Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Why Posts Take Forever to Publish
February 13, 2006

Have you noticed slowness when posting lately? I’ve seen more than a few recommendations on how to fix this issue, but no real fix for the fix.

WordPress 2.0 has moved the essential trackback/pingback/enclosure mechanics into a special script that gets loaded separately from when you publish a post. Instead of cycling through all of the pingbacks and trackbacks that it has queued before returning control to the browser (like in version 1.5), the publication process spawns a request for the special script and just continues normally.

The result is that you don’t wait for pingbacks to finish when you publish, and they still get published properly, but in the background. So what’s causing the big delay these days, if that mechanism is set up to prevent it?

Kitchen Snow
February 12, 2006

Oh, yes, this is why I love snow.

Everyone in other places in the country gets so excited when snow happens because it’s so cute and wodnerful. Here, we live on the precarious border of where the snowfall starts to get reasonably inconvenient to deal with and people don’t know how to deal with reasonable snowfall.

Scary Vaccinations
February 10, 2006

Berta was commenting on how we really don’t document the kids’ activities anywhere. I suspect she doesn’t read the blog as much as I would like to think she does, not that I write out everything that we do with the kids here. But now we have something important to record, and I might as well do it here, if anywhere.

Wednesday, Berta took Riley in for his 15-month checkup. He’s been a little cranky this week. We were thinking that maybe he’s getting a little cold in his ears because he was a bit wobbly and irritable over the weekend, but the doctor said he was ok. Berta says that he was very uncooperative. He didn’t want to sit

In addition to the check-over, Riley had some vaccinations. Three shots, two in one leg, one in the other. And that is where things started to go awry.

"Behold the changeset of destruction"
February 09, 2006

Whew.

There has been a lot of turmoil on the WordPress hacker mailing list about features for the next version of WordPress. If you didn’t get your chance to join the fun, you might want to read up on the craziness that people have suggested for improving WordPress before you start shooting off suggestions.

Today marks the first commit of the big new features, and it’s a doozy. I say “doozy” not because it’s a fantastic feature (oh, but it is), but because it’s a big change. I’ll explain it a little and maybe you’ll see why it’s so cool.

But you should know now, if this affects you - You might want to stop updating your site from SVN for a little while. Of course, if you do this via script, it might already be too late. Eek.

Weird Parents of the Preschool
February 08, 2006

Dropping Abby off at school reminds me of a comedian I once heard. Supposedly, he took his daughter to the playground, and the mothers there were rabid. Playgrounds are usually pretty safe environments with all the parents present, and it borders on expected for a mother to look after kids who aren’t her own should something happen like a fall, or scrape, or stranger offering candy. A man among the children is instantly labelled a predator. And sometimes, that’s how I feel taking Abby to school

It’s not all the time, and it’s never when Abby is with me. It’s always when I come out. There is some mother out there with her kids, and she’s very protective. I smile at all these people in the morning, but I often get nothing but scathing looks, as if to say, “Get away from my baby! Get away from my car! Why are you here? Get away from me!”

I usually drop Abby off at her preschool at least two days a week. This behavior among the mothers of the children is not universal, just common among the mothers that drop their kids off at the same time as I do. But there are more weird things that these parents do that make me wonder about them.