Jeremiah Oeltjen

Check Your Calculator

I've been studying for the Extra Class Amateur Radio exam and while taking a practice test I got the following question:

What is the phase angle between the voltage across and the current through a series R-L-C circuit if XC is 50 ohms, R is 100 ohms, and XL is 75 ohms?

• 76 degrees with the voltage leading the current
• 76 degrees with the voltage lagging the current
• 14 degrees with the voltage lagging the current
• 14 degrees with the voltage leading the current

I thought I knew how to figure out this problem. I wasn't, however, coming up with a reasonable answer. It took nearly 15 minutes for me to realize that my calculator was set to radian mode.

Duhhhh!

Trackback Spam Reporting

In the past two months I've received quite a bit of Trackback spam on my blog. Its interesting to see how many you get per month. This can be done with SQL:

SELECT 
     YEAR( `tbping_created_on` ) AS year, 
     MONTH( `tbping_created_on` ) AS month, 
     COUNT( * ) AS count
FROM 
     `mt_tbping`
WHERE 
     `tbping_blog_id` = 1
     AND `tbping_junk_status` < 0
GROUP BY 
     year,
     month
ORDER BY 
     1, 
     2

Movable Type 3.2

I've upgraded to Movable Type 3.2. One of the first things I did after upgrading is to use the new archive basename feature for the individual archive filenames. Immediately, though, I found that editing an entry caused the basename to change by adding a "_1" to the end.

Now, this is normally done to prevent collisions, but an entry should not cause a collision with itself. I did some searching and found that this is a known defect in Movable Type and can be avoided by using the save button on the entry edit screen rather than the one on the preview screen.

I will say the anti-spam filtering for comments and trackbacks is wonderful. They come enabled by default and have been already filtered out hundreds of junk trackbacks that my blog has received in the last few days.

Next, I intend on creating a new site identity. I already have all of my templates and other site specific artifacts in a Subversion repository. I now have to begin editing those templates and other things and come up with a nice clean design with cool CSS tabs for navigaion.