Month: April 2008

Back to the drawing board

In order to support a new product development I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I re-did my existing waypoint database as a PostGIS geographical database. I also added some foreign keys and some other cleanup that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. But obviously, I don’t want to support two databases, so today I’ve been converting one of my existing waypoint generator perl scripts to use the new PostGIS database instead of the MySQL database it was on before, but without any actual GIS functionality. And Houston? We have a problem. Doing a full US + Canada data load on the MySQL version takes about a minute and a half. Doing the same load on the PostGIS version takes twenty five minutes. Something tells me that I need to make some adjustments here.

That was close!

The theme I have been using for a couple of years on this blog (Maple) didn’t work very well with WordPress 2.5 and I can’t find an updated copy anywhere. Since I’ve hacked the shit out of it over the years, I decided it was time to make a fresh start with a theme that’s actually supported. So the first thing I did was copy the default theme, and try to make it look more like Maple. That wasn’t fun, and I’m not 100% satisfied with the results. So I decided to look at other themes.

I couldn’t find what I wanted at the official themes site, mostly because their search engine doesn’t categorize themes by category, and also because their “preview” function doesn’t work. But I found this other site, whose name I won’t mention but it had the word “free” in the URL. I found a bunch of nifty themes there, and downloaded them. I was just customizing one theme to add gravatar support and give the comments an alternating colour scheme, when I noticed something weird down at the bottom. It looked like spam. I grepped the theme code for the spammy urls, and couldn’t find them. But I figured the offending code must be in footer.php. Sure enough, all the themes I’d downloaded from this site had encrypted code in footer.php. I couldn’t read it or decrypt it, but it obviously was there to insert spam code in your blog. I tried replacing the footer.php with one from the default theme, and that broke other stuff. Crafty buggers.

Anyway, I’ve removed all traces of this crap, and I guess we’re all stuck with the psuedo-Maple theme until the official site starts working again.

Hmmm

I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5 because the damn thing was nagging me all the time about being back at 2.3.3. But now I discover that my theme doesn’t work right with the new code, and one of my favourite plugins, the LiveJournal CrossPoster, doesn’t work. Now I’ve either got to find a less ugly theme, or fix the old Maple theme to support the new comment code with the built-in Gravatars.

Update: I might have found the fix for LJXP!
In lj_crosspost.php, change

if(version_compare($wp_version, “2.1”, “< ")) { require_once(ABSPATH . '/wp-includes/template-functions-links.php'); }

to

if(version_compare($wp_version, “2.3”, “< ")) { require_once(ABSPATH . '/wp-includes/link-template.php'); } else if(version_compare($wp_version, "2.1", "<")) { require_once(ABSPATH . '/wp-includes/template-functions-links.php'); }

Update #2:
I officially hate this update. It keeps adding bogus </code> tags even though my tags are perfectly well closed before I saved them. Let’s try with block quotes instead?

Bald Eagles!

It’s rare for me to get my second paddle of the season so quickly after the first (first was Sunday, second was today, Wednesday), but the weather cooperated and today was chicken wing day in the cafeteria so I wasn’t hungry when I got home, so away I went.

The creek was quite deserted by other boats, except for one flat bottom dinghy that two guys were fishing from. I’ve seen carp mating in that area, so that’s probably what they were after.

Considering that Sunday I saw almost no wildlife except geese, today was a bonanza day. I saw male red-winged blackbirds staking out their territories, several kingfishers patrolling their sections of the river (and raising their crests in alarm when I got too close), a few pairs of ducks, and I finally saw the famous Irondequoit Creek bald eagles. I rounded a corner and saw two soaring birds, one quite high and one just above the ridge line, nd immediately said “oh, turkey vultures”, but then the lower one spread his stunning white tail and I noticed that the head was bright white as well. I never did make out for sure if the higher one was a bald eagle as well, but I think it was. One thing that impressed me was that while it was soaring, it seemed to be moving back and forth much faster than a turkey vulture does. Maybe it’s anti-vulture prejudice, but it just seemed more, I don’t know, purposeful or something.

I also saw a crow or raven down fairly low, but he flew away rapidly as I got near so I didn’t get a good look. There were very distinct primary feathers curling up at the tips, which I think means it was a raven.

I went a little bit further than I did on Sunday, and I wasn’t as tired when I reached the weir, probably because I paced myself better. Probably just as well, because on the way home there were two stretches where I was paddling into a very strong wind. My weather widget says that the winds at the airport are 21G33 knots, or 24 to 33 mph, which I can easily believe. And when the wind is blowing in my face like that, my old canoe trip instincts say “paddle as hard as you can for the lee of the upwind shore, and don’t rest until you get there”, so that’s what I do.