ChapterZero

New development: it may not be MT that is acting up, but instead Opera. I couldn’t log in with Opera just now, even after changing my password, but now using IE I logged in on one try. Only time will tell. I just downloaded the MT upgrade, and will be installing it soon. Nothing else.

Hmmm… just figured it out I think: I checked Opera’s cookie cache, and saw a bad loginkey/user cookie pair for biharmonic.org; after deleting them, I could log in. So I just set Opera to autodelete cookies on log out. I would rather just use Wand to log in anyway. Cookies suck, in general. Unless I’m the one who set them

I forgot what I was originally going to post, because MT has been acting up lately. It refuses to let me log in, unless I change the password, and even then it doesn’t accept the new password right away. At first, it gave an invalid password message, but now it just returns me to the log in screen. I had to wait a couple of hours between wanting to say something, and actually being able to log in; that really sucks.

In lieu of a well planned assay on what I’ve been up to lately: I emailed my room mate for the summer this morning, to introduce myself. I also looked him up on his school site to see if he had a web site– no luck. I also posted the pics from yesterday’s End of Year Banquet for NSCS– to me they look pretty crappy, probably because of the ImageMagick conversion process. I was also shown an extremely cool website, falstad.com, by one of the grad students in the research group. That is only the second site I’ve ever bookmarked for its applets (the first was a DSP site, whose applets pale in comparison to this site’s). I particularly like the Electrodynamics applet: it allows you to choose a source, and what you would like visualized (E/B/j, and a slew of other things), set the frequency, resolution, etc; while it is running a visualization of this setup, you can change all the settings interactively, and use your mouse to insert various things, like changes in the region’s em properties (permeability, conductivity, etc.) and perfect/fair/good conductors, magnets, etc. I used it to see the balancing/shielding effect of a pair of wires, and then to see what effect changing the current on one wire had upon the fields (of course, the system became unbalanced, and there was then a traveling wave). This particular applet is so good, I’m considering bringing it to the attention of my prof, so he can let his students know about it– it is a really good visualization tool.

Of course, being who I am, I am daydreaming about extending the applet so it can do more things, and provide more quantitative data, so it could be used for instance to visualize standing wave patterns in a waveguide, or to numerically show what the fields radiated by an arbitrary antenna geometry look like. I forgot to mention the source code is available.

I discovered a php tool for doing what I’ve always intended to write an MT extension for: the process of including TeX rendered formula into blog entries. It works by parsing the text for the formula, moving it into a temporary file, rendering it into a dvi file, dvipsing that file, converting it to gif/jpg/png whatever, then trimming that file. It also has the nice feature of caching rendered formulae; it does so by renaming the file to the md5 hash value of the formula, and displaying such a file if it exists instead of rendering the formula.

It sucks that PHP and MT don’t integrate well; what’s more to the point, it sucks that PHP and Perl don’t integrate well. Well, at all really. So I was thinking of porting it to Perl, which will be really straightforward. I have that MathMT text formatting engine that I’ve been “designing” for the past several months installed in my Text formatting listbox, but it has no features. After porting LaTeXRender to Perl, I could write a wrapper that allows MathMT to call LaTeXRender to allow easy integration of high quality math formulas with MT– the purpose of all this effort in the first place.

Of course, LaTeXRender requires a TeTeX installation, along with the requisite ImageMagick tools to have its full functionality. But, it can also be used with MimeTeX. Pretty spiffy– those with space for the considerable overhead, or who already have all of it installed, would be able to have the full power of TeX, while those who aren’t willing to install TeTeX in full, or can’t, can resort to a slightly crappier MimeTeX.