LaTex “too many unprocessed floats” problem and solution

After adding about 30 scanned images into an appendix, I started getting “too many unprocessed floats” errors.  Doing a little digging, I found that many of the images were starting to back up on each other.  LaTeX was getting plugged up and was barfing.

The solution:

Add this to your top-level file:

\usepackage[section] {placeins}

By using the placeins package with the section option selected, LaTeX is forced to dump all of the unprocessed floats at the end of each section.  There are a few other ways to do it with that package but this way made the most sense to me.  Doing that, I get no more errors!  Well, at least from that problem.

I, for one, salute our new hexapodal robot overlords

It seems someone has taken hexapodal robots one step closer to total world domination.  A guy named Matt created a robot that can create 3-D surfaces using a router and and end mill bit.  It looks like it’s only a proof of concept but I can see this same idea quickly being married to a whole host of applications.  Just wait until the day when hexapodal robots can create more hexapodal robots!  Let’s hope no one lets them think for themselves.

Best way to display content – pages or posts?

I’ve been slowly porting content over from my old website host to my new website.  It’s been a bit of a painful process as I had hand-coded most of the html on the old pages in such a way that it is rather difficult to move directly from one server to the other.  Back when I made the pages in question, I didn’t own a domain name and was thus hosting it off of my university’s top-level domain behind a “/~username” setup.  To bring them over to my new site, I’ve been replicating the content of the old pages into pages on WordPress.  I have also moved the photos from the old site, where they were static, to the new site and a Gallery2 installation that allows more flexibility with some tradoffs that I have discussed in earlier posts.

As I’ve been moving the content over, I’ve been placing it into pages.  The way I’ve understood pages and posts is that pages are for static content, such as my old travel photos and writeups, and pages are for dynamic content that rotates through, such as what I am writing here.  Pages are organized hierarchically in WordPress while Posts are put into categories and have tags attached.

Looking at my traffic patterns, it seems almost as if the pages that I have put up aren’t registering in search engines.  My posts certainly get lots of hits, as is evident by the traffic spike I had for my Sarah Palin Erotica post.  Who knew so many people wanted to read about her having eskimo threeways?  I didn’t!

Is there a reason that I haven’t been getting very many hits on my pages?  Is it because there are no tags assigned to them?  Is it from the plugin (Google XML Sitemaps) I use to generate sitemaps?  Is it somehow related to the way WPG2 displays images on the pages?

This all leads me to wonder if it would be better to put my old travel photos (and newer ones) into posts rather than pages.  Thoughts, anyone?