wiki of the future?

Last weekend I have been watching, reading and playing around with Ward Cunningham's Smallest Federated Wiki. As usual he is a great designer and aims to simple, effective, understandable and useful tools! I particularly like the plugins idea (not new of course) and how easy it seems to be to add new ones, like support for MathJax:
Get inspired you too!

syntax highlight

The following example shows how to syntax highligh some snippet of code in a very minimalistic way.
I used it by symlinking to a file in the version control repo and name it in as the argument of
$('#code-area').load() and here it is:

  
  
  
  
  



Metacircular code highlighting
The following code is an highlighted version of this very page using
SyntaxHighlighter.


You need a decent modern browser to enjoy it.



  
  

metacircularity

I found and liked a very good summary of the 'Maxwell Equations of software' motto from Alan Kay in this post from Michael Nielsen.

It is nice also because it has running code inspired by all the gurus and books I like: Alan Kay, Peter Norvig, John McCarthy, SICP, Paul Graham.

Git and RSA identities

Here is the solution I found to be able to use git with a different RSA identity than the rsa_id default one.

My repo on github is logback-android and my user account is espinielli.
I did generate an SSH key as per github help and named it github_rsa:
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your_email@youremail.com" -f github_rsa

I then added the following section in ~/.ssh/config
# github for espinielli
Host github
HostName github.com
User espinielli
IdentityFile /Users/espin/.ssh/github_rsa

From within the repo directory (I cloned it before via http):
$ git remote add gh ssh://git@github.com/espinielli/logback-android.git

And finally I am able to use it like this:
$ git push gh master

LaTeX on Blogger again

My previous post about LaTeX  on Blogger reported that the solution described there did not work anymore...
Now I found a new solution based on mathjax.

So let's try it straight away with inline math, like the great equation \(e^{-2\pi}\), and with displayed math like the following:
\[ \left [ - \frac{\hbar^2}{2 m} \frac{\partial^2}{\partial x^2} + V \right ] \Psi
= i \hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial t} \Psi \]

(What was) Croquet is maybe still alive

It seems there is still some hope to see Croquet (or, OpenCobalt which took off from where Croquet stopped) alive and based on latest Squeak and more importantly using Cog VM.
Matthew Fulmer reports it here.

The potentials are magical as explained by Howard Stearns.

Investigating Pier

I have been playing around with Pier.
It is fun, especially when you can extend it to show LaTeX formulae (this is still work in progress given I am using the js from MathJax [even if forbidden], but hey I wanted a proof of concept!)

I will try to complete it: whatch out 'Beautiful Math for Pier' on squeaksource.