mod_fcgid: stderr: PHP Fatal error:  Cannot redeclare class PayPalExpress in /wordpressroot/wp-content/plugins/shopp/gateways/PayPal/PayPalExpress.php on line 16, referer: http://domain.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=shopp-settings-payments

The domain and path have obviously been changed.

I’ve reported this problem to the Shopp developers so lets see what they say. In the meantime you’ll have to disable Membership until this is resolved.

Update 20/11/2011 – Ingenesis have acknowledged the conflict and have offered an unsupported workaround until they get their developers onto it.

• Edit shopp/gateways/paypal/paypalexpress.php
• Change the @subpackage meta field to PayPalExpressX
• Change the class name to PayPalExpressX

Overview

The FXD Pegasus Manipulator 4 is one of the more popular 4 channel 2.4 GHZ co-axial RC helicopters in it’s class. Released in 2011, what makes it so popular is it’s performance in this price range.

Its available in shops for around $130 AUD or around half the price on eBay.

As there is a lack of troubleshooting guides available on the net for this new model, I thought i’d compile a list for anyone trying to fix their helicopter.

Specs

Model number 68785

3.7V 180mAh Lithium Polymer battery

8 x AA batteries required for controller

Helicopter charges from either controller or standard powered USB socket.

Flying tips

I’m no RC helicopter flight expert by any stretch of the imagination, these tips are what i’ve learned flying this model so far. The terminology i’m using may also be incorrect so please go easy on me!

Most of this tips i’m sure apply to all models of RC helicopters as well.

Trim

When I first started flying this RC helicopter, I used to tune the trim each and every time before flight. What I found was that that as the helicopter started to “warm up”, it’s flight characteristics would change and the trim would need recalibration again. This started to get tedious so I got used to flying the helicopter with the trim centred and haven’t looked back. I now spend less time fiddling with the trim and enjoy more flight time since precious battery isn’t being wasted during calibration.

Landing

Landing the helicopter is not as simple as reducing the collective and it settling down by itself. Ground effect comes into play cushioning descent when it’s close to the ground, this causes the helicopter to “bounce” as it nears the ground and then drift sideways which can screw with your carefully placed vertical landing. The best way i’ve found to overcome this is to first get a feel for  how much power you need to apply vs the distance you start to float off the ground. Then when you land, make the helicopter descent, and as soon as it starts to experience ground effect, reduce the throttle to zero slowly and the helicopter should land gently (not drop!). I’m sure some people find dropping the helicopter fine but i’m a perfectionist and want to perform a great landing.

Spare parts

As this model is fairly new, there isn’t an easy way to obtain spare parts. As it stands I don’t know of any place that sells parts for this model.

Troubleshooting and Repair

This section should grow over time. If anyone has any tips they’d like to see added here for the benefit of all, let me know and i’ll add it.

Part numbers and names of parts can be found in the manual that came with the helicopter.

When spinning up the blades, the whole assembly vibrates excessively and a grating noise can be heard.

I haven’t quite been able to figure this one out yet, but I think it might have something to do with where the cyclic control motors connect to the lower blade. Try fiddling with the attachment ring (swashplate?) and see if that helps.

The main rotor shaft feels loose and I can jiggle it up and down, causing the rotor assembly to lift up during flight and affect the way the heli performs.

This can happen after you crash your heli a few times. The shaft and blades should feel snug, you should not be able to lift the blades and the whole rotor assembly up and down.
The cause of this problem is Gear B (part 32) has slipped too low on the gear outer shaft (part 29). If this happens, lift up Gear B higher so there is no play between Gear B and the top of it. Careful not to push it up too much otherwise the lower blade will not rotate smoothly.

So what do we do?

With the help of the Linux or Mac command line, this task becomes less tedious.

1. Log into the Mailman interface of your source host.
2. Go to the Member list and start with A.
3. Starting from the bottom of the list (simply because it’s easier to select from the end) highlight all email addresses upwards. You’ll also highlight the rightmost column but don’t worry about that, it won’t show in the paste.
4. On the command line, create a new file.
5. Paste the contents of the clipboard into the file. There’ll be lots of blank lines mixed in with Tabs. Once again don’t worry.
6. Rinse and repeat for the rest of the letters.
7. Save the contents of the file and exit the editor.
8. Run grep against the file with: grep -v ‘ ‘ <filename> | grep -v ‘^$’ | grep -v -P ‘\t’ | sort > thelist

You now have a file named “thelist” with the list of Members stripped of blank lines and tabs, ready to be imported the target Mailman instance!

