Friday was a good day for getting help from Google.

I broke the SASAG Web site. The main site worked, but I had a 500 error on the admin interface, with the HTTP error logs reporting Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_home_path() in wordpress/wp-admin/includes/misc.php on line 128.

I found other reports of the problem, which turns out to have been because I had upgraded WordPress before upgrading the backupwordpress plugin to 2.1.1.

In order to fix the problem, I needed to connect to the Web server with SSH. But I needed to use the Socks5 proxy we use at work to access the outside world. I’d never run SSH via a SOCKS5 proxy before, but it turns out to be very easy: I just added -o 'ProxyCommand /usr/bin/nc -x localhost:1080 %h %p' to use the proxy forward I had running on port 1080.

Once connected via SSH, I solved the problem by moving the old plugin version out of the way and installing the new version. (This did preserve my settings, fortunately.)

Later, at home, I wanted Microsoft Word for Mac 2011 to report its word count rounded to the nearest 100 words. A little bit of searching revealed a helpful answer for that too.