blogwaffe

Have you ever taken any functional derivatives? Because as of now, I can honestly say I have taken an infinite number of them. Multiple times. All you variational calculus jocks out there are laughing in mockery (“Have I ever taken a functional derivative? Please.”), but I’ve never messed with the things before this Quantum Field Theory course I’m taking (Path Integral Formalism rocks). Well, not messed with them to the extent I have now, anyway.

They play a little hard to get, functional derivatives do. But once you get the hang of them, they’re reasonably straightforward to cope with. I’ve known and loved various sorts of delta functions for quite some time; functional differentiation isn’t such a step from there. It’s the functional integration that gets a little tricky. As far as I’m concerned, defining and comparing measures is done by waving tiny little hands over yellow bits of paper and writing down an equal sign here or there.

I have never once thought, “I know enough math.”

For those of you who use my rss feeds, I have a question. For those of you who don’t (why not?), just ignore me.

I think my feeds might be broken, but in a subtle way (for the curious, I think they’re sending out 304s when they shouldn’t). If you use either my post feed or my comments feed, can you tell me what feed reader you use (Sage, NetNewsWire, Firefox‘s live bookmarks…) and whether or not the feeds have been getting updated corectly when new posts or comments get submitted?

Thanks. (This is what you get when you use alpha version software. Bleeding edge, baby!)

This plugin will send an email notification to the blog’s administrator when a draft is written or edited by a user that cannot publish posts (these users are called “Contributors“). You may find such notification useful since these posts must be subsequently approved (published) by a user who can publish other people’s posts.

NOTE: Notification is sent to the email address defined in the Administration Panels: Options->General / Email address. This is not, in general, the same address as that specified for the Admin user account.

Instructions:

1. Download the plugin.
2. Upload it to your wp-content/plugins/ directory (i.e. wp-content/plugins/draft-notifier.php).
3. Make sure the file has sufficient File Permissions to be read by your web server (you probably don’t have to worry about this step).
4. Activate the plugin called “Draft Notifier” from your Administration Panel’s Plugin Manager.

That should be it. No configuration is necessary.

UPDATE: This plugin is now hosted on http://wp-plugins.org and is called “Draft Notifier“.

Not a week and a half ago, I commited a bit of iTMS stupidity. To add insult to injury, the iTunes free download of the week this week is a song I purchased (for money) nearly two months ago: “I Predict a Riot” by Kaiser Chiefs. While it’s nice to think of myself as ahead of my times (actually, I prefer “prognosticator of musical import”), I’d rather be cheap.

It’s a good song, though. Get it while it’s free.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Delicious.

I prefer crunchy peanut butter (without funny, non-peanut oils in it), raspberry jam (jam has seeds in it – as I recall, fruit spreads get called different things in different countries), and either potato bread (any Idaho jokes will be met with a bitch slap) or Mom’s white bread.

I also prefer not to run out of jam while making the damn thing; the peanut butter to jam ratio is key to a good sandwich. Now my mouth is all stuck together.

I’ve always hated Bryan Adams’ music. “Everything I Do”, “This Side of Paradise”, and (I loathe writing it down) “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman”, suck. I tried to think of a more diplomatic way to put it, or even something a bit more intellectual and substantive. But “sucks” is really the best way to express the way in which I detest his music.

Dixie informed me today that “Summer of ’69” is a Bryan Adams song. Man that’s an awesome song; I always thought it was Bon Jovi.

I honestly don’t know how to move forward in my life knowing what I do now. Bryan Adams, the putrescent archon of pappy crap, wrote “Summer of ’69”, a mid-eighties musical and lyrical work of genius.

My entire world has collapsed.

Following Paul.za’s lead, I’ve decided to write up a brief sketch of some of the background behind my current research: Quantum Spatial Search. Be warned, this is the longest post blogwaffe has ever seen. Skip to the last page of this post and read the last line if you want the short of it. For the long of it, read on.

Use the little page numbers below to navigate this post.