April 2008 Archives
So long in the leg, the neck, and the bill,
I, dribbler of frog ruins, stock-still
epicure of sluggish fish, fish who take
my ankles for cane shoots, idiot
fish, will gladly regurgitate ten boluses
of choicest offal if you can name
even one of my regrets.
I see you writing in your notebook. Sloppy.
First I had regrets, and now I know a notebook
when I see one. I hope you have a license
for this, Monsieur Jumelles.
There! again! Who but the most craven
obscurantist switches languages like that?
It was bad enough to be a talking egret,
but this, this—the way you tread, no
stealth at all, fish scattering to the
deep—this is how “the multiple seed,
packed tight with detail, soured,
is lost in the flux and the mind,
distracted, floats off in the same
scum.”
Enough.
This is my lake. It has a lot of small
animals in it. I am not going to eat them all,
and neither are you.
The temporal expression (if
ever occurs in a temporal sequence, it occurs only after the first occurrence of
) may be defined as
. Recall that
(
“waits for”
) is typically defined to mean
(either
repeats forever or
repeats until
occurs).
The following equivalence defines in terms of
. Note that
(eventually
) is short for
, and
holds in one state iff
occurs in the next state.
This post has been a shameless test of my new-found typesetting abilities.
In order to become more familiar with the implementation of Markdown, I spent my free time today extending the language with a new syntax for embedding mathematical notation. Extending Markdown was not entirely trivial, even though my new syntax did not conflict with any other Markdown syntax, but the results are pretty satisfying:
$$ n! \equiv \prod_{i=1}^n i =
$$ 1 \cdot 2 \cdot \ldots \cdot n
turns into
The in-line environment is also available. For instance, the sum , written
$1 + 2 + \ldots + n$
has a well-known closed form (apocryphally due to Gauss):
Formatting often changes between environments to avoid ugly line spacing; for instance, here is the in-line version of that sum: .
My latest implementation of a class factory for JavaScript:
function Class(arg) {
var proto = clone(arg), i = 1;
while ((arg = arguments[i++]))
extend(proto, arg);
return proto.constructor = extend(function() {
this.initialize.apply(this, arguments);
}, { prototype: proto, derive: derive });
}
Vital functions like clone and derive remain to be explained, but I’m really just trying to see whether Markdown plays nicely with code.
I’ve spent the past week experimenting half-heartedly with various b!@&&ing software: TextPattern, WordPress, and now Movable Type. You can see where my loyalty has settled. Key selling point: MT came with Markdown/SmartyPants and Textile 2 preinstalled (not that it would ever make sense to use both simultaneously, but it’s nice to have options). Good riddance, WordPress Rich Text Editor! Also, I appreciate that MT publishes a set of static pages rather than dynamically generating every page. This kind of website (you will not catch me using the ‘b’-word) benefits very little from dragging a database into the picture every time a page is viewed.
Incidentally, my first ever—what to call it?—“personal ideation” website, seemath.org, used Movable Type. I imagined seven years might have brought some new contender to the fore, but I have yet to be impressed with any other option.
