views arguments

I've been trying to get this View page to build based on an nid I'm passing in the url.

Seems like pretty simple stuff but for some reason it is defying my efforts at every turn.

I had it working using the title but there is a chance of duplicate titles so I have to use nid (like I should have from the start).

So I have a url set as: articles/[article title]/[nid]

In my view I have the path set as: articles/%/%

I have arguments set as:
Node: Title (providing default value using php code: $args[1] = arg(1); return $args;)

Hello Bostonians- I am building an artist portfolio site with the usual suspects (views, cck, etc.; + draggable views, which is awesome BTW) and am beating my head against a brick tree here. My client has four types of artwork, which are tagged in taxonomy as Photographs, Paintings, etc. She now would like albums within those categories, and I thought, keen, I'll use Taxonomy to create a second vocabulary of albums.

I'm working on a site where I have a pretty dynamic use of panels idea, and I'm having a problem implementing it.

I'm wrapping up a D5 Site using Panels 2, and I'm having 2 problems related to the titles of my views in Panel pages:

Problem 1:
I'm embedding a view which accepts arguments in a Panel page. This view also uses arguments in its title. The view title displays perfectly when accessing the raw view by its path, but when the view is embedded in the panel the title is displaying literal "%1" and "%2" for the arguments when they're not supplied. It's like Panels is messing up Views' intelligent handling of these titles.