I’ve been making some changes to this site recently: upgrading to the newest version of WordPress, choosing a new theme and fiddling with the layout.

One thing I discovered is that, unless you’re running a very minimal installation, it’s quite easy to run out of memory, even with only a handful of plug-ins. Versions of the software have become slightly larger since WordPress 2.6 or so, plus plug-ins have become more ambitious, not to mention the increased usage of rich content like videos and AJAX transitions.

Every time I tweaked something, I ended up with blank pages and an error message like this:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of X bytes exhausted (tried to allocate X bytes) in /home /Your-Username/public_html/ the particular folder on line X

I searched around for quite some time for advice, and tried each of the following, before ending up at a working solution. They didn’t work for me, but I’ll leave them here since they might prove useful for someone else. Please be very careful, though: some of these ‘handy tips’ will break your entire site.

1) De-activating all but the most essential plug-ins. This is probably good housekeeping advice all-round, but didn’t actually make a lot of difference. The basic install was using 26MB of the 32MB allocated; with a full suite of plug-ins it was just over 28MB. Add some users, and you’ll quickly run out of memory — the extra 2MB from disabling plug-ins didn’t make enough difference.

2) Alter the value of php_value memory_limit in your .htaccess file. Doing this broke the whole site: YMMV.

3) Optimise your database tables using phpMyAdmin. Saved about 200KB. Woop.

4) Adding the line “memory_limit = 64M” in my php5.ini file. Made no difference one way or another.

What actually worked was this.

Open wp-config.php and find this bit:

/** Sets up WordPress vars and included files. */
require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php');

Change it so that it reads like this:

/** Sets up WordPress vars and included files. */
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');
require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php');

Touch wood, that’s done the trick. The site’s still as slow as molasses, of course, but at least I’m not running out of memory.

I mentioned this a couple of posts back. Delete discusses ‘The Virtues of Forgetting in the Digital Age’. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend but the RSA has — as always — made the audio of the talk available to everyone. See the link below for details.

Google remembers everything we’ve searched for and when. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyber-space for future employers to see. The written word made it possible for us to remember across generations and time, yet now digital technology is overriding our natural ability to forget. Should the past be ever-present, ready to be on-screen at the click of a mouse?
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, director of the information and innovation policy research centre at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, explains why current information rights and privacy fixes can’t help us, and proposes a simple solution - expiration dates on information.

RSA Event Page Here

For the human condition, forgetting is at least as important as remembering — sometimes more so. Without it, we are all bound to lead the miserable life of A. R. Luria’s patient Solomon Shereshevsky, who was crippled by his boundless, indelible memory, or his fictional counterpart, Jorge Luis Borges’s Funes. No forgetting implies no generalisation, no real present time, no amelioration of trauma, and no weaving of meaningful life narratives.

More on the nature of memory in the digital era with a review of two books. Total Recall is a utopian view of a not-too-future world where nothing is forgotten, thus fulfilling a desire for eternal life, according to the reviewer.

Delete (the subject of the quotation) suggests that we need to build technologies that will put ‘expiration dates’ on past data, to allow us to better grow as human beings.

I find it interesting that both books, and the reviewer, imagine that we, as individuals, will be empowered one way or the other. A less optimistic view, one I’ve mentioned earlier, is that it will be third parties — governments and corporations — that make the decisions regarding our memorabilia, and consequently, our memories.

Posted via web from iandelaney’s posterous

We have no idea, do we, of where this stuff will be in the future?

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.”

That’s what Omar Khayyam wrote. But it‘s rubbish, isn’t it, here in the digital world?

The moving finger writes and bits are written, but they can be unwritten at the drop of a hat. Maybe I’ll forget to renew this hosting account and domain name. And then it’s gone. Three years of writing down the pan. Link Rot is so widespread that there’s a name for it – even a wikipedia entry. Ask around for Geocities users, for example. My first proper website about Hamlet got wiped from Hypermart without explanation in 1999.

Oh hoh! – you say – if you are in a swashbuckler sort of mood. “But Ian, there is the Internet Archive and Google. They save the lot.”

Let’s take the two separately. The Internet Archive is a not-for-profit that may or may not exist tomorrow. Google will do what it has to. Maximise profit for shareholders. Its priorities are not yours.

Writing and Digital Writing have a key difference when it comes to history and permanence. The pen-written word is permanent – what is written in ink is in history, has happened, will always have happened. Digital Writing is subject to UNDO, link-rot, moderation, invisible and unlimited revision, and ultimately, erasure. Digital Writing is inherently unsafe, written in water, whatever the writer’s or publisher’s intentions at the time of publication.

On the other hand. I was talking with my friend Deirdre the other day about memory and the Internet. That the way we consider our past is reconfigured because we have continual access to the primary data.

The opposing case says this, and it also holds a lot of value:

I can see exactly what happened at *that* party four years ago because there are dozens of photos/videos/posts about it. The past doesn’t decompose the way it used to. While once upon a time, my memory of the party was that it was wild and enormous fun, the raw data might show that we were all over-intoxicated and some people were clearly not so happy. Twitter doesn’t currently archive, but it, or its successor, will do so very soon – and so we’ll have access to everyone’s impressions of the party as it happened, *then*.

And then we start to rely on it, perhaps. At the age of 14 I knew the capitals of every major country in the world. I don’t anymore, because what’s the point? I can Google it. So we don’t need to remember stuff. I used to know 10 phone numbers off by heart. Today I know none, because they’re stored in my mobile. So what’s the point?

There’s two strands to my thoughts here:

(a) We have semi-permanent access to our past. This enormously affects our ideas about our own history. They will be more ‘true’ in a way, but our understanding of what the reflexion of Internet publishing means is still very naive. Memory and the past is changing, but I don’t think we know how, yet.

(b) That we are eagerly abrogating responsibility for knowledge and also memory. My phonebook, pictures, thoughts — my people, my past – are in other people’s hands. And those people don’t care about my past or my memories. They might well get wiped. I’m anxious about that as well.

More anon.