My Technophilic Musings

If you have ever had these errors or just want to be prepared in case they pop up somtime (and they surely will), then read on as I discuss various situations that lead to them and also their solutions.

I generally use desktop clients (mostly blogjet, but also Windows Live Writer and Scribe Fire sometimes) to blog to my WordPress based blogs. Some months ago, I started getting "Http 406: Not Acceptable" error while posting a particular post. Tried posting through the WordPress inbuilt TinyMCE editor, but got the same result. A little bit of research told me that this was because the post contained some words that were considered harmful by the "mod_security" plugin for apache that had been installed by my host to prevent hacking attempts. The quick resolution was to include the following lines in my .htaccess:

Sure enough, I put them in, published the post, and it worked. But since this meant opening up my site to the real hacking attempts, I commented them out and went about my work, occassionally turning them on as and when required.

But, a few days ago, after a server upgrade, the problem reared its head again, and in a more vicious manner. I started getting the dreaded 406 error again, and this time for any post, even a blank post, and through all clients. But this time, TinyMCE was working without issues. A little bit of looking around my site told me that the problem was that my desktop clients were not able to connect to my "x mlrpc.php" file which is responsible for taking care of all the remote api provided by WordPress. Trying to access it through any means provided the 406 error. My site's error log was filled with:

An appropriate representation of the requested resource /x mlrpc.php could not be found on this server.

Now, the xml rpc methods are used not just by WordPress but many other CMS's (like drupal, joomla, etc) and sure enough a quick search resulted in many similar reports for all the platforms. Enabling my previous mod_security options resulted in "503: Server misconfiguration" errors, complicating things further.

On seeing the error logs, I found that the server could not understand the options, and then I discovered that the mod_security had been upgraded to and it wasn't backward compatible with old options. Modifying the options to their latest counterparts also didn't work, as further wading through mod_security manual told me that now, its options cannot be overridden through .htaccess and can only be changed by the web admin.

I found that my host has basically blocked the x mlrpc.php file from being accessed at all instead of using proper rules for blocking only the attacks while allowing valid accesses. This was the problem that a huge number of people are also having and moreover they (like me) are not able to convince their hosts to switch to proper rules.

However, not all hope is lost. I have "fixed" this issue with a workaround for now. It is pretty simple really. Just rename your x mlrpc.php to something else (e.g. myrpc123.php) and also replace all references to it in your CMS with your new file name. You can use sed to automate this task. I used perl however:

Now, the 406 errors should be gone. If this worked for you, or you had any issues let me know. Also, if you have any other workarounds/fixes of your own, do drop me a word.

Note: In the above article, please ignore the space between "x" and "mlrpc" as the mod_security rules prevent them from being in content also. Moreover, use some unique name for rpc file.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Drupal, Hack, http 406 error, Joomla, not acceptable, wordpress

Update: Modified the “Oxios Hibernate” app as well on public demand. Please redownload the below mentioned package. It now has Oxios Close as well as Oxios Hibernate.

Oxios developed a very useful tool for Windows Mobile (WM2003/5/6/6.1) called “Oxios Memory” sometime ago. On running it, it’ll flush your RAM (kind of) and recover substantial amounts of memory that can be used by the currently program. It is so good at this that many people run it regularly on their phones, and most of them want to run it in an automated mode (through a scheduler or a script). But the problem (so far) was that it generates a Message Box at the end for which the user has to press “OK” button to make it go away. There is no known way of disabling this message box and many attempts to work around it by scripting the “press OK” action have been very unreliable at best. Hence, it took it upon me today to remove this nagging problem and 5 minutes later we have a “clean” Oxios Memory.

Yes, no more nagging prompts

Download it here: Oxios Memory Hacked By Shantanu Goel

(Feel free to spread the message but please don’t hotlink to the file as it is anyways disabled. Provide a link to this page instead)

If you like it, then DIGG IT by clicking here or choose your favourite submission engine from the links below the post

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Hack, Oxios Close, Oxios Hibernate, Oxios Memory Cleaner, Remove Message Box Prompt, Windows Mobile, WM2003, WM5, WM6, WM6.1

Situation: You are migrating your WordPress blog from PHP4 to PHP5 (intentionally or being forced to as you web host won’t support PHP4 anymore). Most of the times, this is as simple as adding some simple lines to .htaccess (e.g. AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php ). And you might not notice any issues. But many of you still do. The issues range from weird page layouts, to some controls not working, to some errors popping up here and there, and probably your blog not even displaying. This occurs because even though WordPress is PHP5 compatible, some of the plugins you are using might not be. But even if you ensure that all your plugins are PHP5 compatible, there is still one more problem that I just saw today.

