categories : Sanitized the plethora of wordpress-categories to which posts belong. At the moment there are just 5 categories : ‘stories’ and ‘web’ (for all posts with low math-content) and three categories ‘level1’, ‘level2’ and ‘level3’, loosely indicating the math-difficulty of a post.

MathJax : After years of using LatexRender and WP-Latex, we’ll change to MathJax from now on. I’ll try to convert older posts as soon as possible. (Update : did a global search and replace. ‘Most’ LaTeX works, major exceptions being matrices and xymatrix commands. I’ll try to fix those later with LatexRender.)

theme : The next couple of days, the layout of this site may change randomly as I’ll be trying out things with the Swift wordpress theme. Hopefully, this will converge to a new design by next week.

name : Neverendingbooks will be renamed to something more math-related. Clearly, the new name will depend on the topics to be covered. On the main index page a pop-up poll will appear in the lower right-hand corner after 10 seconds. Please fill in the topics you’d like us to cover (no name or email required).

This poll will close on friday 21st at 12 CET and its outcome will influence name/direction of this blog. Use it also if you have a killer newname-suggestion. Among the responses so far, a funnier one : “An intro to, or motivation for non-commutative geometry, aimed at undergraduates. As a rule, I’d take what you think would be just right for undergrads, and then trim it down a little more.”

guest-posts : If you’d like to be a guest-blogger here at irregular times, please contact me. The first guest-post will be on noncommutative topology and the interpretation of quantum physics, and will appear soon. So, stay tuned…

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.

A few google searches made it plain how out of touch I am on these matters (details below). But first, there was this comment to this series by Link Starbureiy :

“I took part in Gowers’ blog discussion. My input was to move things over to Google collaboration tools, like Google Knol, and perhaps Google Sites. However, those tools for large-scale collaboration may not be the best solution anymore. I like the NSN idea, but worry about it’s very long-term stability. Would you consider porting the project over to the Google App Engine so that it can be played with in the orkut sandbox (http://sandbox.orkut.com)/?”

I thought I made it clear from the outset that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life web-mastering a site such as NSN. All I wanted to show is that the technology is there free for the taking, and show that you do not have to be a wizard to get it running even on a mac…

I would really love it when some groups, or universities, on institutes, would set up something resembling this dedicated to a single arXiv-topic. Given our history, Antwerp University might be convinced to do this for math.RA but (a) I’m not going to maintain this on my own and (b) there may very well be a bandwidth problem if such a thing would become successful… (although, from past experiences and attempts I’ve made over the years, this is extremely unlikely for this target-group).

So please, if your group has some energy to spare, set-up your own math2.0-network, port it to Google Apps, Knol, Orkut or whatever, and I’d love to join and contribute to it.

As to LaTeX-support : this is trivial these days. First you need a working LaTeX-system on your virgin macbook. The best way is to download The MacTeX-2008 Distribution at work (it is a huge 1.19Gb download…). Next, install the fauxml-wordpress plugin (that is, download it to YourHome/Downloads and then drag the file faux-ml.php to the Library/WebServer/Documents/wp-content/plugins/ directory. Next, install likewise the WP-LateX plugin following the instructions, go to the configuring page and set the directory for latex and dvipng (if you follow my instructions they should be located at /usr/texbin/latex and /usr/texbin/dvipng), fill in the text color and background color you desire and clip your default latex-documentstyle/includepackages/newcommands section from your latest paper into the LaTeX Preamble window and believe me, you’re done!!!

After some thought, I decided not to transcribe all of my posts from last year (there are 93 of them!), but instead to restrict attention to those articles which (a) have significant mathematical content, (b) are not announcements of material that will be published elsewhere, and (c) are not primarily based on a talk given by someone else. As it turns out, this still leaves about 33 articles from 2007, leading to a decent-sized book of a couple hundred pages in length.

