Enabling Thumbnails

 Technology, WordPress  13 Responses »
Mar 262005
 

I decided I finally wanted to track down why I could­n’t get the thumb­nails work­ing on Word­Press. I always get the mes­sage “File type not sup­por­ted. Thumb­nail not cre­ated.” even when the file­type is sup­por­ted. I run a stand­ard Debi­an stable sys­tem, with a back­port of MySQL, so my first assump­tion was that it should work. A long week­end is a good chance to try to track down these things, espe­cially when it’s rain­ing as much as it is this week­end in Van­couver. Of course, I start at the Word­Press sup­port for­ums. This leads me to try apt-get install libgd2; the thumb­nails don’t work. As a next approx­im­a­tion, try apt-get install php4-gd2; this also does­n’t work.

I dig a bit deep­er in the for­ums and find that a new­er ver­sion of PHP might solve the prob­lem; the Debi­an stable ver­sion is 4.1.2 and a ver­sion > 4.3 is recom­men­ded as the GD lib­rary is included by default. The oth­er advant­age to upgrad­ing PHP4 is that there are quite a few secur­ity holes fixed in ver­sion 4.3.9 and up; these may have been back­por­ted to 4.1.2, of course. So I look in backports.org because I already know how to use those; no new­er ver­sion of php4 there. Next I try dotdeb.org; this back­port site has a new­er ver­sion of PHP4 and a new­er ver­sion of MySQL. I add the magic line deb http://packages.dotdeb.org ./ to the /etc/apt/sources.list file. I also change the pin pri­or­ity in the pref­er­ences file to use dotdeb.org rather than backports.org. This upgrades my MySQL to dot­de­b’s 4.0 ver­sion nicely, but does­n’t touch the PHP4 install­a­tion. Seems odd to me since they should both be upgraded in the same way, I would have thought. Edd Dum­bill (Debi­an guru) gives me a couple of oth­er things to try in the pref­er­ences file; noth­ing seems cap­able of rais­ing the pri­or­ity of the dot­deb php4 install over the cur­rent stable installed ver­sion. Edd sug­gests installing each .deb by brute force; that breaks on unmet dependencies.

So I think about installing the unstable ver­sion of PHP4; maybe that will work bet­ter. I set up the pin pri­or­it­ies in the preferences file, and use apt-get -t unstable install php4. It threatens to install lots of things, so I decide to install a little at a time and make sure noth­ing breaks, or at least ensure I know what has broken if it does. First off, I make backups of httpd.conf, access.conf, the fire­wall script, and the PPPOE set­tings. Just in case. Not that I’m para­noid or anything.

  1. I install the unstable ver­sion of libexpat1; this installs libc6 and talks about hav­ing to restart the X11 serv­er. Since I’m not run­ning X, this isn’t a prob­lem. Then it decides it also needs to restart apache but the restart fails so I have to start apache by hand. For a while it looks like that failed too and I’m men­tally curs­ing but it does even­tu­ally restart.
  2. Then I decide, rather than the piece­meal approach, to do the full install with apt-get -t unstable install php4. As a side-effect it looks like I also get perl updated to 5.8.4, and it upgrades apache (just as well I saved those conf files!). The install script tells me about changes to apache con­fig files, which has me a little wor­ried… I decide to install the pack­age main­tain­er­’s ver­sion of httpd.conf and add in any needed changes later. Everything seems to keep on run­ning after­wards, though, so this upgrade was bet­ter than the last dist-upgrade I did, which did­n’t apply my changes to httpd.conf.

Now phpinfo.php shows that I have php4.3.10 installed on my sys­tem; time to try out the thumb­nail func­tion­al­ity. It still does­n’t work. Rein­stall php4-gd2. Thumb­nails still don’t work. Try apt-get -t unstable install php4-gd, which also seems to uninstall/reinstall/install a whole bunch of pack­ages. I con­sole myself that I’m half-way to sarge, if and when that ver­sion of Debi­an ever makes it to stable. Hmm, the install script just asked me what size paper should be the default on my sys­tem. I guess it has some reas­on for want­ing to know.

