I like Java. Well, that is, I don’t dislike Java as much as I dislike most other langauges. I’d honestly prefer ML, but I’d be without the massive ball of mud that is the Java class libraries, the wonder that is Eclipse, and ANTLR. I need these. It’s a weakness. Continue reading »
I used to have a site that used LaTeX to render equations. This worked pretty well, except that I didn’t have LaTeX installed on the server. It turns out that you can do pretty well without it.
There’s an excellent program called mimeTeX that renders math without a TeX installation. I used it with Drupal and DruTeX. Now I’m not using Drupal… so I need to find another way to display math. Oh, mimeTeX still works, but you have to explicitly encode the link. I’m way too lazy to do that.
Update: I’ve been experimenting with using [ tex ]…[ /tex ] from the mimeTex plugin to WordPress. It’s working now, but I needed to do two things to make it work.
I also had to go into the cache folder and delete all the files that were created during the process, so I could see the effect of the changes. But now it works!
Here’s an example of an equation array. Note that you need to use & to insert the required ampersand delimiters.
[ tex ]\begin{eqnarray}
\overset{*}{\triangleright}\!(uvx) & = & \triangleright\!(\overset{*}{\triangleright}\!(uv)x) \\
& = & \triangleright\!(\overset{*}{\triangleright}\!(\overset{*}{\triangleright}\!(u)v)x) \\
& = & \overset{*}{\triangleright}\!(\overset{*}{\triangleright}\!(u)vx)
\end{eqnarray}[ /tex ]
So… shouldn’t everyone just install LaTeX by default? Shouldn’t all CMS ship with some math solution? Of course! 
Over the past month my hard disk failed in my MacBook Pro (again), my wife’s MacBook, and our old Dell laptop. The Macs are both still on warranty, but the Dell’s not. Odd, you know? Anyway, this shows the general usefulness of two things: external hard disks and Apple’s Time Machine software. I’m currently running my Mac off of an external hard disk until I can get it back to Apple. Fun!
Welcome to Stacy’s blog. There isn’t much here, since Stacy is rather busy at the moment. But he may be adding content in the near future… or not.