Forum: Instiki – Topic: Feature Requests

Ah.

That is indeed a bug. Fixed (in Instiki and Heterotic Beast, too). Thanks.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Feature Requests

Take a look at http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Sandbox (feel free to ignore the request, I put that there to ensure that no-one messed with them before you’d seen it). Each theorem has .num_theorem style so the CSS counts them. However, the counting that is done by Instiki to find the theorem numbers for use in \ref{...} commands only counts those with ID tags. So the labels for the theorems that I do want to refer to are miscounted because I prefer to have all my theorems numbered rather than only number those that I explicitly refer to.

Does the same issue happen here. Let’s experiment:

Theorem 1 refers to A, Theorem 3 to C, and Theorem 6 to F.

Yes, so it’s the same here. Thus, no need to check the Sandbox. Here’s the source of what I just typed:

+-- {: .num_theorem #a}
###### Theorem

The first letter of the English alphabet is A.
=--

+-- {: .num_theorem}
###### Theorem

The second letter of the English alphabet is B.
=--

+-- {: .num_theorem #c}
###### Theorem

The third letter of the English alphabet is C.
=--

+-- {: .num_theorem}
###### Theorem

The fourth letter of the English alphabet is D.
=--

+-- {: .num_theorem}
###### Theorem

The fifth letter of the English alphabet is E.
=--

+-- {: .num_theorem #f}
###### Theorem

The sixth letter of the English alphabet is F.
=--

Theorem \ref{a} refers to A, Theorem \ref{c} to C, and Theorem \ref{f} to F.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Feature Requests

The issue of needing ids to keep theorem numbers in step has been raised (again).

I’m not quite sure what the issue is.

So if I write

+-- {: .num_theorem}
###### Theorem
$X$ is nuclear and Banach if and only if it is finite dimensional
=--

your theorems still get numbered (correctly, I hope).

Since there’s no label, there’s no easy way to refer to this theorem, but maybe you don’t care. And if you do care, wouldn’t you want to avoid the fragility associated to an automatically-generated id (which will change if someone re-orders the theorems, adds a new one, or whatever)?

I must be misunderstanding…

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Feature Requests

The issue of needing ids to keep theorem numbers in step has been raised (again). Mike came up with a suggestion which seems reasonable on first reading which is that instiki (or whichever part of it is appropriate) adds an automatic id if one isn’t present, much in the way that the table of contents part does.

So if I write

+-- {: .num_theorem}
###### Theorem
$X$ is nuclear and Banach if and only if it is finite dimensional
=--

then instiki adds an automatic id, say id="theorem1" where the 1 gets incremented according to the internal counter (which it has, if I remember right, since it uses that to figure out the ref number). Would this be feasible?

Forum: Instiki – Topic: S5 presentation export

Thanks for thinking some more! :-)

I wonder why the number of files is so large. If you look at the “nanoc-slidy” solution the number of files does not look too big. BTW some of the features of JessyInk (inkscape) - the option of inserting “whiteboards” during the talk and draw on the slides would certainly be another great feature. Although I know how much work that means, a tool which supports in collecting information for lectures, at the same time allows for preparing the slides and at the end you get an output which you can use on any computer with a browser (or a portable firefox). And this program supports drawing on the slides … I am dreaming - but Instiki has great potential!

Thanks

T

Forum: Instiki – Topic: S5 presentation export

It’s not so clear to me what the best approach is.

The number of CSS and Javascript files (MathJax, in particular, is huge) required to support a single S5 slideshow is very large.

It would be possible, but very inefficient, to produce a Zip file, with all of that junk, for every slideshow you decided to export.

In some ways, you’d be better off putting an entire Instiki installation on a USB stick (assuming that the host computer has Ruby).

A hybrid approach would be to export a static file of the S5 slideshow, with the URLs rewritten to point to the files in an Instiki installation.

Gotta think some more …

Forum: Instiki – Topic: S5 presentation export

As far as I can see, an export of a S5 slideshow with all the scripts is not implemented with the current version of instiki. I believe this would be a great feature if one could export a slide show which was prepared within instiki onto a memory stick (with all the scripts, css and embedded graphs at the right place) and use the presentation “offline” on a system without a ruby/rails/instiki installation.