Since the thumb­nail gen­er­a­tion still does­n’t work, and I have no idea what to try next, I decide to give up and post on the Word­Press sup­port for­um. I hope someone there knows what the prob­lem might be! In the mean­time I cre­ate the thumb­nail I need using Imagema­gick­’s convert func­tion. This takes one com­mand line and approx­im­ately 0.01 seconds.

Later… on the Word­Press sup­port for­um someone tells me to search the for­ums. Since I’d star­ted by doing that (and quoted for­um searches in my post), that was­n’t par­tic­u­larly help­ful. Then I remem­ber I have SpamKarma installed, which has a captcha script (not that I want to use it, but it should be a good test). The error mes­sage on the captcha test page says the GD lib­rary isn’t enabled. A bit of Googling turns up the idea that maybe I need to restart apache yet again. I had­n’t thought of this before because the Debi­an upgrade/install pro­cess usu­ally restarts everything that needs to be restar­ted, includ­ing apache. I run apachectl restart and find I can finally click the magic but­ton on image upload to cre­ate thumbnails!

So the les­son appears to be: if in doubt, restart apache. Three times, prefer­ably. Any less just may not work.

Inspiration 5443

 Crafts  Comments Off on Inspiration 5443
Mar 262005
 

I’ve been knit­ting for most of my life, except for a long gap in the 1990s. I took it up again about 3 years ago and, due in no little part to Eve’s encour­age­ment, am going to start show­ing off some of what I’ve done and am doing. Maybe blog­ging will even encour­age me to fin­ish things soon­er — I tend to do most of a piece but not get around to fin­ish­ing it for some time.

my version of 5443 pattern view of 5443 All that being said, here’s my first blog entry on the sub­ject of crafts, my ver­sion of item 5443 in a pat­tern book called Inspir­a­tion 75. One would think that a book that calls itself “inspir­a­tion” could come up with inspired names for the pat­terns with­in it, rather than just num­bers. In the book the top looks like the image on the left (note the link leads to an online retail­er for the pat­tern books and yarn; I have no idea wheth­er they’re any good or not but they did have all the images). Instead of the recom­men­ded yarn, I used Schoeller­’s Micro-Cablé in col­our 23 (yet anoth­er unin­spired name). The link there is to Wise Needle, a great site if you want to fig­ure out which yarns to sub­sti­tute for that hard-to-find yarn from Europe. Tim took the photo of the res­ults on a mini-golf course in Maui, hence the “shot on loc­a­tion” look. 

Favourite Recipe Book

 Books, Food and Wine  Comments Off on Favourite Recipe Book
Mar 252005
 

I don’t usu­ally wax lyr­ic­al about recipe books, although I do have a few, but I was brows­ing through my favour­ite the oth­er day look­ing for some­thing to make and figured it’s well worth a recommendation.

Deborah Madis­on’s Veget­ari­an Cook­ing for Every­one fea­tures this quote on the front cover: 

The 1,400 recipes in this book are those that I like to cook. If you’re a com­mit­ted veget­ari­an, you can pre­pare every recipe in this book. If you are a vegan, you can cook most of them. If you don’t attach a title to your eat­ing style, you can cook everything in this book and serve it with meat, fish, or fowl.

The focus of this book is enjoy­ing cook­ing and enjoy­ing the food that is pro­duced. There are no lec­tures on being a veget­ari­an; there is inform­a­tion on basic cook­ing tech­niques and what vari­ous ingredi­ents are and how they work. The wide range of recipes cov­ers almost everything I’ve ever wanted to cook (except for meat-based meals, of course). And the recipes work. They’re not neces­sar­ily quick, but the clear explan­a­tions ensure that the res­ults are worth eat­ing. I was look­ing through the book while writ­ing this review, and found myself temp­ted to make things on every page (cot­tage cheese and nut­meg pan­cakes, any­one?). Hmmm, I think it’s time for lunch.