If you have a blog and want to turn it into a LaTeX-book, there’s no need to transcribe or copy every single post, thanks to the WPTeX tool. Note that this is NOT a WP-plugin, but a (simple at that) php-program which turns all posts into a bookcontent.tex file. This file can then be edited further into a proper book.

Unfortunately, the present version chokes on LaTeXrender-code (which is easy enough to solve doing a global ‘find-and-replace’ of the tex-tags by dollar-signs) but worse, on Markdown-code… But then, someone fluent in php-regex will have no problems extending the libs/functions.php file (I hope…).

At the moment I’m considering turning the Mathieu-games-posts into a booklet. A possible title might be Mathieumatical Games. Rereading them (and other posts) I regret to be such an impatient blogger. Often I’m interested in something and start writing posts about it without knowing where or when I’ll land. This makes my posts a lot harder to get through than they might have been, if I would blog only after having digested the material myself… Typical recent examples are the tori-crypto-posts and the Bost-Connes algebra posts.

So, I still have a lot to learn from other bloggers I admire, such as Jennifer Ouellette who maintains the Coctail Party Physics blog. At the moment, Jennifer is resident blogger-journalist at the Kavli Institute where she is running a “Journal Club” workshop giving ideas on how to write better about science.

But the KITP is also committed to fostering scientific communication. That’s where I come in. Each Friday through April 26th, I’ll be presiding over a “Journal Club” meeting focusing on some aspect of communicating science.

Her most recent talk was entitled To Blog or Not to Blog? That is the Question and you can find the slides as well as a QuickTime movie of her talk. They even plan to set up a blog for the participants of the workshop. I will surely follow the rest of her course with keen interest!

I’ve re-installed the Google analytics plugin on december 22nd, so it is harvesting data for three weeks only. Still, it is an interesting tool to gain insight in the social networking aspect of math-blogging, something I’m still very bad at…

Below the list of all blogs referring at least 10 times over this last three weeks. In brackets are the number of referrals and included are the average time Avg. they spend on this site, as well as the bounce back rate BB. It gives me the opportunity to link back to some of their posts, as a small token of gratitude. I may repeat this in the future, so please keep on linking…

Not Even Wrong (69) : Avg (1.05 min) BB (52.94%)

The most recent post of Peter is an update on the plagiarism scandal on the arXiv.

The n-category cafe (63) : Avg (2.13 min) BB (50%)

The one series I followed at the cafe lately was the Geometric Representation Theory course run by John Baez and James Dolan. They provide downloadable movies as well as notes.

Richard Borcherd’s blog (47) : Avg (1.53 min) BB (53.19%)

It is great to see that Borcherds has taken up blogging again, with a post on the uselessness of set theory.

The Arcadian functor (32) : Avg (3.45 min) BB (34.38 %)

It is clear from the low bounce-back rate and the high average time spend on this site, that Kea’s readers and mine have common interests. Often I feel that Kea and I are talking about the same topics, but that our language is so different, that it is difficult for me to spot the precise connection. I definitely should start (for myself) a translation-project of her M-theory posts.

RupertGee’s iBlog (23) : Avg (6.48 min) BB (34.7 %)

Surprisingly, and contrasting to my previous rant iTouch-people (or at least those coming here from Rupert Gee’s blog) sure take time to read the posts and look for more.

Ars Mathematica (22) : Avg (0:01 min) BB (77,2 %)

Well, the average time and bounce back rate say it all : people coming here from Ars Mathematica are not interested in longer posts…

iTouch Fans Forum (14) : Avg (2:07 min) BB (42.86 %)

Again, better statistics than I would have expected.

Vivatsgasse 7 (13) : Avg (1:51 min) BB (38.46 %)

I hope these guys haven’t completely given up on blogging as it is one of my favourites.

Sixth form mathematics (12) : Avg (1:40 min) BB (25 %)

My few old posts on LaTeXrender still draw referrals…

Strategic Boards (12) : Avg (0:01 min) BB (91.67 %)

People in strategic board games are not really in my game-posts it seems…

The Everything Seminar (11) : Avg (2:04 min) BB (72.73 %)

Greg Muller has been posting a couple of nice posts on chord diagrams, starting here.

