineering but DON’T want to be seen riding around in a BMW? and then in all your stupid-fuck-wisdom you decided to IGNORE the hell out of the nice key hooks to your imediate-fucking-left? but instead you laid your keys lazily next to your (now dead) macbook? I swear to shit, when you picked up that fancy swtich-blade-keyless-entry-thing and watched as your vodka juice ran out of it I thought I was going to piss my pants! so fuck rad!

wait wait wait…the best part is that just TODAY you decided it would be a bad-ass-fuck-idea to bring home your super-important-top-secret lab notebook that contains ALL of your super-fuck-important data and read over it AT THE KITCHEN BAR…AND NOW…well, let’s just say that that son of a bitch is holding more tonic water than your poor fuck MacBook.

I could not imagine how tonight could get worse for you! …wait what’s that? not getting laid either? damn, bro….need a hug?

well at least you’ve got your novel, “…you know…the one you’ve been working on for ten years?”

Apple Tech Porn

Posted on May 19, 2009 by Jeff

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the good fortune of being able to upgrade my primary machine. Replacing my 24″ iMac is the new Mac Pro with Xeon “Nehalem” processor.

As my computing needs have evolved, I’ve grown more and more power-hungry and the Mac Pro’s Nehalem-based architecture and expandability are the perfect fit. In addition, I flanked the Apple Cinema LED Display with two 24″ Dell LCDs that are suspended above my desk with Ergotron MX Desk Mounts.

All three displays combined, give me a functional width of 5,760 pixels…and I use each and every one of them. Those fancy Ergotron MX desk mounts are amazing and allow me to rotate each of the displays into either landscape or portrait mode, depending on my needs.

My handy Apple Student Developer discount made all of this a financial possibility and I am very much in tech-love. More shots of my setup can be found here.

Official WWDC 2008 Predictions

Posted on June 8, 2008 by Jeff

so it’s become a tradition for me to make predictions on the eve of any Apple Expo Event. being that tomorrow is the WWDC, I shall once again either completely UNDERpredict or OVERpredict what Steve Jobs will have to say to the Apple-masses tomorrow morning.

here are my official predictions:

iPhone 2.0: the long awaited 2.0 firmware will be announced as “final” and bring all sorts of 3rd party application goodness as well as full-on Exchange support, etc. also expect a few more “apple developed applications” in this release. it will be available for download…IMMEDIATELY.
MobileMe: say goodbye to the overpriced .mac service and say hello to the all new premium offering from apple bringing over-the-air syncing of personal email, contacts, etc. MobileMe will be available for purchase…IMMEDIATELY.
3G iPhone: no more shall iPhone users be frustrated with lousy Edge network speeds when away from WiFi. Assuming that the major carriers (AT&T as well as international carries) will need time to field test the new hardware, expect to be able to pickup the new 3G iPhone in “later this month.”
GPS: throw in GPS and crazy Google Maps integration when the 3G iPhone ships…oh and while i’m at it…video recording, MMS (dear god let them include MMS) and a ‘lifeblogging app’ in the new version for good measure.
OS 10.6: given that this is a developer’s conference expect to hear about Apple’s next iteration of OSX and a complete LACK of PowerPC support. Sorry legacy users.
Total OS Integration: expect his Steve-hood to emphasize tighter integration between the mobile and desktop versions of OSX and the new online offerings in MobileMe.

i’ll update this post after the keynote address and we can all collectively laugh at my complete and total lack of understanding of what the hell apple chooses to do with their multi-billion-dollar-company.

Twitxr – A Tale of Mobile Posting

Posted on May 19, 2008 by Jeff

in a continuing effort to streamline my web2.0 existence, i’ve made a few changes to how i share my wildly interesting mobile photos with the world.

basically all i want is to be able to post an image from my iPhone and have it propogate to Facebook, Flickr and send out a Twitter alert complete w/ link. previously, i was just uploading any mobile photos to directly to my Flickr account and then having my blog update my recent flickr photos into a nice row of thumbnails (which you can see at the top of this page).

not content with having to upload photos to multiple services, i’ve decided to go with a service called Twitxr (pronounced twit-cher).

emailing a photo from my iphone to the twitxr service posts the photo on my twitxr profile page—but more importantly—sends out a link to the photo via twitter, posts a copy of the photo to flickr (complete with geotagging info) and uploads a copy to my facebook profile.

i settled on Twitxr b/c they have a publicly available API that will allow for growth and community support; in addition, they also have a decent iPhone client that will hopefully benefit from the iPhone SDK.

now that you’re aware of all of my behind-the-scenes tech wranglings, you can finally go about your day in peace.

blog house keeping (how i spent my saturday)

Posted on May 17, 2008 by Jeff

so since its the weekend (and no one visits this site on the weekends) i decided to do some blog housekeeping. here’s a few of the changes/modifications i’ve made to your favorite blog on the entire internet:

Added the “Web Two-Point-Ohhhh” section to the top of the sidebar to conveniently list all of my profiles from across the world-wide-internet. Quick links to twitter, facebook, flickr, etc are all nicely organized for your perusing.
Integrated the Disqus blog commenting system which has all sorts of bells & whistles that should making posting comments and keeping track of the compelling conversations that follow a d-r-e-a-m.
Video Comments!!!! One of the perks of disqus is that they are partners with seesmic and allow for YOU (yes you!) to leave a video comment on any blog post! Simply click on the comments link of any post, click on “Record a Video Comment” and BAM the seesmic software pulls up your webcam and lets you easily record your thoughts of love and admiration for ME.
Upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1 and read up on how to cleverly integrate photos into the blog. Using the built-in Gallery in WP2.5+ and nick stakenburg’s incredible Lightview javascript library, I’ve got an easy to implement and dead-sexy gallery system in place.You can see this post for a demo.
Went through and cleaned out all the stray files and unnecessary uploads from my FTP server & backed up my entire server. Organization is a good thing.
Installed the WP-Cache2 plugin to speed up loading of the blog b/c you guys have more important things to do than wait around for my blog to load.
Installed the WordPress Backup plugin and scheduled daily/weekly backups of all of my content b/c like sand through the hourglass, these are the blogs of my life.

As my lack of a social-life permits, I want to download all of my Flickr sets to individual WP Gallery posts and whip up a gallery page so that all my little snowflakes are never more than a few clicks away from all that is ME.

one lonely success

Category Archives: Tech