Is there some work around to achieve this?

T

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Feature Requests

I’m sure there’s a solution for that: …

Is this a feature that is implemented somewhere?

Your short description is slightly … underspecified. So looking at an actual implementation would be helpful to me, in deciding whether this is something to implement in Instiki.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Feature Requests

That sounds like a request for macro-support in itex. For a variety of reasons, that’s unlikely to happen.

What I mean is a research-friendly facility

• to define vocabularies for abstract mathematical languages (notations), and
• to render terms of that language in configurable ways. An implementation of this idea might use Turing-complete macros, but would be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

I, for one, would be against this. It would actually hinder collaboration as everyone would have to learn the local conventions every time they wanted to edit a page, and stuff that worked on one wouldn’t work on another.

I’m sure there’s a solution for that: A vocabulary could be modelled in a distributed fashion much like OWL ontologies or XML Schema Definitions, which allow for importing other “vocabularies” (ontologies/schemata). One could even imagine a versioning and migration scheme to implement the global refactorings I mentioned in my first post. I haven’t thought this through, but that might even be a practical application of basic category theory ;) BTW this also has the advantage that a user doesn’t have to learn the language again and again.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Feature Requests

That sounds like a request for macro-support in itex. For a variety of reasons, that’s unlikely to happen.

I, for one, would be against this. It would actually hinder collaboration as everyone would have to learn the local conventions every time they wanted to edit a page, and stuff that worked on one wouldn’t work on another.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Feature Requests

That sounds like a request for macro-support in itex. For a variety of reasons, that’s unlikely to happen.

On the other hand, perhaps you have something else in mind …

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Feature Requests

As far as I can see, there’s a lot of discussion about notational conventions on nLab, e.g. in the article on comma categories. However, there’s a huge number of articles that would have to changed if some notation actually was to be consistently adopted. I haven’t made any scientific investigations, but it seems clear to me that this hinders improvement of notation. Good notation is essential for making mathematics intuitive and useable, so wouldn’t it make sense to add powerful features for expressing and experimenting with notations?

A first step would be separating data and presentation, e.g. writing “\commacategory{F}{G}” or similar (not necessarily itex) instead of “F \downarrow G”. The concrete notation would be specified at a separate stage. This could happen

• globally by the site operators to consistently change all occurences
• per-article by the authors e.g. to avoid notation clashes
• individually by the user based on his preferences.

If this was done in every article, changing notations would become a matter of seconds. This would of course mean that in the case of nLab, some thousands of articles have to be changed (maybe some heuristics could be used to speed this up), but that has to be done only once and then hopefully never again. Future search-and-replace style global “refactorings” for generalizing or normalizing notation would become possible, too.

The major technical challenge I see would be finding a good mechanism for specifying abstract notations. The rest should be pretty straightforward.

What do you think about this?

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Feature Requests

(Hopefully minor) feature request: this came up in a discussion on citing the nLab. It would be convenient to have the current revision number displayed on the page somewhere obvious. Perhaps the footer could read:

Version 144, revised on December 1, 2011 11:24:39 by …

I know it’s easy to deduce - take the number after “Back in time” and add 1 - which is why I said “convenient” rather than anything stronger.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Bugs

Your page is a good example for what I wanted to say. The content text is large (even larger than on this page, I believe), in contrast to the table of contents text which is rather “normal” size, similar to how most Web pages out there would show up in my browser. I would expect, that Instiki does not enlarge the content text by default, but leave it to the page designer to tune the font size, if (s)he thinks it’s needed.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Bugs

Q: what do I need to do to get Instiki chosing a normal font size for my Web by default?

You might try setting the font-size on #Content. But I’m puzzled: is the font-size different from what you see on my Instiki site (which should be the same as the font-size here). Or are those also too large for your taste?

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Bugs

I installed the latest development version, and the bug with the schema is gone indeed. Thanks! The content is also migrated with some hand-work… A nice Import feature would be really helpful. Any plans?

