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Tag: wordpress

command line interface

Published February 7, 2007 by lievenlb

Way
back in 1999 I read Neal Stephenson’s pamphlet In the Beginning ! Was the Command Line and
decided I should and would have Linux running on my clamshell iBook.
Needless to say this was (a) a foolish idea and (b) not entirely trivial
in those dark OS 9-days. Still, I somehow managed with the help op PPC Linux and was
proudly wearing their T-shirt (at least for a couple of weeks in early
2000). Fortunately, as a brief OS X
history recalls, OS X was released March 24, 2001 and put an end to
my Linux-folly and I’m pretty certain even Neal Stephenson is on Mac OSX
these days.

Needless to say I couldn’t resist installing the
Wordpress CLI-theme the moment I spotted it! A command line
interface to your blog! awesome! If you want to have a go at the
original version, take a look at Rod McFarland’s blog.
Just type ‘ls’ to the prompt and you’ll be hooked. Or you can have a
look at the command line interface of NeverEndingBooks by going to the
left sidebar and clicking CLI under the ‘Command Line Version’ header
(don’t be afraid you can always come back by clicking on the
GUI-interface over there). My design is black on a light-gray background
and is no where near as cool as the original theme but it was the only
quick way around some limitations of the CLI-theme.

The
CLI-theme operates as a front-end via a small interpreter which draws
the information directly from the WordPress-database. As a result you
loose the effect of all post-processing by plugins such as Markdown and LatexRender two of
the plugins I use most! I could still live with the idea that pure LaTeX
was served to a CLI-environment between tex-tags, but surely I didn’t
want to loose all my links! The quick (and extremely dirty) way around
it was to resubmit the relevant part of the HTML-source files of the
GUI-frontend posts to the WP-database. And to serve the same LaTeX-gifs
to the GUI and CLI interface I needed the backgound to be rather light
gray (taking #BDBDBD gray would have been much nicer wrt. the cool
rasterized grayed-images but then some of the more recent LaTeX-gifs
became partially unreadable). Oh, and in the process I had to update the
permalink structure, thereby wrecking allmost all internal
reference-links (but I’ll sort them out soon, I promise).

So, a
lot of work for a rather meagre result. What do I like about the
CLI-interface (apart from old time nostalgia)? I really like the
searching facility. Just type ‘search yourword’ to the prompt and it
will give you all posts containing that word (much quicker than in the
GUI-interface) and if you remember at least one word from a post-title,
feeding it to the prompt will give you the entire post (or a list of
posts if the same word appears in different posts). Try out typing
‘Perelman’ to see what I mean. Besides, bots don’t seem to know what to
do with the CLI-interface so for the few days I had this theme as my
default theme I was alone on NeverEndingBooks mast of the time (which
helped a lot having to change that many posts). So, whenever I want to
have the site to myself I’ll just change the default theme from now
on.

Still, I did put back the old GUI as default because the
CLI-theme still has a few drawbacks. Such as, it is impossible to write
a sizable comment (not that too many of you do this, but anyway) and
some other quirks. Still Rod McFarland is working on a version 2 (and
even set up a google-group for
those who want to code along, and maybe I’ll join the effort) which
promises a great improvement and I’m rather confident that by version
3.14 it will be in a state that I’ll have the CLI-interface as my
default. Until then, I’ll keep up the two front-ends and allow you to
toggle as you like (your browser will remember your preference).

I realize most of you are youngsters and not of my cpu2
generation so have a hard time imagining how exiting a command line
prompt is. Fortunately, Neal Stephenson has made the full text of “In
the beginning ! was the command line” available as a
free download. Print it out and enjoy!

