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If you run Wordpress and ever receive a message such as “Allowed memory size of xxxxxx bytes exhausted” then you’re not alone. Resolving the error isn’t a big deal though. As of v2.5 the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT option allows you to specify the maximum amount of memory that can be consumed by PHP.

This wasn’t in my config already, but simply adding it fixed the issue.

This setting increases PHP Memory only for WordPress, not other applications.

Please note, this setting may not work if your host does not allow for increasing the PHP memory limit–in that event, contact your host to increase the PHP memory limit. Also, note that many hosts set the PHP limit at 8MB.

Increase PHP Memory to 64MB
define(’WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘64M’);
Increase PHP Memory to 96MB
define(’WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘96M’);

I’m sorry, but by request this article was removed. Please see similar articles like:

• Conditional-CSS
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FireFox has always been a good browser, but as of the latest release has become THE browser that I use daily. FireFox extensions make it wickedly powerful. As a web developer I find many of the extensions invaluable. Here’s the best of the best…

Web developer`s toolbar

Web Developer`s tool bar probably will become one of the best plugins You`ve ever seen. It comes with his own tool bar that gives many useful tools for analyzing, validating and optimizing web-pages. The great thing about this plugin is that it’s on a few different browsers, so if you switch between them you will be able to use the same plugin on all.

Web Developer Toolbar

Firebug

Firebug is pretty similar as web developer, but it comes across with few different powerful options. You have an ability to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript right in any web page.

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Google announced it will release a brand new open source web browser called Google Chrome. Yesterday a site went up, and has subsequently been taken down at http://gears.google.com/chrome/?hl=en (as of this morning clicking this link take you back to regular old Google).

According to Crunchbase the features include:

• Tabbed browsing where each tab gets its own process, leading to faster and more stable browsing. If one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it
• A distinct user interface that places tabs on top of the browser window instead of right below the address bar
• An “incognito” mode that lets you browse the web in complete privacy because it doesn’t record any of your activity
• A new JavaScript engine built from the ground up for speed
• Malware and phishing lists that automatically update themselves and warn you of bad websites
• A default homepage that displays your most commonly used sites and other personalized information

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Scott Hanselman, the studmuffin of the Microsoft world drops some knowledge and clears up some confusion about the size of the .NET Framework.

The .NET Framework is not really a 200+ meg download. From Scott’s site:

Which installer do I use?

Here’s the whole thing in a nutshell for Developers, ISVs, and Administrators.

• Offline Installer - One single file that can be run offline and can install the .NET Framework any system it’s run on. It’s complete, all platforms, installable offline.
• Online Installer - A 2.7 meg setup program that will detect what just the files you need, then go download between 10 and 60 megs.
  • NOTE: If you’re IT and inside an office, you’ll want to decide if you want everyone in the office downloading .NET separately, or if you just want download it once, and have them to run it off a network share. Check out the Deployment Guide for Administrators for ways to push it out via AD or SMS.

So how big is it the .NET Framework download, really?

It depends on what you’ve already got installed. Here’s some examples of my results using an XP SP2 machine.

Scott goes into much greater detail on his blog here. He’s also launched a section of his site called SmallestDotNet, it checks you browser’s “UserAgent” and figures out what version (if any) of the .NET Framework you have (or don’t have) installed, then calculated the total size if you chose to download the .NET Framework. Easy huh. The bummer is that it doesn’t work with FireFox.

The AJAX Control Toolkit is a joint project between the community and Microsoft. Built upon the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions, the Toolkit aims to be the biggest and best collection of web-client components available. I’ve been using several of these on an internal .NET project and I’m pretty impressed. A few of the control produce nice effects, but take a bit more to implement than I care for, but it’s still worth checking out.

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Clone Detective is a Visual Studio integration that allows you to analyze C# projects for source code that is duplicated somewhere else. Having duplicates can easily lead to inconsistencies and often is an indicator for poorly factored code.

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Undoubtedly every web-designer and developer who as made any attempt to use CSS will have found a situation where different web-browsers require different style statements. I’ve just encountered this myself with a side project I’ve been working on. This irritation is due to the varying degree of completeness of the CSS implementation across browsers and browser versions.

Conditional-CSS is a solution to this problem, taking the idea of the conditional comment syntax from Internet Explorer and placing it inline with your CSS statements.

Conditional-CSS is something you need to install on your server to be able to use. It comes in three platform versions:

PHP -Very simple to install and portable to any platform that runs PHP - the right option for you if you want to give Conditional-CSS a go.

C - Exceedingly fast and will run on just about every *nix platform, this is a little tricker to install, but very useful as a global interpreter.

C# -Runs under .NET 2.0 in Windows and Mono on many other platforms, use this version if you are using IIS or a .NET based web-server.

Get Conditional-CSS here.

In a presentation at the Black Hat briefings, Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. will discuss the new methods they’ve found to get around Vista protections such as Address Space Layout Randomization(ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and others. Essentially they’ve figured out a way to hack Vista using Java, ActiveX controls and .NET objects to load arbitrary content into Web browsers.

What they are indicating is that they have revealed a fatal flaw in Windows Vista which potentially blows the OS wide open and in such a way that it cannot be fixed. The attacks themselves are not based on any new vulnerabilities in IE or Vista, but instead take advantage of Vista’s fundamental architecture and the ways in which Microsoft chose to protect it.

Many of the defenses that Microsoft added to Vista and Windows Server 2008 are designed to stop host-based attacks. ASLR, for example, is meant to prevent attackers from predicting target memory addresses by randomly moving things such as a process’s stack, heap and libraries. That technique is useful against memory-corruption attacks, but Dai Zovi said that against Dowd’s and Sotirov’s methods, it would be of no use.

“This stuff just takes a knife to a large part of the security mesh Microsoft built into Vista,” Dai Zovi said. “If you think about the fact that .NET loads DLLs into the browser itself and then Microsoft assumes they’re safe because they’re .NET objects, you see that Microsoft didn’t think about the idea that these could be used as stepping stones for other attacks. This is a real tour de force.”

They go on to imply the approach can also potentially be applied to other operating systems such as Windows XP and Mac OSX (but not with this specific technique).

Read more at TechTarget or TrustedReviews

I’m obviously a fan of Jide’s Freshy2 theme, it’s the theme I use on this site. However, in order to do some of the fancy stuff within the theme you’re required to also use Jide’s Customize plugin. The Customize plugin provides css based customization for themes. It’s allows themers offer customization options with their theme really easily, just with a few css tricks! Sounds cool right? It is… unless you’re using Wordpress 2.6. Apparently, WP 2.6 uses a new version of scriptaculous and it conflicts with the theme/plugin. What you’ll see is an inability to see the media buttons when writing posts, among other things. No word from Jide on when an official fix will be issued, however Nestle Poell has compiled a collection of fixes which should make the plugin work (at least mostly work) so that you can use the Freshy2 theme.

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