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tiger tracks

Published June 13, 2005 by lieven

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/mysqld_safe &

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’ >> ~/.bash_profile

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 โ€šร„รฌ
โ€šร„รฌwith-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 :

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markLaTeXdown

Published May 20, 2005 by lieven

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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balm or poison

Published May 9, 2005 by lieven

Don’t try
to follow the previous post unless you want to end up in a neverending
(sic!) series of re-installs, unrecognized harddisks at start-up and a
few kernel-panics!

At this moment I know of NO safe way to use Carbon Copy Cloner
to make a bootable clone of my HD. Here is the only way I managed to
make a bootable copy :

– before you start, click on the
target-partition of the external HD and use _File/Get Info_ and
uncheck under _Ownership & Permissions_ the box _Ignore
ownership on this volume_
– this might be enough for you but I
had to use DiskUtility to _Erase_ the externet HD-partition.
– then follow the previous post (that is do _sudo open_ on CCC
and then proceed as usual BUT make sure in your
prefernces only the box _Make Bootable_ is checked and certainly
no syncing-options!)

A bit too drastic for me. Its a bit like
: make a DMG of your MacintoshHD and do a restore on an empty external
partition. It seems that Tiger and Panther have very different
DNA-samples bringing a lot of excellent free- and shareware developers
near a nervous breakdown. Have the Apple-people ever heard of something
like _backwards compatibility_? Anyway, I’m not going to try
making another backup again until Mike Bombich has released a
Tiger-version of CCC!

Also, don’t try to follow the suggestions
of my Tracks
post. It certainly is not enough to get tracks running under Tiger
(and probably also not under Panther as at the time I did a strange mix
of following this path and doing some manual installs using the Hivelogic
page. This time, I got strange errors coming from the Ruby-MySQL
dialogue. I’m not going to try installing MySQL, PHP and Tracks before
someone like Marc
Lyanage tells that it is safe to use the Panther-packages under
Tiger!

So, for the moment I’m just going to use my minimal
system (Tiger+Xcode Tools+TeX (following the instructions from this page
)+some excellent free and shareware like DevonThink , Pod2Go
, VoodooPad , SubEthaEdit ,
QuickSilver , Transmit and NetNewsWire ) until the
experts have tamed Tiger. Meanwhile, I’ll just confine myself to the
_Dashboard-Kintergarten_ !

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