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minute changes

Published December 28, 2006 by lievenlb

These
lazy days between christmas and new-year’s eve are ideal to do finally
those things one would like to postpone indefinitely. Here is a list of
the tiny changes made to this blog : At last, an upgrade from WordPress version
2.0 to 2.0.5. Something I always defer because of the warnings to
back up databases and all changed files and preferences (and as I have
these sporadic periods of changing the PHP-code to my taste, I tend to
forget the changes I’ve made). Still, things went smoothly as far as I
can detect, the only problem I encountered was following the
instructions to the letter, such as

Special Exception:
the wp-content/cache folder should be deleted.

when what
they really mean is that one should only delete the
contents of the cache-directory. So, I had a 5-second
scare starting up the homepage and being greated with an error message
saying something to the effect that WP couldn’t write to this directory.
Apart from security reasons, this upgrade was necessary to install
some WordPress Plugins.
Top of my wish-list being RS-
Discuss.

RS Discuss is a brand new, tiny, lightweight
wordpress forum plugin that is entirely self-contained and integrates
tightly and seamlessly into your existing WordPress website. Despite its
size, it’s got everything that makes a forum a useful tool:
Full
integration with WordPress’ own user system
Multiple forum
setup
RSS feeds for forums, topics and user activity to keep
track
Search capabilities
Sidebar widget integration
Totally customisable, including different setups for different themes
Fully featured mdoerator controls including pinning and locking
topics
Clean uninstall if you don’t like it :)

So, if
you like to make your own contribution to this site (apart from
commenting), the forums (note to old schoolmates : i know it should
really be fora…) are open to all from the top menu :
forum. At present I’ve only set up a forum dedicated to discussions
on noncommutative algebra/geometry but if you like other discussions,
you will find a way to let me know. Below each post you will now
find a collection of colourful logos. They enable someone who registered
to one of the may social-bookmarking sites to add the post to their
bookmarks. Here, I used the Sociable
plugin. Last year I had a brief period experimenting with CiteULike
(see
this post ) and I intend to explore some of these bookmarking
systems further over the coming months. I’ve moved My Online Publication Page
over to this blog using the bib2html
plugin. It is now avalable from the top menu
: biblio. Every publication has its own BibTeX-popup link as well as
a link to the full PDF-file of the preprint version of the paper or book
(which may differ slightly from the published version). This page will
soon replace the older MOPP-page. I’ve moved the Archives of this
blog to the top menu :
archive using the Smart Archives
Plugin which gives a much better way to read though the past of
NeverEndingBooks. Actually getting this plugin to work did cost me some
time and (security)-worries, but these are solved, I hope. I you cannot
get it to work under WP-2.0.5, contact me and I’ll hopefully still
remember what I did. The default Calendar is replaced by an iCal-subscribable
calendar using the Event Calendar
Plugin. So far, I haven’t added upcoming events yet, but it seemed
like a good thing to have when our masterclass-noncommutative geometry
starts next semester. Note to Self : Event Calendar is incompatible with
the Sociable-plugin, so deactivate it when you want to add a new event.
And then there are some totally useless plugins which I just couldnt
resist to install. Such as the mystatus plugin
which offers an easy way to let you know what keeps me bizzy these days
(you will find it in the left-hand sidebar) or the GeoPress
plugin which enables me to add google-maps to whatever post I like.
For instance, as you may have guessed, I wrote this post from our home
and as google-maps of Antwerp have improved drasticly, you can zoom in
to my environment to any level of detail you feel appropriate…

INSERT_MAP

Added : this map seems to work with
Firefox, Flock and Camino under MacOSX but not with Safari. If you
happen to know why, please let me know.