Noncommutative Geometry (11) : Avg (3:36 min) BB (27.27 %)

Well, we are interested in the same thing viewed from different angles, so good average times and a low bounce back rate. Maybe, I should make another attempt to have cross-interaction between the two blogs.

Anyway, the good news being that we went from about 40 posts since last july to over 310 posts, all open to the internal Search engine. Having all this stuff online is only useful if one can browse through it easily, so I wanted to install a proper up-to-date archive-plugin…

The current theme Redoable has build-in support for the Extended Live Archives v0.10beta-r18 plugin which would be ideal if I could get it installed… Im not the total newbie in installing WordPress-plugins and Ive read all the documentation and the support-forum and chmodded whathever I felt like chmodding, but still no success… If you know how to kick it into caching the necessary files, please drop a comment!

The next alternative Ive tried was the AWSOM Archive Version 1.2.3 plugin which gave me a pull-down menu just under the title-bar but not much seems to happen when using bloody Safari (Flock was OK though). Maybe Ill give it another go…

UPDATE (jan. 9th) : The AWSOM Archive seems to be working fine with the Redoable theme when custom installed in the footer. So, there is now a pulldown-menu at the bottom of the page.

**UPDATE (jan. 12th) : Ive installed the new version 1.3 of AWSOM Archive and it works from the default position **

At a loss I opted in the end for the simplest (though not the most aesthetic) plugin : Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives. This provides a year-month scheme at the top followed by a reverse ordered list of all months and titles of posts and is available as the arXiv neverendingbooks link available also from the sidebar (up, second link). I hope it will help you not to get too lost on this site…

Suggestions for a working-from-the-box WordPress Archive plugin, anyone???

Dvonn 2 overload

LatexRender and Dvonn-boards

Dvonn 1 mobility

A DaVinci chess problem

Bivalue Sudoku graphs

microsudoku.sty

A 2006 chess puzzle anyone?

Hints for micro-Sudoku

Micro-Sudoku

Sudoku mania (bis)

Sudoku mania

SnortGo 2

Quintominal dodecahedra

Elkies’ puzzles

Fox and geese

SnortGo

ColGo

Antwerp sprouts

Combinatorial game software

Bloomsday end

Group think 2

Down with determinants

Group think

MathML versus LatexRender

Stalking the Riemann hypothesis

MathML and work ahead

The secret life of numbers

CCDantas on blogging

Doing the Perelman

The n-category cafe

Writing with gloves on

Why mathematicians cannot write

The music of the primes

arXiv trackback wars

citeUlike

The efficient academic

2005 lists : math novels

Teaching mathematics

Two TA Tales

The Oxford murders

Mappalujo

LatexRender Plugin for WordPress under Tiger

GMD

Google scholar

Simonne Stevens (1926-2004)

Quiver pictures in WordPress

Groen moet!

Artistic (and other) frustrations

The cpu 2 generation

If you’re running a math-blog,
sooner or later you want to say something more than new-age speak like
‘points talking to each other’ and get to the essence of it. In short,
you want to talk math and it’s a regrettable fact that math doesnt go
well with ASCII. In everyday life we found a way around this : we all
use TeX to write papers and even email-wise (among mathematicians) we
write plain TeX-commands as this language is more common to us than
English. But, plain TeX and the blogosphere don’t mix well. If you’re
expecting only professional mathematicians to read what you write, you
might as well arXiv your thoughts. Im convinced the majority of people
coming here (for whatever reason) dont speak plain-TeX. Fortunately,
there is technology to display TeX-symbols on a blog. Personally, I was
an early adapter to
LaTeXRender and even today a
fair share of page-views relates to the few
posts I did on
how to get latexrender working on a mac. Some time ago I
switched to mathML and now I’m
regretting I ever did…

