paul schreiber

Many WordPress users have run in to the error “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.”

Sometimes, it is because you changed the table prefix and the solution is a database change.

For other folks, it was due to old plugin incompatibility. To fix it, you need to replace admin_head with admin_menu.

Unfortunately, neither solution worked for me. However, the latter (and some digging) pointed me in the right direction.

In my case, I had to change the parameters to—and order of—the add_submenu_page() and add_menu_page() calls.

Here’s the old code:

function thgs_add_menus() {
 add_submenu_page(__FILE__, "Heather Gold Show", "Shows", 8, "thgs/shows.php");
 add_submenu_page(__FILE__, "Heather Gold Show", "Venues", 8, "thgs/venues.php");
 add_menu_page('Show Management', 'Shows', 8, __FILE__);
}

And here’s the fix, which works with WP 2.8.4:

function thgs_add_menus() {
  add_menu_page('Show Management', 'THGS', "administrator", "thgs/shows.php");
  add_submenu_page("thgs/shows.php", "Manage Shows", "Shows", "administrator", "thgs/shows.php");
  add_submenu_page("thgs/shows.php", "Manage Venues", "Venues", "administrator", "thgs/venues.php");
} 

Recently, my friend Rob posed a question to twitter:

Is Mac OS X 10.5.7 the single biggest patch Apple has ever released, or just one of the biggest?

I thought that was an easy question to anwser.

I was wrong.

I looked all over the web for this information, and no one seemed to have it in one place.

So, I present to you: the comprehensive Mac OS X software update chart, current as of May 28, 2009. When the downloads are still available, I’ve linked to them on Apple’s site.

(more…)

For those of you who just want the answer, here you go:

• Range hood bulb: 10 Watt G4
• In-oven bulb: 50 Watt 130 Volt GY6.35

Head to your corner store and pick one up. Now, on with the story.
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URLs usually appear in written form — online or on paper. Sometimes, URLs are spoken aloud. You’ll often hear URLs read out:

• during television and radio advertisements
• in voicemail messages
• on conference calls

So what? Well, almost everyone gets it wrong.

And you sound like an idiot when you do.

I’ve seen directors of national political organizations and billion-dollar public companies make these mistakes.

In the interest of saving you and your organization future embarrassment, let’s run through a quick example. Suppose we want to give out the URL for Google Voice, the replacement for GrandCentral.

The URL for Google Voice is:

http://www.google.com/voice

You would read it aloud like so:

w-w-w dot google dot com slash voice

What not to do:

• Don’t read out “http://”. Nobody needs to hear “h-t-t-p colon slash slash.” It’s at the beginning of every URL. That’s eight syllables you waste.
• Don’t say “backslash.” A backslash looks like this: \. If you type a backslash instead of a slash, your web browser will give you an error.
• Don’t say “forward slash.” A forward slash is the default type of slash. It’s either slash or backslash. Don’t waste those three syllables.

Suppose you want to read about my house concerts. The URL for my house concerts site is:

http://concerts.shrub.ca/

You would read it aloud like so:

concerts dot shrub dot c-a

• Don’t read out “http://”. Nobody needs to hear “h-t-t-p colon slash slash.” It’s at the beginning of every URL. That’s eight syllables you waste.
• Don’t say “www” — it’s not in the URL.
• Don’t pronounce the trailing slash. (I’ve never heard anyone do this, but you never know.)

A note about top-level domains

The last part of the hostname is the top-level domain (TLD). For google.com, it’s “com.” For concerts.shrub.ca, it’s “ca.”

If you have a three-or more letter TLD (com, net, org, info, biz), pronounce it like a word. For “eff.org,” say “e-f-f dot org,” not “e-f-f dot o-r-g.”

If you have a two-letter (country code) TLD, spell it out. For Canada (.ca), say “c-a,” not “ka”; for Switzerland (.ch), say “c-h.”

Recently, I came across some streaming video that was only available to Canadians. Being a Canadian in the US, I felt somewhat entitled. Yes: I wanted to watch a hockey game.

I knew I could do this with an SSH tunnel. I just wasn’t sure how. There are lots of pages explaining how to set up SSH tunnels and proxies, but none were very clear or complete, and they didn’t explain what you had to do on the web browser end.

Step 1: Set up the SSH tunnel

ssh -D 8080 -f -C -q -N user@hostname.ca

Step 2: Set up System Preferences

This is for Safari and other WebKit-based browsers. Note: this will also affect Mail and other CFNetwork-based applications.

1. Select Apple > System Preferences
2. Click Network
3. Select the network interface you wish to use (i.e. AirPort)
4. Click Advance
5. Click Proxies
6. Select Configure Proxies > Manually
7. Check the box beside SOCKS Proxy
8. fill in “localhost” and “8080″
9. Click OK
10. Click Apply

Step 3: Set up Firefox

1. Select Firefox > Preferences
2. Click Advanced
3. Click Network
4. Click Settings
5. Click “Manual proxy configuration”
6. Besides SOCKS Host, fill in “localhost” and “8080″
   Do not fill in any other fields, including “HTTP Proxy”
7. Click SOCKS v5
8. Click OK

Here is how you create a self-signed SSL certificate for the Dovecot IMAP/POP server on Debian Linux:

openssl req -new -x509 -days 1000 -nodes -out "/etc/ssl/certs/dovecot.pem" -keyout "/etc/ssl/private/dovecot.pem"

The default is 365 days, but I upped it to 1000, so I don’t have to do this so often.

Dovecot does this on installation via /var/lib/dpkg/info/dovecot-common.postinst; you can force this script to re-run by issuing these two commands:
find /etc/ssl -name dovecot.* -exec rm {} \;
dpkg-reconfigure dovecot-common


FotoMagico is program that lets you create amazing slideshows. In FotoMagico, slides advance in one of two ways:

1. automatically, after a set time period
2. after a mouse click

If you’ve picked option (2), you see a “fast forward” overlay when you click the mouse:

I dislike this. Fortunately, there’s a preference to turn this off.

FotoMagico lets you export your slide shows as standalone player applications, and distribute them to anyone with a Mac.

I found one problem, however. Even when you turn off “Visualize Interactive Control,” the standalone player does not respect this preference. That means you always get the “fast forward” overlay. Yuck.

Fortunately, there is a workaround. If you peek inside the bundle for FotoMagico, you’ll notice it has a CFBundleIdentifier of com.boinx.fotomagico.

If you run defaults read com.boinx.fotomagico before and after setting the preference, you’ll see one line appear:
"PrefsKey_DisplayOverlays" = 0;

Now, look at the Info.plist inside the player. Its CFBundleIdentifier is com.boinx.fotomagico.player.

This means, the fix is simply:
defaults write com.bound.fotomagico.player PrefsKey_DisplayOverlays 0

San Francisco* has all kinds of interesting events going on. Here are some of my favourite off-the-beaten-path activities:

Storytelling

Porchlight

Science

Ask a Scientist
Down to a Science (haven’t been yet)

Music

Paul’s San Francisco House Concerts (yes, that’s me)
Drew Pearce’s House Concerts 
Songwriters in the round, hosted by Heather Combs

Literature

Writers With Drinks

Talk Show

The Heather Gold Show

Tech

SuperHappyDevHouse
BayCHI  

* Okay, so a few of them are just out of town. 

I somehow forgot the Long Now’s Seminars on Long Term Thinking. These are excellent, and I’m even a Long Now charter member.