blogwaffe

Greg says I should put a little shoutout to DrLP whenever sprachwaffe get’s updated. Come on, Greg, ever here of RSS?

But, really it’s not a bad idea. Who in their right mind would feed off of sprachwaffe. Except me, of course, but it’s for administrative purposes, I swear. And I think Paul.za does too. Him I have no excuse for.

But speaking of technological incompetence, what do you get when you cross William Gibson, Bruce Springsteen and a fifteen year old script kiddie? Some form of heinous, ill-formed, leeching invertebrate who is but one example of the hoarde of “beta users” WordPress has managed to accumulate.

The upcoming version of WordPress is in beta at the moment and is in need of testing. Since nothing here is terribly important (I think we can all admit that, right?), I decided to make blogwaffe a testbed for WordPress as of the now passed alpha phase of the development. WordPress is an extremely open community; I didn’t have to sign up for the privilege (if you want to consider it as such) of doing this, I just downloaded the software and had at it. And I’ve kept having at it all the way through alpha and into beta in the here and now.

Read more…

The one week mark has come and gone. I offer no apologies. Anyone who reads this site is used to it :)

(So Bert is better at blogging than I am. Get over it.)

The title of this post, such as it is, comes not from a lack of timely content, but instead from a project with which I probably should not have involved myself. I’ve… sort of… volunteered to write up a good chunk of the basic end user documentation for the new version of WordPress (currently in beta, and currently powering this site) on its new wiki. The long of it: I’ve been spending time I don’t really have on culling data from other documentation and writing up new stuff. The short of it: I can’t stop typing in wiki markup.

It’s actually pretty convenient, I’ll have to reevaluate my stance on things like Markdown and Textile. Previously, I’d thought they were for sissies. Perhaps my opinion hasn’t changed, but instead I’ve simply admitted to myself that I’m a sissy.

At any rate, the project is going reasonably well, but a bit slowly. I’ll be quite happy when it’s over (this weekend?).

Hope everyone had a joyous day today.

Mine was excellent. I sat around reading America The Book which my fantastic brother graciously gave me for Christmas, watching HP3, and having a wonderful dinner with some family friends. I’ve been doing a lot of that, lately: socializing, that is.

Sunday: Church. Monday: “Movie Night” with some teenaged friends of the family. Tuesday: My parents’ annual St. Thomas’ Day party – sixty-six in attendance (thankfully nowhere near the record). Wednesday: More church. Thursday: Freedom, sweet freedom… to shop for the people I had not managed to get presents for already. Friday: Christmas Eve service. Saturday: Christmas dinner for thirteen. And that brings us to today.

The best part about coming home this year was seeing how well other people recognized me. Perhaps more on that when I’ve got more data.

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for Seattle, so the inconsistency with which this site is updated will temporarily become consistent. In the I-doubt-I’ll-post-anything-during-the-next-week sense.

And a preemptory Happy New Year! to everyone.

Or they may be. At least for now. It’s not my fault, really.

But since there isn’t anything to comment upon… no one will notice.

Amaze your friends! Be the first on your Block! Now Posable!!

Blogwafffe is proud to introduce a hot, new and huge catchy hook: ‘Ask Dr. Language Person‘.

With a monicker shamelessly ripped from Dave Barry, a real live professional linguist will be receiving any linguistic or otherwise language oriented questions posted at sprachwaffe. So ask away. Keep them clean, though; it is my dad.

I submitted a bug to the wordpress development team and I now see that the fix I submitted along with it has been included in the official source. It’s uncredited (I accidently submitted anonymously, and I have no idea if they’d have credited me even if I had remembered to put my name down), but that doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. It was such a minor little tweak, that I can remain happy in my anonymity. Not that I’d be chagrined if I submitted something more important and was left uncredited.

To take the highground (and the soapbox), being able to use such high-quality open source software is enough for me.

A shout-out through the ether to the people at wordpress.

UPDATE I spoke too soon – it turns out it wasn’t my code, it was the exact same code generated, I presume independently, by someone else. No matter, at least I know it was a good idea.

Our cable broadband service died yesterday around 2pm. So to the both of you that read this outside of my apartment and couldn’t find it yesterday, I apologize. That’s what you get for looking at a site hosted from some dude’s apartment.

But, man, I almost didn’t make it. How did I survive the entire year last year without internet access in my apartment? It boggles the mind and defies reason.

But we’re back now (though Paul.za and Greg don’t know yet). Until charter decides to freak out again.

We totally need a satellite feed. Or some backbone.

I know no one else cares, but my server is now running WordPress 1.3-alpha-5. A developer would surely disagree, but the code seems fairly stable (as in “not about to self immolate”, not as in “no longer changing”), so I think things should all theoretically work. On my end, though, I’m not 100% sure I’ve got all my bits in place, so let me know if something explodes.

Perhaps I was a bit offensive. Certainly not my intention. I thought it moste amusing. Our Mr. Harris was meant to take it good naturedly, but if he’s suffered for it, I apologize. As well to the people at blogcoven for possibly driving away a perfectly good (as in entertaining) reader. I suppose I should have at least waited until someone else had posted. But I couldn’t resist. “Huge, catchy hooks”. It’s now my new catch phrase. If he comes back, I’ll give him a hearty *slap* on the back.

I have been admonished for having a slow site. I don’t access it much from outside my apartment, so I was unaware of the annoyance. I knew that the photos were slow to load; I’ve been thinking about preloading them ahead of time, but I’m not sure about the best way to do that. Photos may just have to be slow.

The more important issue is the images loaded in my css. They take too long. I’ve been thinking about reworking the style of the site, anyway. Perhaps I’ll try to get something a bit less bandwidth intensive. The real problem is that I’m doing my own hosting over a cable modem: not much uploading bandwidth. I’ll look into other possibilities, but I’m cheap.

As a stopgap, I’ll change a few links and have caltech host all my images, so at least those will load a bit faster.

I’ve also just finished importaing all my old .in need of a life. entries to this site. Many of the links are likely broken. I will not be fixing them. Deal with it.