Jerzy Kosinski’s “Being There”

 Books  1 Response »
Mar 182005
 

Jerzy Kos­in­ski’s Being There was a reas­on­ably pop­u­lar book­club book, at least in part because it’s short and thus most people could read it in full (and some even read it twice!). Sev­er­al of us had also seen the film (screen­play also by Jerzy Kos­in­ski). Reac­tions to the book at book­club var­ied, from those who found it deeply pro­found to those (includ­ing me) who did­n’t quite get it and wer­en’t sure what they were meant to “get” either.

A brief syn­op­sis: Chance is a sim­pleton who works as a garden­er for an old man (rela­tion­ship unspe­cified) and spends his spare time watch­ing tele­vi­sion. His exist­ence is com­pletely unknown out­side of the house and garden where he lives and works (no birth cer­ti­fic­ate, no record of exist­ence any­where), and when the Old Man dies, the law­yers who take pos­ses­sion of the prop­erty evict him. Through luck, Chance is taken into the house of a rich, influ­en­tial couple, who assume he is someone of know­ledge and power because of his calmness and the high qual­ity of the hand-me-down clothes from the Old Man. His state­ments about life in the garden are assumed to be deeply mean­ing­ful alleg­or­ies; his know­ledge of human beha­viour as shown on tele­vi­sion meshes with the expect­a­tions of those around him, and he is feted by both report­ers and politicians.

Reviews on Amazon talk about the bit­ing satire evid­enced in the book; the book­club mem­bers spent more time talk­ing about the meta­phors. Chance goes from being lit­er­ally nobody, with no iden­ti­fic­a­tion, and no real name, to some­body import­ant simply due to luck — an exag­ger­ated ver­sion of Andy War­hol’s 15 minutes of fame. People see in him what they wish to see — the wife of the busi­ness­man invents a romantic past for him, the Soviet Ambas­sad­or thinks he speaks Rus­si­an and under­stands Krylov, the US Pres­id­ent con­siders him as the next can­did­ate for Vice-Pres­id­ent — des­pite there being no actu­al basis for any of these assumptions. 

I found the book rather too over the top for my taste; the film was bet­ter and more detailed. Peter Sellers made Chance believ­able where the book shows the holes in the fable. Oth­er book­club mem­bers loved the book though and enjoyed fig­ur­ing out the meta­phors and won­der­ing which bits of the book were inspired by which parts of Jerzy Kos­in­ski’s life. We spent a bit of time dis­cuss­ing what changes would have been required in the book were it writ­ten today, rather than in 1971. Tele­vi­sion is a lot less coy now and Chance’s reac­tions to the attemp­ted seduc­tions might be dif­fer­ent. All in all, I’d rather see the film again than read the book again.

Keeping America Strong

 General  57 Responses »
Mar 102005
 

Betcha did­n’t know that small one-per­son con­sult­ing com­pan­ies in Canada play a vital role in keep­ing the US strong, didja? Makes you won­der why I moved to a big US-based com­pany, but I digress. 

I found out just how vital these small com­pan­ies are when an asso­ci­ate pro­du­cer from a TV pro­duc­tion com­pany cold called a few months ago to see wheth­er I’d be inter­ested in tak­ing part in their series called, yup, Keep­ing Amer­ica Strong. When I poin­ted out that I was in Canada and a one-per­son con­sult­ing com­pany, he respon­ded that keep­ing Canada strong would help the US bor­ders and that small com­pan­ies also play a vital role. And that the series was hos­ted by Wil­li­am Shat­ner, sup­por­ted by tele­vi­sion news anchors and a Navy Admiral.

