So I didn’t get around to updating last night before going to bed at 3:30, but I’m getting around to it now. You should notice the site overhaul: I still have a garish gimp flame-plugin thing, but I needed some green, and making something by hand just wasn’t working out. The color scheme is based on brown, just because it is? I tried it out, and it worked, so I ran with it. Also, I brought back the side bar.

More important news: it is spring break for me! It’s partly why I spent an afternoon screwing around with my blog style, and I hope that I’ll get a load of things done this week ‘round. As I said before, I’ll hope to grab pretty much everything else that I’ll need to finish the reprap before the heat death of the universe, and if certain professors are around, I’ll stick around and cut some more parts. That in itself would be a pretty good use of my break, but I’ll also be looking at describing and improving my algorithm for the BAP problem I’ve been talking about: keeping people in the dark about what I’m talking about is no fun. I’ll also clear out my old list of draft posts, make up/set up an image manager that isn’t crappy, and work on EZLO. On top of this, I do need to finish the homework profs have assigned over the break, finish applying to REUs, and save the world. Oh, and anim3 needs some serious work.

Well, I think it’s about time to get started on these things. Stay tuned.

Google, being the benevolent giant they are, have made the api to their document viewer public. Upon realizing this, I added the option to view PDFs through Google rather than downloading a copy each time you wanted to check something. It works reasonably well, although you have to set your PDF to be public in order for it to work (or show up as an option). Hope you guys have fun with that.

So, I’ve decided that every friday will be devoted to ignoring homework as much as humanly possible, and instead working on one of my side projects. So, today, I fixed the showing older document function (technically, actually made it publicly available), fixed the image handling so that it works with the dual LaTeX engines, and just did some plain ol’ code refactoring for the image handling. You’ll also notice that there’s a new reload function that will reload your images for you, so you don’t have to reload the page to get the newest images uploaded by someone else.

A quick note: once you’ve inserted an image, changing the engine will not change the file extension for image code that is already inserted. Well, if I just lop off the file extension, it still works: plus, the image code should clean up after itself, and pdftex/vanilla latex are probably smart enough to look for the right extension (eps/png) so it should be all good, even if it doesn’t clean up well. Note to future users/self when documenting: vanilla latex will use the eps format will use lossy compression: pdftex images will use png. Just a caveat there…

Also, there is an annoying tendency for the mysql server to run off and consume 100% cpu on a single core system. It’s happened several times, and I can’t get into mysql to figure out what’s going on. Also, chrome (at least edge) doesn’t seem to like editarea, since it screws with the overlay. I’ll have to figure that out sometime: maybe later. It is, after all, 1am, and I need to sleep.

I’ve done some work on EZLO! The first time in at least a month! Even though I haven’t exposed the functionality, you can access your old stuff now. Also, I gave the login page a facelift and exposed the link to the quickstart. Now for outstanding issues:

• Diffs *need* to work. If more than one person (myself) uses this at a time, bandwidth could become a problem. Also, diffs would allow multiple people to work on a doc at a time.
• Images need to be overhauled to handle multiple engines. Also, the thumbnails are cute, but not functional. I should probably combo thumbs with names, so that people also have an incentive to rename to something meaningful.

• Overhaul the visual style of the site.
• Overhaul the templating system, make insertions votes, allow ajax search.
• Support for Bibtex.
• Custom keybindings.

I’ve just added the choice to build a pdf with either pdftex or vanilla latex and dvipdf. Although they’re pretty similar, sometimes you want one over the other (pdftex doesn’t work with pst-circ, for example, or pdftex can take png images). Note: I have not overhauled the image system to deal with this yet. This might mean I’ll have to convert on demand, or something, which might be for the best, since having more images than necessary might be detrimental to my hard drive space.

Also, I just learned about hyperref. I’ll have to keep that in mind for future experiments.

Fun fun!

EZLO so far has been using a fastcgi backend, with lightty up front. However, this hasn’t been the best of worlds, since the dispatch.fcgi processes would die at a certain time in the morning, and I couldn’t figure out how why or how to find out how (I got as far as trying to parse through the process accounting). I just got fed up and decided to ditch fastcgi and run a full-fledged http server as a backend.

There was a post I read a while back (I can’t find it, though) which claimed that cgi and fastcgi are hacks, and that using the web server as a proxy for application specific web servers is the simpler, more transparent method. HTTP has been around for ages, in contrast with fastcgi, the young protocol that no one loves.

With a dual mongrel backend (mongrel being a ruby/c web server), I’ve noted that the speed of the site seems to have dropped, and memory usage jumped up; however, mongrel knows I’m in development mode, so we’ll have to see how it responds when I push it into production mode. The memory usage isn’t something I’m happy about, but I’m not sure what else I could do, since they’re actually just full-blown web servers. I just tell myself it’ll be more flexible in the long run…

Also, as I’ve been doing alot of reorganization of the directory structure in anticipation of a release, I’ve thought about how to package up EZLO into something distributable seems less than easy, meaning it might actually take an appreciable amount of effort to just package it up into a release. Just a note.