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my lifestream

Published December 3, 2006 by lievenlb

The old
concept of getting your
brain subscribed to has a reincarnation into the
lifestream idea : add a page to your blog listing all
your timed actions on the web. I stumbled upon it via the
Lifestream – ala wordpress post containing a link to the original Streaming my life away
article by Jeremy Keith. After far
too much time I managed to install Chris Davis’
Lifestream wordpress plugin. Here are some comments that may make it easier to install a
lifestream page yourself. To begin, don’t download the plugin at the
top of the page, but rather scroll down to comment 886-59 by Gunnar
Hafdal and download via the link given there (or use this direct link).
This version at least contains a readme file (even after reading through
all the php-code of the other version I didn’t have a clue as how to use
it, in the readme file I finally learned that you had to create a new
page and use Lifestream as a page-template…). Next, I could’t
get it working until line 78 of stream.php was
commented out (the Copenhagen-time line). Also don’t use the
Dashboard-Manage-Lifestream page in the hope to change your
RSS-subsriptions, but rather hard-code them in the
life.php file. Bear in mind that not all RSS-data will
work with Lifestream. I’ve tried out all of the social bookmark sites of
which the logo is given at the bottom of a post, and found that only six
of them work without doing extra work : co.mments, digg,
ma.gnolia, furl, netvouz and de.lirio.us (the last one modulo the fact
that it doesnt give the accurate time). At the moment I’ve added just
co.mments, digg, magnolia and netvouz to my lifestream but I may add
other streams later. Of course one can solve problems with the other
RSS-feeds by scraping them and writing new feeds which Lifestream (or
rarther the underlying magpieRSS bundled with wordpress) can handle. I
assume this is the idea behind the other Lifestream plugin by Elliot Black (I havent
tried this one out). The last thing to do is then to change the
stream.php file so that it produces a page with more or
less the same look and feel of the rest of the blog. Apart from a few
things which I still have to remedy, I’m happy with my
Lifestream. Now it is time to have a serious go at some of these
social-bookmarking sites…

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FoaF

Published January 25, 2006 by lievenlb

Speaking
about work done behind the curtains, here another tiny addition to this
site. If you ever looked at the source of this page, you will notice
that as of today there is one line added near the end of the
_head_-tag

< link rel="meta"
href="http://www.neverendingbooks.org/lieven.rdf"
type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" / >

which will point
spiders and suitable aggregators to the (first installment of) my own
_foaf-file_. According to the Friends of a Friend (FOAF)
Project its intended purpose is

FOAF is a way to
describe people and relationships to computers. FOAF stands for Friend
Of A Friend. Technically, it is an RDF/XML Semantic Web vocabulary.
Because of this, FOAF data is easy to process and merge.
Home
pages typically say things such as:
“My name
is…”
“I work for…”
“I’m
interested in…”
“I live near…”
“My blog is…”
“I write in this
weblog…”
“You can see me in this
picture…”
FOAF is a way to say all those things, but
so that computers can interpret it. Computers can’t understand English
yet, so we have to be a little more precise in how we say these things.
FOAF is a way of saying these things for computers.
What would
computers do with this information? We experiment all the time, but here
are some questions that computers can answer using FOAF data:

“Show me pictures of bloggers interested in (foo) who live near
me.”
“Show me recent articles written by people at
this meeting.”
“Is this person vegetarian?”
FOAF is a SemanticWeb project. The Semantic Web is an effort to make
it easier for computers to get useful information from the Internet.

Sounds intruiging doesn’t it? But how do they go about
realizing some of this? Well, by encoding all relevant information which
you are willing to share about yourself, people you know, your work etc.
in an RDF (Resource Description
Framework) file. The source file can be bit scary at first but
fortunetely you do not have to type these tags yourself. To begin with
your own core-FoaF file, you can use the excellent on-line foaf-a-matic or
the Java-desktop version foaf-a-matic mark
2 beta-2. Just fill out the data you want to include and these
programs will turn this info into proper FoaF-code. There is one
important thing to consider. These two programs allow you to keep
email-data out of the FoaF-file (for obvious spam-reasons). However, the
whole FoaF-strategy is based on linking various FoaF-files together into
one semantic net and for this reason one has to be able to identify a
person which may occur in different FoaF-files under different nicks or
slightly different names. FoaF takes as its Unique Person Identifier the
email address, so removing this data from your file makes it entirely
useless. Fortunately, the FoaF-community came up with an alternative
keeping the email-address as the UPI but scrambling it to make it
useless to spam-bots. That is the whole purpose of tags such as 

 mbox_sha1sum ac5cefa7e1e7df92f7257ea663dfd06a4a4be212

which gives the result of applying the _SHA1_
function to a ‘mailto:’ address. I haven’t checked the online
foaf-a-matic, but the desktop version manages to give the sha1 of your
own email address, but doesn’t give those of the people you know. So, I
had to use the online sha1
generator and paste the result into the file. Still, all of this
is just scratching the surface. Later on, I will extend my FoaF-file by
adding more people, together with additional information about them and
myself. To get an idea of what information you can encode have a look at
the FOAF Vocabulary
Specification. You can at all times check on the progress looking at
the source file reference. This last bit was achieved by the FoaF header plugin
for WordPress.

