I recently ordered a LaunchPad Development Board from Texas Instruments and needed to program it using my Fedora 16 linux machine. I've had an Arduino for a couple months now, but I'm really a beginner when it comes to programming for microprocessors. I really wanted someone to walk me through the setup process and give me the tools I needed to get started. Sadly, that sort of help was unavailable...

The Situation

I’m developing a module for Magento (v. 1.5.0.1) that creates a product Archive for old products (so the information can still be found by people doing research on past product, but it won’t clutter the interface for people looking to buy currently available product). The module will also place products into the Archive automatically. That automatic processing will likely be done via a cron job, but for the time being I am triggering it manually from the configuration section of the Magento admin...

A couple years ago I built a simple computer from some spare parts and made it a linux desktop. A few days ago I decided to use it to replace an even older linux server I had running at my house. I turned it on (for the first time since I built it) and decided, after a few failed attempts at upgrading from Fedora 11 to Fedora 16, to put in a new hard drive and install Fedora 16 from scratch.

The old hard drive was a 40GB IDE drive. My new hard drive is a 750GB SATA II drive.

I took out the old drive, plugged in the new drive, and boot the machine from a Fedora 16 live CD...

When you’re looking through pictures on a SocialEngine website and you click through to look at one by itself, there’s a list of options underneath the photo. These options vary depending on whose picture it is, but often you’ll see the option to “Make Profile Photo”. That supposed to enable you do quickly swap in a new profile photo.

The Problem

Users have started complaining that this link is not working properly. Instead of allowing them to change their profile photo, a modal window appears with a “Page Not Found” error:

Page Not Found

The page you have attempted to access could not be found

I dug into the code to see what was going on...

Users have recently reported receiving error messages when accessing Groups on a website built on the SocialEngine platform. The site was recently upgraded to SocialEngine 4.1.7 from 4.1.3

The Error

The error messages the users received weren’t very detailed (as usual). This is the relevant message found in the log file:

2011-09-16T03:15:03+00:00 ERR (3): [4096] Object of class Zend_View_Helper_Translate could not be converted to string (/socialengine-root/application/libraries/Engine/View/Helper/HtmlLink...

Getting Errors

Sometimes when working with the SocialEngine platform I’ve come across an error message that sits in the middle of a blank, white page. It’s quite a bit less scary than a typical error message, but there’s not much information to help the developer know what’s wrong. This is how it reads (though not as pretty):

We're sorry! We are currently experiencing some technical issues. Please try again later. Error code: a0dceb

There’s always an error code underneath the apologetic text, and that’s the important part...

I run a few WordPress sites, and every now and then one of them gets hacked. Most recently I found that Google Chrome was warning visitors to my web site that there was malicious code on my site. Here’s the process I went through to clean out my site running WordPress 3.2.1 (though I’m sure it applies to others as well).

Accepting the Problem

Since Google was warning that I was linking to a URL that contained malware, I assumed the link came from an outside source. I’ve heard that Google AdSense can sometimes be the culprit (they blacklist URLs, but sometimes there are AdWords ads pointing to the URLs and those ads don’t get pulled from AdSense, so they end up on your site), so I decided to take the lazy route wait until Google realized it wasn’t my fault and cleared my good name...

The Situation

There’s a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ unit in the office here running ReadNAS Frontview 4.1.7 that houses files for multiple departments.

• Account Dept Share
• Sales Dept Share

The ReadyNAS NV+ has multiple groups established:

• Accounting
• Sales
• Admin

Employees are put into one of these groups and the groups are given access to various shares (Admin has universal access):

• Account Dept Share – Accounting
• Sales Dept Share – Sales

The Problem

In time we started getting a lot of file access errors...

Background

I’ve been working on a new custom Magento payment module and having a lot of headaches along the way. I decided to start from scratch using the template provided here: http://inchoo.net/ecommerce/magento/how-to-create-magento-payment-module/.

I’m doing this using Magento Community Edition (the free one) version 1.5.0.1.

Setting Up

I got all the code copied into place with a few modifications:

• In the modules block of config...

I’m trying to test a Magento cron job by running the target file from the command line. When I do, I get this error:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 262144 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 523800 bytes) in Unknown on line 0

Line 0? Nothing happens before Line 27 (on this script). This isn’t a problem with my code. It’s a problem with PHP.

The Fix

It’s actually a problem with the PHP Command Line Interface (CLI). The server was recently upgraded to Ubuntu 10...