WordPress + IImage Gallery Plugin

I've successfully installed WordPress on my account and i'm working on migrating most of my MT stuff over to it. I'm having difficulties, however, making one of the plugins work: iimage gallery.

I correctly installed the plugin and set the appropriate permissions to the folders, yet it still doesn't work. I get an error that tells me the jpg image is not accessible or a supported filetype. looking through the support logs, the author suggests loading up his "troublemaker.php" script to hopefully shed some light on the issue. when i go to http://defenestrate.org/troublemaker.php, the following message appears followed by the image:

I'm receieving that first error but on a completely different script... Any solutions here?

dreamhost disabled fopen_url functionality a few months ago, as it was deemed a security risk. In its place, dreamhost does support curl, which provides the same sort of functionality.

hope this helps.