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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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