Problem: My host supports both PHP4 and PHP5. I decided to migrate my personal blog to PHP5 today by adding the aforementioned line to my .htaccess. Immediately, my blog disappeared, and in its place, all that was left was a few errors:

[07-Apr-2008 12:11:49] PHP Warning:  flock() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /…/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 105
[07-Apr-2008 12:11:49] PHP Warning:  fopen/…/wp-cache-e3ba4b7161eb59d50c5e976a0b66782a.meta) [<a href='function.fopen'>function.fopen</a>]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /…/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 240
[07-Apr-2008 12:11:49] PHP Warning:  fputs(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /…/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 241

Note: I’ve deleted the exact file paths above for security reasons.

It gave me an idea that it had something to do with wp-cache. When I tried to open the settings for wp-cache, it again gve error that web server doesn’t have the permissions to write the file wp-cache-config.php, wp_cache_mutex.lock etc.

Continue reading »

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: errors, migrating from PHP4 to PHP5, permissions, PHP4, PHP5, plugins, web-server, wordpress, WP-Cache

Some time back I had posted a little hack to fix an issue that users of i3theme have, i.e., their right sidebar drops to below the main content area in IE6. But it wasn’t that good as it took care of only the situation when this phenomena was caused by the tag cloud widget. So, here is a little modification I did to fix the issue more properly.

1. Go to your wp-content/themes/<i3theme> folder and open the style.css file in your favourite text editor.

2. Search for “#sidebar” (without the quotes) until you reach the following code:

3. Now, modify this code to look like:

4. That’s it. Save your file and you are done.

So what does it do? Basically I just added an attribute “word-wrap: break-word” to the sidebar handling. So, if there is a word that cannot fit in the sidebar width, the word will be broken to continue in the next line and thus the sidebar alignment will remain intact. let me know if you face any issues with this.

Note that this particular word-wrap property is Internet Explorer specific. Firefox (and other browsers) will ignore it, but since the problem with sidebar alignment occurs only with IE, so it will enable IE to display your site properly.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: i3theme, i3theme 1.6, i3theme sidebar issue, i3theme sidebar problem, IE, IE6, internet explorer, sidebar, word wrap, wordpress

There are many code syntax highlighter plugins available for WordPress (e.g. iG Syntax Highlighter, WP-Syntax, etc) but almost all of them have a problem. They want you to write the code in “HTML editing mode”. If you use any kind of WYSIWYG or visual editors (like built in TinyMCE or offline clients’ similar modes), there is a grave problem. Your code becomes garbled. e.g.:

If you intend to write:

It might turn out as:

 The issue here is that the code highlighting plugins use the “exact” text entered within the [ code ] (or similar) tags, and since we used the WYSIWYG/visual editors, they add html formatting tags to the code and also convert some special characters into HTML entities (e.g. > into &gt;, < into &lt;, white space into &nbsp;, etc).

The workaround is that you can write the code in html editing mode. But the problem here is that if you happen to switch to the visual mode or edit your post in this mode any time later, the problem will come back which makes editing posts a pain. So, here is a simple hack that will let you write your code in visual/WYSIWYG mode without doing anything special.

Continue reading »

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: code, code hilighting, Hack, html editor, html entities, html_entity_decode, iG:Syntax Hiliter, plugin, strip_tags, TinyMCE, visual editor, wordpress, WP-Syntax, wysiwyg

Disclaimer: I’m neither a WordPress guru nor a PHP expert. This is what it is, a dirtly little hack, otherwise I’d have called it an “enhancement”

Now onto the main things.

Aim: You would have used wp_list_pages (or plugins like dd-list-subpages, that use it) to display a list of your pages/subpages on a particular page. e.g., I use it on my “Projects” pages hierarchy to list all the relevant projects under a particular heading. Now, the thing is that wp_list_pages gives you a lot of options to display things like dates, page title, page link, etc, but that’s not enough. I need to provide a small description for each page as well, to put things into perspective. Obviously, I don’t expect the visitors to go inside each link to see what it holds in store for them.