Mind you, I’m convinced that mathML is the
‘proper’ way to get TeX to the internet but there are at the moment some
serious drawbacks. For starters, it is highly user-unfriendly. You
simply cannot expect people to switch browsers (as well as installing
extra fonts) just because they come to your site (or you have to be a
pretty arrogant git). Speaking for myself, Im still having (against my
better judgment) Safari as my default browser, so when I come to a site
like the n-category cafe I just
skim the plain-text in between and if (and only if) the topic interests
me tremendously I’ll allow myself to switch to Flock or Firefox to read
the post in detail. I’m convinced most of you have a similar
surfing-attitude. MathML also has serious consequences on the
server-side. If you want to serve mathML you have to emit headers which
expect everything to follow to be purified XHTML. If I ever forget a
closing tag in a post, this is enough to break down NeverEndingBooks to
all Firefox-users. I’ve been writing HTML since the times when the best
browser around was something called NCSA Mosaic so Ive a
pretty lax attitude to end-tags (especially in IMG-tags) and Im just
getting too old to change these bad habbits now… It seems I’m not the
only one. Many developers of WordPress-plugins write bad XHTML-code, so
the last couple of weeks I’ve been spending more time fixing up code
than writing posts. If you want to run a mathML-wordpress site you might
find the following hints helpfull. If you get a ‘yellow screen of
death’ when viewing your site with Firefox, chances are that one of your
plugin-authors missed a closing tag in the HTML-rendering of his/her
plugin. As a rule of thumb : go for the IMG-tags first! I’m sorry to
say, but Latexrender-Steve
is among the XHTML-offenders. (On a marginal note, LaTeXrender also has
its drawbacks : to mathematicians this may seem incredible but what
Latexrender does to get one expression displayed is to TeX an entire
file, get the image from the ps-file turn it into a gif and display it,
so one gets a GIF-folder of enrmous proportions. Hence, use Latexrender
only if you have your own server and dont have to care about memory
constraints. Another disadvantedge was that the GIFs were displayed with
a vertical offset, but this has been solved recently (use the ‘offset
beta’ files in the distribution)). Wrt. to that offset-beta version, use
this latex.php file instead (I
changed the IMG-line). Some plugins may not serve the correct headers
to display mathML. So, if you want to allow readers to have a
printer-friendly version of your mathML-post, get the WP-print plugin BUT
change to this wp-print.php file in order to
send the proper headers. Sometimes there are just forgotten lines/tags
in the code, such as in the [future calendar plugin](http://anthologyoi.com/wordpress/plugins/future-posts-calendar-
plugin.html). So, please use this version
of the future.calendar.php file. And so on, and so on. The joys of
trying to maintain a mathML-based blog… So, no surprise I’m seriously
considering to ditch mathML and change to normal headers soon. One of
the things I like about LaTeXRender is that it can be extended, meaning
that you can get your own definitions and packages loaded whereas with
mathML you’re bound to write iTeX, which Ill never manage. But, again,
mathML will be the correct technology once all major browsers are mathML
capable and the font-problem is resolved. Does anyone know whether
Safari 3 (in Leopard, that is Mac OS 10.5 to the rest of you) will be
mathML-able?

I could never have pulled this off in such a short time without Jacques Distler
more or less on constant stand-by (thanks Jacques!). Looking at the
times his emails were send I have no idea in which time zone he lives
(let alone sleeps…). So, here a walk-through the changes :

As
I’m on WP 2.0.5 I’ll start with Frederick’ post. He tells me I have to install first the itex2MML binary as
explained by
Jacques but I find that there is more recent
material and therefore download the most recent imath2MML-package
and follow the readme. There is a Mac OSX binary but it’s not clear
for what processor (PPC/Intel/Binary) but a quick mail to Jacques learns
me that it’s PPC which is fine by me but on the spot he puts a
universal binary online, so whatever your Mac is you can just download
the binary, copy it to /usr/local/bin and make sure its chmodded
755.

