Shallow Thoughts : : 18

Tried Blosxom

I'm testing out the possibility of switching to Blosxom. It was very easy to set up, and wasn't even that hard to move my entries over (thank goodness there weren't that many of them, though) but there's a showstopper: I can specify $num_entries, the number of entries shown on a page; but there's no way to get to the previous entries! You can specify a date if you know it, or a year, or a month; but in each case, it will only show you the first $num_entries entries for that time period.

Who would want to have a blog but have a bunch of unreachable entries?

I've asked around, googled, and spent an hour or so in the source (which makes it look like $path_info is set if a date or topic is specified, otherwise unset, and patti found a yahoo posting that suggested doing something like

$num_entries = ($blosxom::path_info ? 999 : 3);

but in fact, $num_entries is always null). I've been through all the plugins, too. How could this popular package be broken in such an obvious way?

Tags: blogging
[ 23:59 Jul 18, 2004    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

FPOA Star-b-q

Hiking up to the top of Fremont Peak before the FPOA Star-b-q started, we saw the Ghost and the Darkness, squirrel style. A couple of ground squirrels hidden in the tall grass startled as we walked by, and whisked off through the grass, occasionally twitching a tail-tip up above the tops of the grasses but otherwise mostly invisible.

Down in the parking lots, there were some interesting ant or wasp-like insects: furry scarlet head, black thorax, furry scarlet abdomen. The wings were black, too, and they could fly at least a little. No idea what they were.

Learned a new word reading scoops on the way down: Anecdotage, that advanced age where all one does is relate stories about "the good, old days."

Turned out Jeff Moore was the speaker at FPOA. He always gives good talks, but this one was especially good: interpretation of the Mars Rover geologic results so far. Some of his slides showed terrestrial scenes (mostly Death Valley) for comparison with the Martian geologic features, and he mentioned that the terrestrial slides were easy to tell because they were the ones with the pocketknife showing (for scale). So the following morning, I got inspired to whip up a few counterexamples.

Tags: science, astronomy
[ 10:00 Jul 18, 2004    More science/astro | permalink to this entry | ]