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Category: web

Snow leopard + wordpress + latex problem

Published October 1, 2009 by lieven

Ever since I’ve upgraded to Snow Leopard I’ve been having problems with the webserver.

At first there were the ‘obvious’ problems : mysql-connection lost and php-error message. These were swiftly dealt with using the excellent Snow Leopard, Apache, PHP, MySQL and WordPress! advice from ‘tady’.

Right now, access to this blog is extremely slow (and often impossible), certainly via the admin-page. The problem appears to be that most of my CPU is used by lots of pdfetex-processes owned by www. Hence the conjecture that it is a problem with either LaTeXRender or WP LaTeX.

Anyone experiencing a similar problem, or knowing a trick to resolve it? Takk.

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Gina says (continued)

Published August 5, 2009 by lieven

Via the Arcadian functor I’ve grabbed the full text of Gil Kalai’s book Gina Says: Adventures in the Blogsphere String War (part 1 and part 2) and read it on a lazy sunny afternoon.

Arguably the best paragraph is the final one, and, it might be sensible to start the book by reading it first as it clarifies Kalai’s point in collecting these comment-threads from a number of popular blogs (including not even wrong, the n-category cafe and asymptotia) :

This book is not about string theory. It is more about delicate boundaries
between greatness and megalomania, between humility and arrogance,
between fantasy and reality, between wisdom and bullshit, between
people of different stature and standing, between skepticism and
harassment, between sanity and its loss, and between truths and fallacies.
These are delicate boundaries that we witness in academics and in science
and even in blog discussions. This story offers a little salute to people’s
passion for understanding their logical and physical reality, as well as for
understanding themselves.

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introducing : the n-geometry cafe

Published July 17, 2009 by lieven

It all started with this comment on the noncommutative geometry blog by “gabriel” :

Even though my understanding of noncommutative geometry is limited, there are some aspects that I am able to follow.
I was wondering, since there are so few blogs here, why don’t you guys forge an alliance with neverending books, you blog about noncommutative geometry anyways. That way you have another(n-category cafe) blogspot and gives well informed views(well depending on how well defined a conversational-style blog can be).

The technology to set up a ‘conversational-style blog’, where anyone can either leave twitter-like messages or more substantial posts, is available thanks to the incredible people from Automattic.

For starters, they have the sensational p2 wordpress theme : “blogging at the speed of thought”



A group blog theme for short update messages, inspired by Twitter. Featuring: Hassle-free posting from the front page. Perfect for group blogging, or as a liveblog theme. Dynamic page updates. Threaded comment display on the front page. In-line editing for posts and comments. Live tag suggestion based on previously used tags. A show/hide feature for comments, to keep things tidy. Real-time notifications when a new comment or update is posted. Super-handy keyboard shortcuts.

Next, any lively online community is open for intense debate : “supercharge your community”



Fire up the debate with commenter profiles, reputation scores, and OpenID. With IntenseDebate you’ll tap into a whole new network of sites with avid bloggers and commenters. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

And finally, as we want to talk math, both in posts and comments, they provide us with the WP-LaTeX plugin.

All these ingredients make up the n-geometry cafe ((with apologies to the original cafe but I simply couldn’t resist…)) to be found at noncommutative.org (explaining the ‘n’).



Anyone can walk into a Cafe and have his/her say, that’s why you’ll get automatic author-privileges if you register.

Fill in your nick and email (please take your IntenseDebate setting and consider signing up with Gravator.com to get a nice image next to your contributions), invent your own password, show that you’re human by answering the reCapcha question and you’ll get a verification email within minutes ((if you don’t get an email within the hour, please notify me)). This will take you to your admin-page, allowing you to start blogging. For more info, check out the FAQ-pages.

I’m well aware of the obvious dangers of non-moderated sites, but also a strong believer in any Cafe’s self-regulating powers…

If you are interested in noncommutative geometry, and feel like sharing, please try it out.

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