If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and point your Safari browser to this blog you can now view it in optimised format, thanks to the iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme. I’ve only changed the CSS slightly to have the same greeny look-and-feel of the current redoable theme.

Upgrading a WordPress-blog running under Tiger (Mac OS 10.4) to Leopard produces a few anxiety moments. All of the standard tools (Apache, PHP and MySQL) seem no longer to work as before. For those of you who do not want to waste too much time over it, I’ll walk through the process.

After upgrading to Leopard you want to check whether your blog is still alive, so you fire up Safari and will be greeted by the message that Safari cannot find your server. Sure enough you forgot to start the WebServer in SystemPreferences/Sharing/Web Sharing. Having fixed this you will see the default Apache-screen because Leopard put these default-files in your webserver-root directory (/Library/WebServer/Documents). In case you installed your blog under a user account you will get a message that you enter forbidden territory, see below for the solution to that problem. Having removed all those index.html files (making sure NOT to delete the index.php of your blog) a more serious problem presents itself : you see the text-version of index.php meaning that PHP isnt working. You check the /etc/httpd/httpd.conf file and it still contains all the changes you made to it to get PHP running under Tiger, so what is going on?

Googling for something like ‘enabling PHP under Leopard’ you’ll discover that the configuration file used by the webserver is in a different location. It now resides at /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf. You will have to remove the hash sign (#) at the beginning of line 114 so that it reads

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Next, you have to create a php.ini file and change one line. The first thing is settled by the following Terminal-commands

cd /private/etc
sudo cp php.ini.default php.ini

and in the php.ini you have to modify line 305 so that it becomes (removing the latter part of the line)

error_reporting = E_ALL

Restarting the webserver enables PHP. If you need more details check out the article Enabling PHP and Apache in Leopard. However, you are not quite done yet. Your blog will now show the WordPress-page that something is wrong with your mysql-database. However, mysql seems to be running fine as you can check from the Terminal so PHP cannot find it.

To remedy this, you have to add the locations (after the = sign) in the follwing two lines of the php.ini file

mysql.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock
mysqli.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock

Restarting the webserver should resolve the problem. But then your blog can still choke on old PHP-code in one of the plugins you use. In my case I was using an ancient version of the PHP-Markdown plugin but after replacing it with the newest version NeB looked just like I left it with Tiger…

A final point : webpages stored in personal Sites-folders cannot be served by Apache2 and will produce a message that you have not enough privileges to view the page. To resolve this, type the following command from the Terminal

sudo cp /private/etc/httpd/users/*.conf /private/etc/Apache2/users

Here a list of pdf-files of NeverEndingBooks-posts on general topics, in reverse chronological order.

(more…)

On my return from O a brand new 15inch MacBook Pro lie waiting in my office. By that evening I had wrecked the system to the extend that I could no longer login and had to reinstall from scratch… I was about to trow it away but tried it out for a few more days and eventually began to understand it a bit. In short : the new Intel Macs promise to be really good hardware, unfortunately some essential software lags behind, so if you want a stress-free Mac-life… hold on to your PPC mac a few months longer. If you are impatient and want to learn some of the pitfalls, read on… I’m ashamed to admit this but the first thing I did on my new machine was to create a WindowsXP partition… BootCamp does what it promises to do and is extremely easy to use once you can start it. The installation guide does tell that you jave to update your systems software and firmware, but that’s what you do anyway after a new install, right? Wrong! You update the software but not the firmware and it took me some time to come to this simple conclusion. How to check whether your firmware is up to date? Go under the apple to ‘About this Mac’, click on ‘More Info’ and look at your ‘ Boot ROM Version:’ if it says MBP11.0055.B03 you’re ok, if not you have to install the newest firmware which is a slightly terrifying experience with soundsignals included, but works fine. Once this is done, you can start BootCamp and have a Windows partition in no time. At a certain moment you have to decide on possible partition-formats for the Windows part, I choose the ‘Fat’ option to be able to swap files across the partitions. Next, what does a mathematician wants from a computer? To run LaTeX! I’ve installed LaTeX on more Macs than I remember so I continued on automatic pilot, getting Gerben Wierda’s i-Installer, startd it up and … my machine froze! Nothing, not even a ‘Force Quit’, was possible any more. Today, there is a clear warning message as the i-Installer page (i don’t recall seeing it there last week, but then it is a recent problem. Things broke down on May 11th when I was still in O)