I’m an adult with flat feet. Like a lot of other adults with this condition, it began early in my primary school years and led to seeing a podiatrist and being prescribed orthotics which I needed to wear pretty much all the time, and did for many years into adulthood. If I didn’t wear them, the muscle running the length of my foot (the plantar fascia I think) would pull and tear painfully leading to hobbling and the inability to bear weight on it. It would then take days to heal properly during which I had to be very very careful not to pull it again.

It seemed that when the muscle was stretched, there was a tendency to pull it, for example when stepping on a stone (even with shoes on), climbing a set of stairs with the foot half on the step, or even massaging it with a view of trying to gently stretch the muscle. It was like someone had inserted a needle straight into my foot, it hurt.

After discovering the article in New York Magazine titled “You Walk Wrong”, I was compelled to ditch the insoles I had worn for years and try barefoot walking in an attempt to strengthen my foot muscles. The article suggested that flat feet was a condition brought about by wearing shoes often and for many years, and as a result the feet being unstimulated and unexercised. I purchased a pair of Vivo barefoot shoes and proceeded to wear them everyday. I had to be extremely mindful of how I walked and where I was stepping and I think it did have a part to play in strengthening my foot muscles. Walking in them for a length of time made my feet feel “worked”, which I guess was a good thing as it meant underused muscles were getting a workout. After doing this for about a year, the muscle pulling incidences had decreased significantly but still happened occasionally.

During this time I also tried a few other things to augment the barefoot exercising like artificially stimulating the sole of the foot by poking it with a toothpick, I later read that NASA had come up with these shoes which poked the sole of the foot in space to stimulate the sole and prevent muscle atrophy so I couldn’t have been too far off.

I also tried calf stretches and hamstring stretches as Dr Google had diagrams which pointed to the plantar fascia and the calf muscles being connected, so I figured if I could gently stretch those muscles then they wouldn’t be so susceptible to pulling.

The real breakthrough came quite by accident in the shower one day, I wondered what it would be like to stand with raised arches. I did that for a while while I showered and noticed that muscles around my ankle and on certain parts of the bottom of my foot starting getting fatigued real quick, muscles which had never really gotten sore before. Was it because these muscles didn’t really get worked any other way, even through barefoot walking? Possibly.

The only way I can think of describing what I did (and am still doing) is to raise your arches by shifting your weight to the outer sides of your foot, which should raise your arches automatically, and then press down gently with the fleshly part of your sole just before the big toe (the first metatarsal head Dr Google tells me). I could feel the “burn” almost immediately from around my ankles to the tops and bottom of your feet.

Fast forward a few months of performing that exercise sporadically whenever I remembered to do it in the shower and my feet have stopped pulling. Fast forward a year and my foot muscle has still not pulled.

Sometimes I forget to do the exercises for a week or two, then I start feeling twinges down there (but it doesn’t fully pull and cause pain), and that’s my cue to start doing the exercises again.

That’s what i’m doing and am confident it’s whats preventing the soles of my feet from pulling like it used to. I still need to be mindful of how I walk/run by remembering to land towards the outsides and forward of the foot. For the first time in many many years i’m able to wear normal shoes again, but i’m staying away from anything that will cushion the impact and prevent the foot from feeling the ground (i.e your typical expensive running shoes with pillows under them). For an explanation why you need to read that NY Mag article.

I hope someone out there with similar problems finds this information useful as it’s certainly fixed my problems.

I’m no podiatrist or a doctor of any kind, just a normal everyday guy who’s tried everything and finally found something that works, and would like to share. I also hope i’m using the right medical terms in this article but if i’m not, i’m happy to be corrected.

Trying to run a PHP site in FastCGI mode and wondering why Safe Mode won’t turn off even though its unticked in the panel? Yeah, it had me tearing my hair out too.

Turns out that when running a site in PHP FastCGI mode, the Safe Mode setting in Plesk will NOT affect wether Safe Mode is on or off. In this mode, the Safe Mode setting is derived from the global php.ini.

Here’s what it says in the Plesk 10 doco:

Note: When PHP is operating in CGI or FastCGI modes, PHP settings are taken from the global php.ini file, and PHP safe mode cannot be switched off by means of security policy settings. If your customers want to use applications that require PHP safe mode to be switched off, and you decide to switch it off, then you need to modify the php.ini file located in /etc/directory on Linux platforms, and the following directory on Windows platforms:
%plesk_dir%\Additional\PHP and %plesk_dir%\Additional\PleskPHP5

Who’d have thought to look in the Plesk manuals

Update: Plesk 10.3 features custom php.ini settings per subscription.

