Archive for July, 2010

Gallery Update

For those interested – updated my gallery page recently, adding some new photos and getting rid of some I’ve grown not-so-fond of. Check them out here.

WordPress 3.0 Upgrade Error Fix

I was recently upgrading the version of WordPress on one of the sites I run and encountered the following error: “Fatal error:

Call to a member function on a non-object in  *SITEHERE*/taxonomy.php  on line 289".

It took me a little looking around to find a solution but there was someone nice enough to look into it in the wordpress forums and posted a solution.  Hopefully this article can save those of you with a similar issue some time in getting things running again.

The problem occurs due to an error in the “Podcasting Plugin by TSG”.  The fix is actually pretty simple and requires a few quick steps:

1. Manually deactivate all plugins.  The procedure to do so when you can’t access the administration menu is located here.

2. Edit the file SITEROOT/plugins/podcasting/podcasting.php – On line 15 replace the code:

register_taxonomy('podcast_format', 'custom_field');

to

function build_taxonomies() {
register_taxonomy('podcast_format', 'custom_field');
}
add_action( 'init', 'build_taxonomies', 0 );

3. Re-enable your plugins and test your site – if this was the issue, things should be working properly now.

4. Upgrade the Podcast plugin in the Plugins menu.  I upgraded to Version 2.3.10.

Thanks to wordpress forum user ddarby14 for posting the solution.  Source thread.

I checked out this plugin and the offending line I found was line 15 in /plugins/podcasting/podcasting.php

register_taxonomy('podcast_format', 'custom_field');

I changed this to a function call

function build_taxonomies() {
	register_taxonomy('podcast_format', 'custom_field');
  }
  add_action( 'init', 'build_taxonomies', 0 );

Boot To USB Without BIOS USB Boot Support

On any new machine I purchase I ensure to thoroughly run all hardware with the various diagnostic applications available on the Ultimate Boot CD.  I have the UBCD setup on a USB drive which allows me to ditch the CD wallet.  Problem is, even in this day and age, there are still machines I encounter that are not compatible with USB boot.  Most of the time I’ll burn an ISO to CD and hook up a spare CD-ROM drive, but recently I was determined to get the computer to boot to USB.  No BIOS update was available and I searched every inch of the BIOS menus looking for a USB boot option with no success.  So, after some browsing around I found PLoP.  PLoP is a Boot Manager that will (among other things) allow a machine to boot to USB even without BIOS support.  It’s actually quite an easy solution but does require you to make either a floppy or CD.  Since the machines I was working with were previously used in a cluster they had no CD-ROM drives but they did contain a floppy drive.  To create a PLoP boot disk using another Ubuntu machine I completed the following:

wget http://download.plop.at/files/bootmngr/plpbt-5.0.10.zip

sudo apt-get install unzip

unzip plpbt-5.0.1.0.zip

cd phpbt-5.0.10/

Insert the floppy to write to into the drive.  I’m assuming it’s located at /dev/fd0.

fdformat /dev/fd0

dd if=plpbt.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k

Once you complete this you have created the bootable floppy and can now boot the machine to the floppy which contains the boot manager.  You will need to ensure that the installed floppy drive is listed on the boot list.  Note that the ISO is also included in the downloaded package if you would rather create a CD.

After you boot into PLoP there is a list of available boot options.  USB should be an option in the list and you simply select that as the boot option, press Enter, and your USB bootable drive can now be accessed!  Note:  Once booted to USB I could *only* use PS/2 keyboard and mouse with the machine.