Greece is currently experiencing some of the worst fires it has ever seen and many people have been killed. The coverage on the TV news has only been fairly brief, but I did see a clip of two salt-shakers (well, that’s what Greek Orthodox Priests look like when they are wearing their funny hats) trying to fight the fire in their own unique way.

As the wall of flames swept towards them, they stood on the top of a hill, facing the fire, one brandishing a crucifix and the other a framed picture. Since the shot was from behind the priests, I could see what it was a picture of, but I reckon it was either Jesus, Mary, or Nana Mouskouri. Needless to say this futile gesture did nothing. Had Jesus been executed by water canon, than the brandishing of religious symbols might have been of use.

But what sought of superstitious nutter honestly believes that a) these fires are God’s wrath and b) waving a picture of a Jewish political activist is going to do any good. In terms of stupidity it ranks up there with believing that blowing yourself up in a bus in an immediate ticket to a cloud full of virgins. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently added the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form to this blog, but couldn’t get it to work. I kept getting an error in the configuration page saying “Cannot access empty property”. The general consensus was that the error involved a clash with the Utimate Tag Warrior (UTW) plugin, and, since the contact form was only misbehaving on the blog with UTW installed I figured there was a connection.

However even after removing UTW, the problem persisted. Obviously UTW had made some changes that were not reversed when the plugin is removed. Like many other plugins, UTW adds records to the wp_options table and it looks as if it adds a record without filling in the option_name field.

By going into the wp_options table through PHP admin, I was able to edit the table and give this record a value in the option_name field. I am sure deleting the record would have worked as well, but I was erring on the side of caution.

Once I did that, the error went away.

This is a fairly technical post for this blog, but since it had me so puzzled, I thought it only right to share the solution. I have only done this once, so I would be keen to hear from others with the same problem to see if this solution works for them.