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upgrade to wp 2.0

Published January 24, 2006 by lievenlb

All
activity on this site this week (apart from changing the theme) was done
behind the scenes. Finally, _neverendingbooks_ is upgraded to WordPress 2.0.
It is a straightforward well-explained procedure but somehow I decided
to try this out in between a WorkShop and a
Ph.D. defense. As a consequence I had to reclone twice…
Some of the Plugins‘ functionality
didn’t survive the upgrade. In particular, the anti-spam plugin BotCheck doesn’t work any longer (one could fill out any code and
still get a reply posted) as I found out sunday-morning when I was
greeted with about 20 spam-replies… Fortunately, WP 2.0 comes
bundled with its own anti-spam plugin Akismet but one needs a WordPress.com API key which
meens signing up to a WordPress-account (free). When Akismet is
activated, it really bans all spam (it even shows how many spam-messages
it found, 30 over two days…), the only problem being that it seems
to de-activate itself at random… The new theme is called Kiwi which is a lot more
compact than the default neverending(sic) page. But there is a (heavy
some will say) price to pay : only summaries of posts are on the
front-page and the font is (too some will say) small. Still, Kiwi has
some nice extra features : the Featured Post Plugin which
allows to re-cycle changing selected old posts to the right of the
banner. Another changing part is the _Elsewhere_ list (second row
to the right) where one can display any feed. At the moment (but I may
change this as the del.icio.us site
seems to be having some problems) all _del.icio.us_ links tagged
noncommutative are shown (if the site is up…). It
appears that apart from Graham
Leuschke nobody has a del.icio.us account or doesn’t use the
noncommutative tag. So, if you want to change this site a bit every day,
you know what to do. Speaking of tags, several new
_categories_ were created so that posts now get multiples tags,
describing better their (intended) content. Something I learned by
tagging papers at citeUlike. Btw.
you are still invited to join the
NoncommutativeGeometry Group over there… Clearly, re-tagging
every individual post was a painstaking experience. A WordPress 2.0
feature I like is the ability to write _pages_ (as opposed to
Posts) which are kept alive in the sidebar and therefore resemble
‘stickies’ (in WP parlace ‘they live outside of the usual
timeline’). At the moment there is just one test-page NAGworldMAP
on which you can see that geocoding was added to
this site via the Geo
Plugin (allowing to add geographic data to posts) and the instant google world map Plugin plotting these data on a Google Map. At the moment you can see
the distance I have to cycle to get to the university, but I have plans
to do something more substantial with this feature soon, so please
familiarize yourself with dragging and zooming the map (for US-citizens,
European countries often do not put geographic data in the public
domain, so there is a limit to the zoom-factor and I use the
‘satellite’-view rather than any of the other two).

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latexrender plugin for wordpress under tiger

Published September 5, 2005 by lievenlb

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”); Swhere_imagemagick_is =
  “/usr/local/bin”; if (Soldpath) { Swhere_imagemagick_is .=
  “:Soldpath”;} putenv(“PATH=Swhere_imagemagick_is”); //
  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

 Slatex_formula =
  str_replace(“_”,”_”,Slatex_formula);     Slatex_formula
  =
  str_replace(“_”,”_”,Slatex_formula);

(
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->_tmp_dir.”/”.Sthis->_tmp_filename.”.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 wrap_formula(Slatex_formula) { 
  Sstring  =
  “\\documentclass[“.Sthis->_font_size.”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{\\mathbb{C}c}{\\Bbbk}\\n”; 
  Sstring .= “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{C}}{\\mathbb{C}}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{Q}}{\\mathbb{Q}}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{Z}}{\\mathbb{Z}}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{N}}{\\mathbb{N}}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbf}[1]{{\\\\text{\\em \\usefont{OT1}{cmtt}{m}{n}
  #1}}}\\n”;  Sstring .= “\\pagestyle{empty}\\n”;  Sstring
  .= “\\begin{document}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “S”.Slatex_formula.”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 

  // add_filter(‘comment_text’,
  ‘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.

