ChapterZero

Sometime two days ago, someone broke into my car— through one of those tiny glass triangle windows in the back— and stole my car radio. That is really freaking unbelievable. I wish, in retrospect, that I had thought of taking the front off the radio, but I didn’t, because I thought my neighborhood was safe; the thought never crossed my mind.

So that’s it. My car officially has no redeeming qualities: the AC blasts hot air, and now, in place of a radio, I have a giant hole trailing wires. Not to mention that the bastards ripped the front panel off to get the radio out.

I wasn’t that upset at first; I thought it was a minor inconvenience that the insurance would cover. Ha! Insurance doesn’t cover ‘little’ things like that— i.e., my deductible is probably higher than the cost of repairing the glass and finding a reasonable replacement radio.

I’m impressed by Wordpress, and I’ve just started using it. The interface is very nice, except in Opera, where there tends to be annoying spacing problems on the posting interface page, but I can live with that. I especially dig the transparent plugin architecture— I installed WP-Style from alexking.org, and now I don’t have to worry about making my own stylesheets; I can mooch off of others’ infinitely superior work.

But, the coolest new feature, which I wasn’t expecting to be using at all, is the post by email ability. I realized that I could use it however, because occasionally I post a question or comment to the University of Houston Mathematics Enthusiasts mailing list (UHME), that would also fit in here. So, I just set up a free pop account with Hotpop, and tried it out. It worked great! The only problem now is that Hotpop supports free accounts with ads, and WP posts every email in the inbox, so I’ll have to write a hack to wp-mail.php to filter out email not from one of my personal addresses. Maybe I’ll just write a general email processing plug-in that runs in front of wp-mail.php and can do more complicated filterings; I’m sure there’s someone out there who would find that useful. We’ll see.

Actually, on second thought, it would much more useful if there was a post-processor for wp-mail, which means I might as well right a replacement plugin— for instance, you might want to label the post as one from a particular mailing list or person, or simply note that it was automatically posted; you might also want to reformat it (for instance, it is a good habit to line break your emails in general, because some email clients won’t automatically word wrap, but WP by default changes those line breaks into <br/ > elements which can interfere with a page’s visual flow ).

I was just reading about the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus. Apparently the ancient Egyptians had a table of 2 divided by all the odd numbers between 3 and 101, expressed as the sum of unit fractions. Can anyone think of an algorithm for this?

A unit fraction is a fraction of the form ; so for example .