Now I’m struggling with something else: The (normal) text of my Web is displayed in a rather large font. Much larger than it is displayed for example on the “Edit Web” page. I see font-size: 1em in instiki.css, which looks fine to me, so I can’t explain it. I’d like to have a “normal” font size, so I’m tweaking the style sheet, defining a proper font-size for my Web on body, but then the Edit Web page’s font gets too small…

Q: what do I need to do to get Instiki chosing a normal font size for my Web by default?

Thanks again for good hints.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Bugs

Hi, I’m trying out Instiki 0.19.3 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard and am running into an issue when publishing a Web. On each page (at the top) I get displayed: …

That’s a bug, which was fixed in Revision 770.

Grab a copy of the latest development version (or get it from my BZR repository or from Github).

Another issue: after installing a new version if Instiki I wanted to import the extisting content from the old installation.

You can copy over your old database, and then follow the upgrade instructions to update the schema to the latest version.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Bugs

Another issue: after installing a new version if Instiki I wanted to import the extisting content from the old installation. There’s a nice feature to export content, but I could not find an import feature. Is there one?

Thanks in advance for good hints!

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Bugs

Hi, I’m trying out Instiki 0.19.3 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard and am running into an issue when publishing a Web. On each page (at the top) I get displayed:

<style type='text/css'>.newWikiWord { background-color: white; font-style: italic; }</style>

in the Browser. This is apparently caused by a line:

<style type='text/css'>.newWikiWord { background-color: white; font-style: italic; }</style>

placed in the HTML source. Any ideas how to fix that?

Forum: Instiki – Topic: nlab

The “save”s were all due to one bot and none actually made it to the database.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: nlab

Okay, so looking through the week’s log for bots (bot, spider, crawler), I get 33,517 hits (actual time period: 11th December 6:25am to 16th December 11:27am, so that’s an average of a little over 4 hits per minute). These break down as follows:

• 25690: show
• 2953: new
• 1345: history
• 1290: edit
• 1029: source
• 395: cancel_edit
• 81: files
• 67: atom_with_headlines
• 53: recently_revised
• 15: save
• 13: atom_with_content

There’s a few that I’ve missed out in between - there are clearly some bad links to the nlab.

I’d say that only show should show in that list. source could, but I don’t really see why. The saves are a bit worrying - I’m going to check those!

Next is to analyse how those are distributed.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: nlab

Is it obvious why the spider aren’t just hitting the cache (in which case, they should not slow down the system at all)?

Are they asking for all revisions of some page (or whatever), that would entail a large percentage of cache-misses?

I ask, just because it seems to me that, if they are operating correctly, spiders shouldn’t lead to an undue slowdown. Maybe I’ve been remiss about

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

directives.

In any case, is it clear that your 3-queue scheme is better than having one queue, with a larger number of worker processes? (I.e., do these spiders insist on making multiple simultaneous connections, or do they access the nlab serially?)

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Bugs

That’s pretty strange. I have not been able to reproduce the problem.

Obviously, having dummy /app/helper/admin_helper.rb and /app/helper/file_helper.rb files does no harm, but I’m puzzled by the fact that they seem to be necessary for you.

Forum: Instiki – Topic: Bugs

I just created a fresh install of instiki (0.19.3) on mac osx snow leopard. Ruby 1.9.3 (ruby 1.9.3p6 (2011-12-13 revision 34018) x86_64-darwin10.8.0).

After running through the usual steps to download dependencies, tried kicking off ./instiki. Consistently got the following error: ...instiki/instiki-0.19.3/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:186:in require’: cannot load such file – admin_helper (LoadError) from …instiki/instiki-0.19.3/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:186:in require' from ...instiki/instiki-0.19.3/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:293:in require_or_load’ from …instiki/instiki-0.19.3/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:252:in depend_on' from ...instiki/instiki-0.19.3/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:163:in require_dependency’ from …instiki/instiki-0.19.3/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/helpers.rb:198:in default_helper_module!'