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markLaTeXdown

Published May 20, 2005 by lievenlb

Clearly,
an extended version of Markdown
including LaTeX-commands would be useful for mathematicians and surely
I’m not the first to think about this. In fact, I found a somewhat
pompous text New adventures
if hifi text by someone claiming to have done precisely that (though
he doesn’t give much details nor post a version of his altered program).

Still, it is pretty clear how to convert a _Markdown+LaTeX_
textfile to plain LaTeX (at least for regex-lovers
). Modify the _Markdown.pl_ script so that the Markdown markup is
translated not to HTML-tags but to LaTeX-commands.

More
interesting material can be found in a thread on _Markdown and
Mathematics_ starting with this post. In it, they search for a good way to include
LaTeX-mathematical commands in a MarkDown text. In fact, this is part of
a more general quest for a good _escape character_ in Markdown to
create _Markdown plus something_ versions. They opt for
{{ and }} rather than the usual
$ signs.

I think the alternatives [
tex ] and [ /tex ] are slightly better because
then you could feed the text to a functional WordPress installation with the
LaTeXRender plugin installed and copy the relevant part from the HTML-source of
the resulting post to get a HTML-version of the mathematical text with
all LaTeX-code converted to pictures. Clearly, typing the suggested tags
is somewhat cumbersome so I would type them using the
{{ and }} proposal (one
{ is not enough because a lot a LaTeX code uses single
curly brackets) and then do a global replace to get the
LaTeXRender-tags.

Even more interesting would be to have a
version of the html2txt.py script for LaTeX, that is,
converting a LaTeX-file to Markdown + LaTeXcode which would give an easy
way to convert your existing papers to HTML if you feed the LaTeXRender
plugin with all the required newcommands and packages.

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tiger days 1

Published May 8, 2005 by lievenlb

It
should be really day 2 but yesterday evening I was a bit overoptimistic
and tried to get MySQL, Ruby, Rails & Tracks installed and in the
process totally wrecked my Ruby-system (and probably a few things more).
Besides, I found out that the _Carbon Copy Cloner_ work-around
doesn\’t really work (that is, one canNOT boot from the cloned copy)
etc. etc. In short, a lot of frustration. So today, I started all over
again (using the install notes below to guide me and so I could reduce
the total time to about 2 hrs). But, as this was the easy bit (still to
come : MySQL, PHP, WordPress+LatexRender, Ruby&Tracks etc.) and I
don\’t want to redo everything again when I do something horribly wrong
I changed my overall tactics. I\’ll keep identical copies on my iBook
and on my iMac and do the next batch of installs on just one machine and
check whether everything works before syncing it to the other. If
something gets messed up I resync to the state of the previous day. Just
one question left : what program to use for the backup/restore now that
CCC seems to be broken? Fortunately, there is still PsyncX which still
seems to work fine (at least today…). Below, for what it is worth,
yesterday\’s log of events :

Okay, I checked that I can still
TeX papers and connect to the printer on the iMac (after Archive/Install
to Tiger). Most other things have broken down, such as my mind on tracks
and my MySQL-database, but I\’m quite hopeful I can rebuild them all.
So, time for a drastic _Erase/Install_ on my iBook.

12:04 : One final safety check. Connect the external
HD, select the _Carbon Copy Cloned_ partition as StartUp Disk and
do a Restart to verify that it can be cloned back should everything go
terribly wrong. Seems to work nicely, so change again from StartUp disk,
restart and disconnect the external HD.

12:16
: Printed the macdevcenter install
tips and made a fresh pot of coffee. Took the unread part of the
newspaper with me, connected Jan\’s iPod, made it the new StartUp disk
and did another Restart.