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          apache2
# Required-Start:    $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named
# Required-Stop:     $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# X-Interactive:     true
# Short-Description: Start/stop apache2 web server
### END INIT INFO

MagicSpam places two sysinit scripts into /etc/init.d/, magicspam-milter and magicspam-rn, both of which will error out and go into a loop when you try to perform update-rc.d operations on them. This happens because update-rc.d now uses insserv to handle the runlevel script manipulation and expects the LSB header. If the script does not have the header, update-rc.d borks. Both MagicSpam scripts currently do not have this header. In fact i’ve found that the lack of headers breaks much more, for example I tried to install another package and it wouldn’t let me because of the MagicSpam packages.

The workaround is not to modify the sysinit file directly, but to add a similar named file into /etc/insserv/overrides/ with the necessary LSB headers. update-rc.d will then read these headers in during runtime without you having to modify the original files. If you update the package, it won’t remove your added LSB headers.

Here’s what i’ve got in mine.

/etc/insserv/overrides/magicspam-milter

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          magicspam-milter
# Required-Start:    $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named
# Required-Stop:     $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# X-Interactive:     true
# Short-Description: Start/stop MagicSpam milter
### END INIT INFO

/etc/insserv/overrides/magicspam-rn

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          magicspam-rn
# Required-Start:    $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named
# Required-Stop:     $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# X-Interactive:     true
# Short-Description: Start/stop MagicSpam rn
### END INIT INFO

The permanent fix is for LinuxMagic to added these LSB headers into their package for Debian 6.0. I’m going to mail support about this and see what they say. Even if they don’t fix it, you have a viable workaround if you follow the instructions above.

Good luck!

References:

LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot

For some reason, sometimes the httpd includes that Plesk spits out in /var/www/vhosts/<domain>/conf gets out of sync with Plesk, and you might end up with orphaned includes which refer to old IP addresses which are no longer on the system. These still get read by Apache on startup, and cause problems with the Plesk Migration Manager (PMM).

To fix, simply remove the unused/old include from the formentioned conf directory, and PMM should migrate the subscription just fine. You can easily tell which are orphaned by running a “ls -latr” and see which is the oldest.

The other thing to check is if the subscription has domain aliases which are out of sync with DNS on the main domain. This will probably refer to old IP addresses no longer on the system. Simply resync DNS to fix.

Seeing as Parallels don’t provide an RSS feed for this, I took it upon myself to create one. It’s been working well for a few months now so I thought i’d publish it for the benefit of everyone else who might find this useful.

Here it is:

http://www.feed43.com/1013588122444128.xml

If you discover any problems with it please let me know and i’ll do my best to fix them.

Enjoy!

Update: Parallels has just introduced their own RSS feed for microupdates, which kinda renders my feed redundant.

feed://www.parallels.com/products/plesk/rss

I’ll leave my feed up for a little while longer but I see no need to maintain it anymore.

Starting with version 5.4, changes have been made which render previous of methods of sending email notifications inoperable. In fact if you upgrade from a previous version to 5.4, your notifications will break.

Cerberus 5.4 brings a new functionality called Virtual Attendants. This is what you’ll need to use from now on.

1. Click on Groups.
2. Select a group you’ve created.
3. Click on the Virtual Attendant tab.
4. Create a new behavior of the type “New message on a group conversation”.
5. Add an Action, and call it something like Relay.
6. Add the action “Relay to external email”.
7. Tick the email addresses you want to relay to.
8. Click Save Changes.

That it! Per worker Virtual Assistant rules are not required for this to work.

There are additional tags you can include in your email replies which can do funky things.

Refer to the link for more details.

http://wiki.cerb5.com/wiki/5.4#Email_Relay_.28Mobile.29

@$sReturnPath = $this->_headers['return-path'];
@$sReplyTo = $this->_headers['reply-to'];
@$sFrom = $this->_headers['from'];
@$sResentTo = $this->_headers['resent-to'];

$from = array();

if(!empty($sReplyTo)) {
$from = CerberusParser::parseRfcAddress($sReplyTo);
} elseif(!empty($sFrom)) {
$from = CerberusParser::parseRfcAddress($sFrom);
} elseif(!empty($sReturnPath)) {
$from = CerberusParser::parseRfcAddress($sReturnPath);
} elseif(!empty($sResentTo)) {
$from = CerberusParser::parseRfcAddress($sResentTo);
}

That’s all that’s needed! You can now redirect/resend your mail from your mail client straight into Cerberus.

Tested on Cerberus Helpdesk 5.4.1