Back to Frederick’s post, download and install the plugin itexToMML.php in the usual way
(fortunately I spot just in time that I have to change one line saying
where my itex2MML binary is (in Frederick’s file it is NOT the default
location)). You can verify whether the plugin and itex2MML do what they
are supposed to do by typing a LaTeX-command in a post and save it. The
output will not produce the desired formula but have a look at the
source file and see whether there is some mathML code in it. If so,
fine! If not, go back and check everything.

If this works, it is
“merely” a problem of getting your mathML served. Frederick suggests
to unpack wordpress_mathML.zip in the wp-includes directory (but you
better make sure you have made a copy of the original class.php and
functions-formatting.php files. In the end I decided against this
approach (that is, to replace only the functions-formatting.php but NOT
the class.php file). If you have two or more themes you want to
maintain, it is probably better to change the headers (because this is
what we have to do to get mathML served) only in those themes which are
XML-sound. In my case, the Command Line Interface theme most certainly is NOT!!!).

Go to your
theme-files and look for the header.php (or similar) file and replace
the default header by the code in the addendum to
this post within php-tags. If you can go to your blog-page then you
are in good shape and things should work well (apart possibly from
layout considerations, see below). Of course, in my case i was greeted
by ” XML “yellow screen of death” (as Jacques calls
it) and I was convinced I did something wrong, so I tried out several
useless things for a couple of hours before it dawned on me that the
reason might just be that my blog-files were not valid XHTML (and the
new headers are very demanding on serving only well-form XHTML). I had
to modify all changes I made to sidebars etc. as well as rewrite parts
of my first posts (I used to take a rather liberal view on writing
blog-posts, writing a mixture between Markdown and improvised HTML and
in the process was very lax about closing IMG-tags and the likes).
But after some time and numerous corrections to the files I got the
main-page up and running (and even had the mathML served as a readable
formula) apart from the fact that I barely recognized my own site.

I printed out source files of the page with and without changed
headers and couldn’t find a difference. So, it had to do with the
CSS-style files, but why on earth would the new headers be picky about
CSS? But as a last resort, after narrowing the search down to one
CSS-line, I asked Jacques whether he had an idea what went on. His reply
will be remembered for quite some time :

A fascinating
question. The answer is that it *is* following the CSS directive, but
in XHTML, ‘body’ is not what you think it is. ‘body’ is just big enough
to contain its content. It does not fill the viewport. ‘html’ fills the
viewport. The solution (a solution) is described in
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000203.html

Many hours later, I still haven’t got a clue what
this is all about, but I blindly followed the hint and surely all
problems vanished. In short, another day wasted in front of a
computer-screen.

At the moment I’m back to old headers and
will not be writing mathML for some time as I have the vast job ahead to
validate all my previous posts to XHTML-standards (if not you would see
more yellows screens of death than anything else. So, here’s the
strategy I’ll be taking in the weeks ahead (I’ll sleep on it tonight
so if any of you think there is a better way, reply quickly)

• rewrite each and every post in proper MultiMarkdown using iTeX for
  the most common math and only resorting to LaTeXRender for exotic things
  (such as Sudoku, Chess, Dvonn) and run these posts through Markdown
  (to get basic HTML and all links in place).
• download these
  files to the WP-database (so that in the CLI-interface you will be able
  to follow all links, but will read all iTeX as TeX-commands (as the
  command line intended after all).
• in the process change all
  broken links to the default permalink-structure (with index.php?p=231 or
  so).

Clearly, this is a work that will take a couple of
weeks but it may be fun to reread these old posts and possibly add new
information about the subjects. When I’m making these changes, I’ll
use the new headers so if you are using a smart browser look out for the
yellow screens. When they happen, either use a dumb browser (such as
Safari) or go into CLI-interface mode where everything should still
work. I plan to start with the oldest posts as this seems more fun to
me.