The Hack: What you need to do is locate a file called “classes.php” in your wordpress installation. It is usually located at <WordPress Base>/wp-includes.

Now, open the file and find a function called “start_el”. This is a function in the “Walker” class, which is used in WordPress to parse tree-like structures. Here, it used by wp_list_pages to list out all the pages. Now, at the very end of this function (just after the closing brace of if ( !empty($show_date) ) { ), place the following piece of code:

What this code does is:

1) Look for a custom field called “description” in your pages. If present, it will show what you wrote there after each of your page in the list generated by wp_list_pages. (To add a custom field to your page, look at the very bottom of your “write” page or “manage” page in the WordPress dashboard.

2) If the “description” field is not present (obviously you might not like to go back and add a custom field to all your pages), it takes the first 250 characters of your page’s content and displays that.

The Hack Is Not Finished Yet: There is just one little thing left to do. As I mentioned, this function is used other times as well (e.g. making your navigation menu). So, you don’t want the description to be appearing always, otherwise it will wreak havoc on your site’s layout. So, there is again a dirty little trick to prevent this.

At the place where you are calling wp_list_pages, modify the call to include the following code before and after the call:

And, modify the previously listed code as well to look like:

What this does now is that it adds an option/variable to WordPress database, which you set to 1 before calling wp_list_pages to tell your code that now its time to display the description, and then restore its state to 0, to prevent the description from being displayed for any other wp_list_pages call.

For your reference, I'm attaching my copy of classes.php here.File Attachment: classes.php.zip (6 KB).
For an example of how it finally looks like, take a look at my “Project” page.

Now It Is Finished: Yes, am not lying. It’s done. All your “Thank You’s” are accepted, and so are your flames, if any .

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: custom fields, description, Hack, list of pages, pages, PHP, start_el, subpages, Walker, wordpress, wp_list_pages

I came across this post on lifehacker today (original post and solution here), which talks about a method of retrieving files from a remote computer through e-mail. Pretty archaic, I know, but again, it is a very simple method and works behind all the firewalls and stuff . But, the catch is that it is only for mac’s. Thought of creating something similar for the PC and mashed together some code during lunch time at office to make our dear old outlook remote-file-sending-capable. So, here it is, head over to my project page “Remote File Access Through E-Mail” to read more about this and download it.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: lifehacker, mac, outlook, outlook 2003, remote access, remote file access, remote file access through e-mail, windows

The awesome i3theme that this blog uses is a treat to the eyes, except to a lot of IE6 users. The issue is that for many people viewing wordpress blogs using this theme, the right sidebar doesn’t appear on the right, but below the middle column main area.

I didn’t know this problem existed as I don’t use IE but when a friend mailed to let me know, I started hunting around for the solution. Infact, found on the home page of i3theme, that the author acknowledged this bug and fixed it in v1.5, except the fact, that the fix doesn’t work. Because this blog was also using the same version.

Now, not taking anything away from the author, who has done a wonderful job with the theme, I took it upon myself to fix it, and the solution turned out to be really simple.

Continue reading »

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: i3theme, IE6, largest, resize, right sidebar problem, sidebar, tags, widgets, wordpress, wp_tag_cloud

As the pic above says, it turned out to be quite elementary in the end. But what is “it” actually?

The Problem: Since the beginning of time (read launching of WM6), millions of WM users (ok ok, will not exaggerate from now on) have been facing a very peculiar issue. The issue is that people tell them all the time that they are avoiding those people, and not taking their calls. But as the perplexed WM’er flips through his calls log, he can’t find any sign of a missed call. Yes, the issue is that many times, the phone will go into a state where the caller will hear the ring go, there will be no sign on your phone of the same, not even a missed call. People all around the world have been after the solution with all their might, suggesting:

1) To change over to Radio Rom x.xx.xx and swear it solved all their issues but we have had equal number of people in both camps (fixed and non-fixed) for every radio rom.

2) Various kinds of flashing techniques and orders but no concrete solution here either.

3) Standing on their heads and chanting “OM” for 10000 years (I’m at it again  )

Anyways, the long and short of it is, they didn’t get anywhere. But worry no more, the messiah is here to save you all from social embarrassment. Click on Continue reading to find the solution.

Continue reading »

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Active Sync, ActiveSync, fake server trick, Hack, missing calls, signal, Windows Mobile, WM6