12:24 : Selected
\’English\’ as the main language. Selected _DiskUtility_ from the
_Utilities_ menu (before you have to select a Disk destination).
Selected the HD, clicked _Erase_ and choose _Erase Free
Space_ first, then choose the SecurityOption to \’zero out data\’.
(Both steps require a lot of extra time but what is the point of doing
an Erase if you don\’t erase properly? Btw. the macdev-article does not
agree with me on this point.) Meanwhile, had some coffee and a
read…

13:23 : Did quit DiskUtility
which brought me back to the Installer. Selected the HD and clicked on
_Options_ to select Erase&Install and clicked Continue. Then
clicked on _Custom Install_ to choose which Packages to Install.
Did choose _all_ Printer Drivers but in _Language
Translations_ only selected : French, German and Dutch. Didn\’t
select X11! Clicked : _Install_ and had yet another cup of
coffee…

13:45 : Restarted! Got me into
the SetupAssistant. Didn\’t choose to transfer info from another Mac. It
selected our wireless network immediately, and asked me for my .Mac
account info. Did create my main account and finished at
13:53 Only had to stop iTunes from wanting to put
PodSoftware onto the connected iPod… Checked for SoftwareUpdate
but there was none. Am connected to internet but had to add my other
mail-account. Done and received email at 14:05 Found
our Printer but did gray out two-sided printing (have to remember later
how I did set this up…).

14:12 : Time
to add the _Xcode Tools_ : opened the folder on the iPod and
clicked on _XcodeTools.mpkg_ . Followed he default installation.
Finished and deconnected the iPod at 14:24 Took a break
to decide how to continue. (21.97Gb available) Update today : do a
custom install using also cross-development!

14:37 : Okay, first things first : get myself a
working TeX-system starting from this page
to get the latest version of TeXShop and the i-Installer and place both
in the Applications folder and in the Dock. Placed the _To Your
Library_ folder of TeXShop in my ~/Library (containing the texmf
etc. path for pdfsync). Then followed this
page and the i-Installer to install the packages in the right order
:

  • FreeType 2
  • libwmf
  • Ghostscript
    8
  • ImageMagick
  • FontForge
  • TeX (did a
    Full install with 2005 Devel.)

Had a brief look
through the other packages and maybe I\’ll install _Latex to RTF_
and _RTF 2 Latex_ later. Created a _DMG_ folder and put
the downloaded disk images into it. Created a_PAPERS_ folder and
transferred the last version of the paper with Stijn to check TeX but
clearly it couldn\’t find the _diagrams.sty_ file (I know I have
to quit using this, but I\’ll better get it over for backward
compatibility; put it into ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/. Ran TeX again
without problems this time and checked the nice source-PDF syncing
(apple-click to jump). Finished : 15:37

15:56 : As long as administration sends me
_Word_ documents and expects me to read them, I have no choice
but to install _Office X_ . The upshot was that while searching
for the OfficeCD I found also the HP LaserJet 1320 CD and installed the
driver so now I can print 2-sided (using Printer Setup Utility) . Done :
16:15

16:45 : Used the
_.mac System Preference_ to get syncing started with my iDisk to
get adresses, calendars and passwords etc. on my iBook. Also filled in
the Sharing Preferences. Now that I have the passwords at hand, it is
time to get the latest versions of some of the shareware I own (and copy
their disk image to the DMG folder)

  • DevonThink
  • DenonAgent
  • Pod2Go : the site seems to be down at the
    moment but fortunately, I have a disk image of it which will have to do
    for now (note to self : check later whether the site is permanently
    dead…) Update today : it is up and running again…

and while I\’m at it I may as well get my wallet out and
purchase the full version of _Lite_ versions I like and use a lot
:

Fortunately, there is also a lot of excellent freeware that I
want to use

One of the following days : MySQL, PHP and perhaps Tracks but
first I desperately need to do some maths to kick off from all this
nonsense…

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markdown

Published April 17, 2005 by lievenlb

The nerd
implimentation of GTD is based on plain text-files, or more
precisely

– all lists in text files, kept in directory
“~/Documents/txt”
– all documents maintained in Markdown for easy
HTML conversion

I’ve been writing HTML-code since the times
that the best browser around was something called NCSA Mosaic so I’ve never paid too much attention to
Markdown
before. Here is its main purpose

Markdown is a
text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to
write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then
convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or >HTML). Thus, Markdown is
two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool,
written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to
HTML.

