Error creating thumbnail: /path/to/wiki/bin/ulimit.sh: xrealloc: ../bash/subst.c:514: cannot reallocate 512 bytes

MediaWiki's software was giving me this error, and I couldn't find a solution on google. I thought I'd post one.

I was able to fix the problem by moving the bin folder to bin.bak, downloading a new copy of mediawiki, and copying the bin folder from the new installation.

I suspect that the error occurs when you set the permissions on ulimit.sh to global read-write (777). The ulimit.sh in the new bin directory was set with limited permissions:

total 20K
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 88 Jun 5 04:18 svnstat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 52 Jun 5 04:18 ulimit-tvf.sh
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 53 Jun 5 04:18 ulimit.sh
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 53 Jun 2 01:54 ulimit.sh.bak
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 48 Jun 5 04:18 ulimit4.sh

Correcting the error may be as easy as changing the permissions, but if that doesn't work, you can follow the steps I outlined above.

Wikis - surprisingly international

I guess this shows how insulated I am... I never really expected BluWiki to get serious usage outside of the US.

In fact, according to Google, wikis are getting much more (normalized) attention in other parts of the world. The US doesn't even rank in the top 10 countries searching for the term wiki:


My experience with BluWiki confirms this... Of all the sites I run, it is the most "international." Only 55% of visits are from within the US. While this might sound high, for comparison, the traffic to every other site I own is at least 97% domestic.

Added features to BluWiki

I'm kicking myself for not putting more time into BluWiki, my free wiki web host. I started BluWiki almost 2 years ago, but only now am I realizing how much demand there is out there for wiki hosting sites.



Hopefully, its not too late. I've been putting a lot of work into the site recently, including redesigning its look. The new skin is much more lightweight, which should be great for my users. Pages hosted on BluWiki will now take up the entire page, since I took out the menus on the top and the left.

My next goal is to support BluWiki sub-domains and allow users to create an entire wiki - instead of just pages on the main wiki.

www.Longwood-University-Sucks.org

In my previous post I already told you that the Longwood University Administration drove me crazy.

I've decided to pay their $35.15. But I'm not going to let them steal $160 from my roommate and me, without saying anything. I've already written the president and several other administrators @ Longwood - but they don't seem to care.

Since I can't really escalate the issue to anyone else, or complain to the FTC / BBB (Longwood isn't a company), I'm doing the only other thing I really can - starting a website. It's online at www.Longwood-University-Sucks.org. On the site I chronicle my frustrations with Longwood, and encourage others to do the same.

From what I can tell, starting this website is the only way to get the Longwood administration to listen to its students.

It looks like it's getting some use. Right now there are about 25 "horror stories" - descriptions of horrible experiences Longwood University students have suffered through.

I think I'm going to take the $160 Longwood took from us, and put it towards online advertising for the site. Hopefully this will get the administration's attention.

Who knows, maybe we'll even see some positive change?

BluWiki's back online!!!!

BluWiki.org, my most popular site, is now online. I can't tell you how much of a relief this is. I couldn't help but feel like I've been disappointing all of BluWiki's users with all of this downtime.

This is what I've been staring at the last couple weeks:



BluWiki's daily visitor traffic. Notice the drop when BluWiki's server failed. :(

I can only hope I didn't loose everyone's trust and that they return to the site, now that its back online!

Special thanks to this guy, who helped me recover the database.

Server problems...

The server that runs BluWiki and several of my other sites is having hard drive problems (although its still online right now).

BluWiki is taking a lot of time and I'm not entirely sure if I'm going to stick with it. I'm thinking about just moving all my non-bluwiki sites to a third party host and just calling it a day.