I must admit, I was intrigued, although I might have been more temp­ted had it been Leonard Nimoy host­ing rather than Wil­li­am Shat­ner. Still, it was worth spend­ing anoth­er few minutes on the phone, explain­ing what XML does and how it is used by vari­ous US gov­ern­ment depart­ments such as Home­land Secur­ity. XML obvi­ously passed the test of being deemed worthy of the next step, which was to meet the field pro­du­cer who would write up the pro­pos­al for each “ente­pren­eur­i­al com­pany” (their words) that wanted to “move for­ward in these times” (their words). At about this stage I star­ted won­der­ing just how much this was going to cost, although I was enjoy­ing the pol­ished deliv­ery of the bene­fits of being on TV with the “Amer­ic­an icons” (their words). Even­tu­ally I got the answer. The major celebrit­ies were donat­ing their time and energy for this import­ant endeav­our, and the only costs were a con­tri­bu­tion to the pro­duc­tion costs of a mere $US 15,000. A tad pricey for a van­ity kick, I thought. So I declined with thanks, got a nice fol­low-up email, and still have the fax with the details of what I missed out on. Maybe I’ll keep that for pos­ter­ity; after all, paper does­n’t degrade the same way web sites do.

Then yes­ter­day I found an Invit­a­tion for Inter­view for “For­bes Radio” on Amer­ic­an Air­lines in my inbox. Yup, anoth­er invit­a­tion to prove I’m one of these “innov­at­ive industry and busi­ness lead­ers, who through effect­ive col­lab­or­a­tion, pro­gress­ive strategies, improved pro­ductiv­ity, and increased agil­ity, provide com­pan­ies and indi­vidu­als a com­pet­it­ive advant­age and bet­ter qual­ity of work and life”. This oppor­tun­ity is to take part in a 3‑minute inter­view to be played on Amer­ic­an Air­lines inf­light pro­gram, which has a “cap­tive audi­ence of 3.4 mil­lion exec­ut­ive trav­el­ers per month”, and offered at the dis­coun­ted rate of only $US 4,995! So make sure you remem­ber your iPod next time you fly on Amer­ic­an Airlines. 

Corporate Blogs/Wikis Article

 Technology  2 Responses »
Mar 022005
 

The art­icle I wrote on some of the busi­ness uses for blogs and wikis has been pub­lished, under the title Blogs & Wikis: Tech­no­lo­gies for Enter­prise Applic­a­tions?.

I’d like to thank every­one acknow­ledged in the art­icle (Bob DuCh­arme, Lex­is­Nex­is; Chris­ti­an Wat­son, Seattle Children�s Hos­pit­al; Chris­toph­er Mahan, Health Net Inc.; Dave Pawson, RNIB; Derek Miller, Nav­arik; Jordan Franks, Trac­tion Soft­ware; Leigh Dodds, Ingenta; Mal­colm Tredin­nick, CommSe­cure; Norm Walsh, Sun Microsys­tems; Richard Tal­lent, Envir­on­ment­al Resources Man­age­ment; Robert Scoble, Microsoft; Ross May­field, Social­text; Tim Bray, Sun Microsys­tems; and Tony Coates, Lon­don Mar­ket Sys­tems). They all spent time writ­ing com­ments or emails in response to my request or talk­ing to me about what they, their com­pan­ies, or their cus­tom­ers are or aren’t doing with blogs and wikis. The tim­ing of the art­icle also meant I could put stuff in from the North­ern Voice conference.

Before doing my research for the art­icle I had­n’t real­ised just how wide­spread the use of blogs and wikis and hybrid sys­tems is in the busi­ness world. Even if wikis are only used for bursts of activ­ity, like organ­ising a one-off meet­ing, or used by one per­son for research notes, they’re still being used. Blog sys­tems are being used for sites, such as the Seattle Chil­dren’s Hos­pit­al web site which don’t look like blogs in any way; they’re a cheap, easy to use pub­lish­ing sys­tem. Blogs are being used for quick coordin­a­tion of tasks, such as at UBC’s Careers Online Pro­ject Web­log (this one did­n’t make it into the art­icle). There is a lot of blog- or wiki-based coordin­a­tion and col­lab­or­a­tion going on in the busi­ness world, much of it prob­ably unbe­knownst to people high­er up in these com­pan­ies, a bit like the way intranets star­ted. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see where this band­wag­on goes next.

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