After banging my head for several hours and inserting debug statements, I figured that it is looking for the file ‘admin_helper’ which does not exist in any folder. I created a dummy file /instiki-0.19.3/app/helpers/admin_helper.rb with an empty modue AdminHelper. Similarly, created another file /instiki-0.19.3/app/helpers/file_helper.rb

Now instiki starts up fine, and I am able to create a few pages.

What could be going wrong?

Forum: Instiki – Topic: nlab

Any thoughts on the following idea?

From time to time, the nLab gets a whole host of spiders and other bots crawling all over it. While I understand that they’re part of what makes the internet work, they can be a bit annoying and slow down the server for everyone else. So I thought of channelling requests a little more cleverly than I currently do. At the moment, I use a global queue in passenger which is fine until all the slots get a slow request. So what I thought was to have a semi-global queue with slow requests (like feeds and lists) and bots being handled by a few dedicated processes, normal requests by some others, and maybe a “priority” list as well. Since passenger doesn’t do this itself (it either has global queue or individual queues) I think that what I’d have to do is to have three virtual versions of the nLab, at least as far as apache and passenger are concerned. Then apache would examine the request and classify it according to which type it was and send it to the right version of the nLab. Passenger wouldn’t know that these are the same so would have a global queue for each, and that way requests get segregated and so don’t hold up others in other segments. The way that I’d have three virtual versions is simply with symlinks in the filesystem: “nlab”, “nlabPriority”, and “nlabSlow” would all be symlinks to the same instiki installation.

Can you see any immediate problems with that? As far as Instiki is concerned, it’s just like being run under passenger as there will be multiple instances of instiki running concurrently, which is what already happens. So that shouldn’t be affected. Apache, also, eats this sort of thing for breakfast, and passenger can cope with different programs as well. So I don’t see an immediate flaw.

(Of course, it may be that this won’t solve the blockage, but it’s less drastic than moving servers which is the other option.)

Forum: itex2MML – Topic: Bugs

I notice that Frederic has now closed this and says that the correct way to handle them is with movablelimits="false". So that makes this now an itex bug again!

Forum: Heterotic Beast – Topic: How can I arrange the order of forum ?

When logged-in as admin, click on the “edit” link, next to a forum in the list of forums.

Forum: Heterotic Beast – Topic: How can I arrange the order of forum ?

I’ve create several forums with admin account. It seems to show up on the top with recently created orders. but how can I change the order of forum ? and how can I delete the specific forum ?

Forum: Heterotic Beast – Topic: redirecting bug ??

Evidently, the default mailer configuration isn’t working for you.

In the latest revision, I’ve made the configuration easier to customize (edit config/initializers/mail.rb). That should do it for you.

Forum: Heterotic Beast – Topic: redirecting bug ??

Thanks a lot !

Finally I got the forum now ! http://forum.peppercode.net

But another little problem has arisen.

When I sign up for new user, notification mail is failed to deliver.

(development environment works fine. because it ignore to fail)

And site says:

We're sorry, but something went wrong.

We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.

And production.log is

Started POST "/users" for 118.36.184.24 at Thu Dec 01 07:15:34 +0900 2011
  Processing by UsersController#create as HTML
  Parameters: {"commit"=>"Sign up", "authenticity_token"=>"ktzSyfq2jKdHmHII7m3EpvxHF3loOUR2rx9P8dkBfGA=",
 "utf8"=>"\342\234\223", "user"=>{"openid_url"=>"", "password_confirmation"=>"[FILTERED]",
 "password"=>"[FILTERED]", "login"=>"jufoot3", "email"=>"jufoot3@gmail.com"}}
Rendered user_mailer/signup_notification.text.erb (0.3ms)

Sent mail to jufoot3@gmail.com (44ms)
Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 102ms

Errno::ECONNREFUSED (Connection refused - connect(2)):
  app/models/user/states.rb:41:in `do_activation'
  app/models/user/activation.rb:8:in `set_first_user_as_activated'
  app/controllers/users_controller.rb:40:in `create'

PS. Do I have to separate this post from this thread ?..