WARNING: i-Installer on Mac OS X 10.4.6 may trigger the Mac OS X 10.4.6 bug that partially freezes your system. May 2006: i-Installer did work perfectly on Mac OS X 10.4.3, the version of Tiger that was shipped with the Developer Transition Kit. When the first intel machines were sold by Apple, these contained 10.4.4 and on that system, i-Installer experiences troubles because of problems deep inside Apple’s Frameworks. The only way I could solve this was to make i-Installer a PowerPC-only application again and ask for Apple’s help to determine where the problem was. So far, this has been s slow process without any noticeable results. The PowerPC-only version worked fine until Apple released 10.4.6 and especially the latest upgrades (Security Upgrade 2006-003 and maybe QuickTime). As I am writing this (May 21) a completely updated Mac OS X 10.4.6 on intel will partially freeze in various circumstances, triggered by various applications (MatLab, i-Installer, etc.). Sadly, the just released MacBook (successor of the iBook) is shipping with this broken version of the OS. Hence, there is now no i-Installer that reliably works on intel machines with recent OS versions and even worse, i-Installer may trigger a nasty bug in recent Mac OS X intel versions.

Scary isn’t it? You have a brand new expensive machine but cannot typeset a single paper… Fortunately, the TeXShop page not only mentions the problem, but also a workaround

On May 11, 2006, Apple provided security updates for Mac OS X. These updates broke i-Installer on Intel (it continues to work on PowerPC). If you have an Intel Mac and you have installed this update, you must use the MacTeX install package until this problem is fixed. Once TeX is installed, it works fine.

The first assertion is true : installing the MacTeX package gives you a working TeX-installation, with TeXShop, Excalibur, BibTeX and i-Installer coming for free. But don’t think the i-Installer problem has been solved, I tried it out and voila another ice-age… So far so good but sometimes we like to compute things, don’t we? Like some commutative algebra or algebraic geometry things via Singular? I remembered to install this via the Fink project but already their news-items are not very promissing

A preliminary version of Fink for the Intel architecture is now ready. No binary packages are available, and things are still rough around the edges, but it should be usable if you are patient! To install it, you need to install the XCode compiler and SDK packages (at minimum). Then you need to get the file fink-0.24.14.tar.gz from the Sourceforge file release page for Fink, expand the file, and run the command ./bootstrap.sh . At the end of the bootstrap process, run fink selfupdate and you’ll get the currently available packages. At last check, there were about 1750 packages in the “stable” tree, but about 150 of those did not build. When things are truly stable, another annoucement will be made here.

The normal FinkCommander didn’t work either but then I found a version which does at Charles K. C. Lo’s Homepage. I verified it by having the fink-TeTeX package installed (which works!) and then I wanted to do a Singular-install… Things seemed to start off well (once you change the freferences to install also unstable packages) but then the installation procedure halted with the message

Failed: phase compiling: singular-3.0.1-1013 failed Before reporting any errors, please run “fink selfupdate” and try again. If you continue to have issues, please check to see if the FAQ on fink’s website solves the problem. If not, ask on the fink-users or fink-beginners mailing lists. As a last resort, you can try e-mailing the maintainer directly: Michael Brickenstein bricken at mathematik.uni-kl.de Note that many fink package maintainers do not (yet) have access to OS X on Intel hardware, so you may have better luck on the mailing lists.

So, maybe I should just donate my MacBook Pro to the Fink-project? A similar problem with installing Maxima… I didn’t even try out GAP via Fink but went for a niversal Unix-installation for GAP and this WORKED! even with all packages and tables and the whole I dont know what. Thank you, GAPpers, perhaps all algebraists on Intel Macs should shift to GroupTheory? But hey! My Intel-Mac does have a WindowsXP partition… So, I did a binary Windows install of Singular and Maxima and both work without problems. Still, it is a strange situation. Fortunately, I did resolve these issues but that will have to wait until tomorrow…

Promises and pie-crusts are made to be broken, a wiser man once said. Still, promises have a much longer life-span and sometimes their real content becomes redundant over time.

A year ago, I promised to document how I got the LaTeXRender Plugin for Wordpress working under OS X. The procedure consisted of some trial-and-error operations, installing non-standard versions of software and hardcoding certain directories throughout certain files…

Not something I was looking forward to when I decided to upgrade this WordPress blog but, surprisingly, things went pretty smoothly this time (Mac-technology has improved a lot). So, please don’t worry too much about this post and follow the (late) instructions below.

First things first : I will assume you have the ‘generic’ LaTeX running under Tiger (10.4),that is, use the i-Installer to download BOTH LaTeX and Imagemagick! Further, in order to get WordPress up and running, have the standard MySQL 4.0 package installed for 10.3 (not version 4.1…) and don’t use the generic Mac-PHP version, but instead download Marc Liyanage’s PHP5 package which has plenty of additional packages installed (notably, GDlib and MCRYPT which comes in handy if you want to fight spam-comments using BotCheck).

