midtoad’s mess.ages
excellence in creative mediocrity

The FAI has chosen a new logo to represent the organisation, after many years with its previous loog. The new logo takes effect in July of this year, in preparation for FAI’s 100th anniversary next year, 2005.
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Q and I spent some time today exploring and developing the beginnings of a new bike trail in the urban wilderness. It runs about 1 km along a south-facing hillside, and should be rideable much of the year.
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When a new server was installed over the weekend of May 8th-9th, the Flight Poetry section was broken. PHP scripts which ran successfully on the old server failed to run on the new one. As a result, extensive debugging and rewriting was required. At the same time, we’re trying out a new look for the actual poetry pages; this could spread to the entire site within the next little while. Enjoy! And, as always, feel free to make a contribution.

Tired of receiving (or sending) too-long URLs (web-links) in your e-mail messages? You know, someone sends you a link to a cool webpage, but when you click on it, your browser opens with an error, because not all of the link appeared in the address bar (most e-mail messages chop into pieces any URL longer than 72 characters). So you have to manually cut and paste together the various pieces of the URL in order to view it. By that time, you’ve given up and gone on to the next thing. But is there an alternative?
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If you live within 5 km of downtown Calgary, and want to arrive or leave during rush hour, you’ll find that a bicycle is consistently faster than a car - even if you’re slow and out of shape. And, (hidden bonus), with a bicycle there is no rush hour!.

Even if you live 10 km away from work, it’s still faster to ride a bicycle, when you consider total time over a week. As a cyclist, you’re getting a free exercise program thrown in, so you can avoid 2-3 hours on that activity each week. The bike still wins!

Given that it’s slower, more expensive (see my other post today), harder on the ecosystem and on your clogging arteries, what’s the excuse not to ditch four wheels for two?

A SUV owner is e a breed apart - a type of person who justifies his purchasing decision by comparing his vehicle to others only a slightly higher up the evolutionary sequence, and then consoling himself that it’s only slightly more (inefficent, larger, more dangerous, expensive - pick two) than the alternative. But is that really true?
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Well, on the off-chance someone was poking around on the weekend, they might have noticed that my website was unavailable. I was busy poking around under the hood!
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A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since my last hang-glider flight a year and a half ago. But today I made a new entry in the logbook. In fact, I made ten new entries, for ten flights!
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Second post by e-mail! In the first e-mail, I tried assigning a category of 1
(General) (actually, I cheated: I copied the broken SQL that the wp-mail.php script tried to create, and added that missing category field to the end of the query, and it worked. I noticed that when the post appeared on my home page, it was listed as being “Filed under mobile”. But the word ‘mobile’ was not a link, since I haven’t created any category called ‘mobile’. I’ve done so now.

I suspect that WP automatically assigns this label ‘mobile’ to any mobile-posted
posts, even if there is no such category.

I further discovered that a function in wp_mail.php called xmlrpc_getpostcategory($content) tries to get the category from the e-mail message, but I don’t know how it is supposed to be supplied. If that function call fails, it’s supposed to use the $default_category variable instead, but for some reason this comes out as a blank, which causes the SQL to break. As a kludge, in my wp_mail.php I defined the variable like so: $default_category=1, which corresponds to my General category.

First post by e-mail! This means that I can now blog from just about anywhere there is internet coverage or cellular coverage. Great!

I took my fifteen year old daughter to a yoga class tonight - her third time out. She’s a slim, seemingly fit teenager, and yet… she’s stiffer and less flexible than her fourty-nine year old father! Sure, I’ve been practicing for nearly two years, but I feel like all I’ve done is hold off the inevitable decline in flexibility. To think that today’s teenagers are so inflexible is a bit scary. If she’s the norm, the adults of tomorrow are going to have a lot of problems when they grow older!

Today while attending an all-day training session I made some improvements to my blog (gotta love having a PC in the training room with an internet connection!). Thanks to the work of a few other people, I now have plug-ins for showing the number of times a post has been read (although most of the time that counter will likely be stuck at 1 ), and for showing stats on the site. Along the way I’ve learned a little more about the database structure for WP, and how the PHP scripts access that data.

I’ve been experimenting with stylesheets for my WordPress blog (you’re looking at it). While doing that, I’ve found quite helpful a page on CSS Guidelines from the NY Public Library.

After trying various different styles (see Style Switcher on the bottom right of this page), I wanted to create my own. I saw a look I liked on Victor Ng’s Cranky Coder site. Since he uses MovableType (a blog tool I abandoned when I began using WordPress), I adapted his look by editing the basic default WP template. You can select my finished product by choosing ‘basicblack’ from the Style Switcher menu.

If you want to use Basic Black on your own WP blog site with WP v.1.0.2, you can get it here.

If you use or modify the Basic Black style, please post a link to your site - if you’d like to show it off, of course!

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Fascinating little project by the team over at GeoURL. You enter the latitude and longitude of your location into your web server’s home page, and then you can see your location on a map.
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