An example of Markdown-code followed by its
HTML-output can be seen at the BlueCloth website and I have
to agree that the Markdown text is very legible. I’ve been playing
around with Markdown for a couple of days now (in fact this post is
written in Markdown as WordPress has a Markdown-plugin) and have found a
few uses for it (more on this another time). Essential sites to visit if
you want to learn some Markdown are : its basic
syntax and in the rare cases that this doesn’t do what you want to
do there is also a full
syntax page.

If you want to use Markdown to write your
HTML-pages you need to be able to convert Markdown to HTML (and
conversely although the uses for this are not immediately clear, but
there are plenty of good reasons!). That’s what the
Markdown.pl Perl-script does for you (one way) and the
Python-script html2text.py (to be found here) (the other
way).

To get them working using BBedit
all you have to do is to put them in the _BBEdit Support/Unix
Support/Unix Filters_ directory (to be found in the BBEdit-folder in
_/Applications_). Then, if you have written a Markdown-text, do a
_Select All_ go to the !# menu and look for
Markdown.pl under _Unix Filters_ and voila, you have valid XHTML
(the other direction is similar).

This is a bit of work and one
would like to do both operations in nearly all Applications using the
_Services Menu_ (in fact, until a few weeks ago I had no clue
that there was something as useful as this menu hidden under the
program-name-menu of any Cocoa-program!). This is best done using HumaneText.service. The
installation is really as siimple as they say on this page (although it
took me a couple of trials before it worked, and I use the Services-menu
rather than the keystroke-shortcuts).

HumaneText works perfectly with TextEdit,
SubEthaEdit and (probably more important to mathematicians) TeXShop and
iTeXMac (the two most common front-ends for (La)TeX under OS X). A
noteworthy exception is BBEdit (hence the above laborious work-around).
Sometimes there are problems with punctuation in the conversion but you
can get around this using SmartyPants.

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padlock returns

Published November 5, 2004 by lievenlb

A couple of months ago I spend some time modifying the WordPress ViewLevel
plugin slightly to include in this blog. At the time, the idea was
to restrict the readership of certain posts (such as info meant for
master-class students etc.). In the sidebar these posts are prepended by
a padlock sign (together with the appropriate view-level). In the main
window these posts do _not_ show up unless you are logged in and
have the fitting view-level.
I hope that this tool may also prove
useful to combat spam-comments. Ideally, a weblog should be configured
to accept any comments but if you have to remove a 100 or more link-spam
'comments' each morning to keep your blog poker-free you have to
play defensive. Unfortunately, WordPress is not very good at it. Sure,
one can opt to put all comments on hold, awaiting moderation but (1)
this is unpleasant for genuine comments and (2) one still has to remove
all spam-comments manually from the moderation-queue. In the end, I had
to close all posts for comments to be spared from poker-online and
texas-online rubbish.
However, I appreciate comments and
suggestions especially at a time when this weblog is changing. So, if
you are working in either non-commutative algebra or non-commutative
geometry and want to give your suggestions, please get yourself a login.
I know, I know, it is a hassle with all those nonsense passwords but if
you are accessing this weblog from just one computer you only have to
remember it once (I forgot my own password but can still post
here…). I will then raise your ViewLevel from the default 0 value
to at least 1 so that you can read and comment the padlocked posts. If
you then want to make a comment on other posts, please use a nearby
padlocked post.
Today, I ask for suggestions for a good LaTeX
book-style. At the moment my favourite is the CTAN
thesis-package but surely there are better packages out there!

again : this idea came to nothing!

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