\r \n

Download wp- latexrender.zip and follow the instructions given to the letter (there is one undocumented extra directory you have to fill in at the start of the latexrender-plugin.php file). There is just one additional thing to do. Find in the class.latexrender.php file the line starting with

// convert dvi file to postscript using
  dvips

and include the following lines just before it :

// begin of workaround // extending the PATH
  environmental variable Soldpath =
  getenv(“PATH”); Swhereimagemagickis =
  “/usr/local/bin”; if (Soldpath) { Swhereimagemagickis .=
  “:Soldpath”;} putenv(“PATH=Swhereimagemagickis”); //
  end of workaround 

activate the plugin and it should work! Still, there are three things you may want to change. In the latex.php file uncomment the indicated lines as you will be using htmlArea to input your posts. In addition, if you have the MarkDown-plugin enabled, it is best to append additional lines such as

 Slatexformula =
  strreplace(“”,””,Slatexformula);     Slatexformula
  =
  strreplace(“”,””,Slatexformula); 

( between the first ” ” should be the beginning and end em-tag respectively) or underscores will be interpreted as em-tags. If you run into additional similar problems, the procedure is to comment-out the line

 
  unlink(Sthis->tmpdir.”/”.Sthis->tmpfilename.”.tex”); 
  

near the end of class.latexrender.php , look in the tmp directory for the TeX-file, detect the problem and add similar lines to the ones above to solve it. Another useful thing to do is to add TeX-packages in the class.latexrender.php file. My own version has the following predefined symbols and loaded packages

 function wrapformula(Slatexformula) { 
  Sstring  =
  “\documentclass[“.Sthis->fontsize.”pt]{“.Sthis->latexclass
  .”}\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\usepackage{amsmath}\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\usepackage{amsfonts}\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\usepackage{amssymb}\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\usepackage{xy}\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\xyoption{all}\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\newcommand{\vtx}[1]{*+[o][F-]{Scriptscriptstyle
  #1}}\n”;  Sstring .= “\\newcommand{\Cc}{\Bbbk}\n”; 
  Sstring .= “\\newcommand{\C}{\mathbb{C}}\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\newcommand{\Q}{\mathbb{Q}}\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\newcommand{\Z}{\mathbb{Z}}\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\newcommand{\N}{\mathbb{N}}\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\newcommand{\wis}[1]{{\\text{\em \usefont{OT1}{cmtt}{m}{n}
  #1}}}\n”;  Sstring .= “\pagestyle{empty}\n”;  Sstring
  .= “\begin{document}\n”;  Sstring .=
  “S”.Slatexformula.”S\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\end{document}\n”;          return Sstring;     }

  

which, among other things, allow all commenters to add quiver-pictures using xymatrix and vtx to depict vertices. Oh yes, you can allow comments to include LaTeX-code by uncommenting the line

  // addfilter(‘commenttext’,
  ‘addlatex’); 

in the latexrender-plugin.php file (but before you do make sure you have spam under control, such as with BotCheck mentioned above). That’s all for now. If you want to use TeX in a comment, make sure to put the code between tags [ tex ] and [ /tex ] (omitting the extra spaces). If you want me to add other LaTeX-packages, leave a comment.

I got Tracks working under Tiger by trial and error starting with a suggestion from Jan who found a fix here. From this I stumbled on for an hour or so on my iMac untill near the very end I found that the tracks-page itself now has a Tiger-section. So, let’s try to do it all over again from fresh on my regular machine (a little iBook).

Start with this page and read it all the way to the comments. There is a comment by Jamie on installing Rails and MySQL on a fresh Tiger which looks like the thing I want followed immediately by another post by Jose Marinez on Installing Ruby on Rails on Tiger which I decided to follow by the letter (with one noticeable exception!). So first I downloaded the Rails installer on Tiger. Next, an install of the Standard version of MySQL. I used version 4.0 for OS X 10.3 !!!! NOT 4.1 !!!!. I installed MySQL and the StartUpItem. Next, I opened Terminal and typed the following commands

- cd /usr/local/mysql
- sudo chown -R mysql data/
- sudo echo
- sudo ./bin/mysqldsafe &

and verified it by performing a simple test

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql test

Next, I secured everything by having a root-password

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password *

Then I remembered that I’d better not have to type the whole path so I did a

echo ‘export PATH=/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH’ >> ~/.bashprofile

Also, I want to admin MySQL via phpmyadmin so I installed it. Then I enabled my webserver to use PHP using this post though I did use vi rather than pico! Next, i did a check whether everything worked fine by typing in safari

http://localhost/~lieven/phpmyadmin/index.php

Followed by a

sudo gem install mysql – –with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql

Now, it is time to get the Tracks-package and to follow these instructions And, it works! Here is the proof :