Hurricane Sandy hammered the mid-Atlantic region starting October 29, 2012. It was a terrible storm, and even now, approaching mid-November, areas hardest hit are still experiencing hardships.

Having dealt with many past BG&E power outages, most recently five days without power due to the June 2012 Derecho, I regularly capture their outage (bit) map for my own records. The derecho also motivated me to capture Dominion Electric VA’s outage map regularly for comparison. Here are examples for BG&E and Dominion VA for October 29, 2012 as Sandy made landfall:

(right-click and view image for full image;   more loops here)

Loops are available here for October 29 through November 3, 2012. The README.md contains some description and direct links to the raw gifs.

Luckily, my area maintained power all through Sandy’s attack. Time for a transfer switch, a portable power generator, and a fuel stock for the next unplanned outage.

Best wishes to those in NY and NJ for relief and restoration of services.

A few updates:

• MathJax with help from
  • chico: Octopress with MathJax by kramdown
  • Gregory Lussier: How to Integrate MathJax LaTeX Mathematics Markup in Octopress
  • Steven Shaw: Hello MathJax
• New theme
  • Alessandro Melandri: darkstripes (as submodule)

One annoying thing that occurred with

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$ rake install['darkstripes']

was the over-writing of all my custom sass, e.g., styles, etc. This seems a little unnecessary, since it’s already labeled custom. Why not leave it, or move it out of the main theme, so it’s not stomped on theme switch. If your custom changes mess-up the theme, that should be up to you to fix. Nuking things is never a good idea, unless we’re talking microwave.

Before starting, read the disclaimer below.

Long live $\TeX$!

If you are a Mac and $\TeX$ user, you are likely a MacTeX user. If you’ve been using it for a while, you have probably accumulated a fair number of versions, since it is on a roughly yearly release cycle. To remove the cruft before installing a new release, I’ve taken to removing the old installation. If you’ve tried this, you may have looked at the uninstall instructions, e.g. for 2011, and found them to be, well, somewhat lacking, e.g. stackexchange. The last part, where the instructions suggest using Show Files from the installer, not particularly useful, given the number of files involved, and the fact there didn’t seem to be a way (on 10.7.4) to export the file list.

What’s installed

Like the uninstall procedure expects, you’ll need access to the 2011 MacTeX.mpkg.zip file. Make a directory and unzip the file

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$ mkdir cleanup
$ cd cleanup
$ unzip /path/to/MacTeX.mpkg.zip

which could create a MacTeX.mpkg directory in your pwd. Now you can build a table of contents from the archives included, assuming bash

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for a in $(find MacTeX.mpkg -name Archive.pax.gz); do
  pax -zvf $a | awk '{print $9}' | sed -e 's/^.//'
done > mactex.toc

Relax, it may take some time, on the order of a minute or two.

Dirs and files

From the toc, the files and dirs can be separated. We know two directories whose individual files and sub-directories will be removed wholesale

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/Applications/TeX
/usr/local/texlive/2011

These trees are filtered from the toc to reduce the noise in the output. A small script will test if a line is a directory (-d) or a regular file (-f)

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#!/bin/bash

I='mactex-2011-toc.txt'
P=( \
  "^\/usr\/local\/texlive\/2011\/.+$" \
  "^\/Applications\/TeX\/.+$" \
)

case "$1" in
  -d) O='mdirs.txt';;
  -f) O='mfiles.txt';;
   *) echo "usage: getem.sh [-d|-f]"; exit 1;;
esac

for l in $(sed -E -e "/${P[0]}|${P[1]}/d" < $I); do
  test "$1" "$l" && echo "$l"
done | sort -u > $O

The P var holds the sed patterns to filter everything below the tree heads identified above. For my install, the directories output were

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/Applications
/Applications/TeX
/Library
/Library/Fonts
/usr
/usr/local
/usr/local/bin
/usr/local/lib
/usr/local/lib/ImageMagick-6.6.9
/usr/local/lib/ImageMagick-6.6.9/modules-Q16
/usr/local/lib/ImageMagick-6.6.9/modules-Q16/coders
/usr/local/lib/ImageMagick-6.6.9/modules-Q16/filters
/usr/local/share
/usr/local/share/ghostscript
/usr/local/share/ghostscript/9.02
/usr/local/share/ghostscript/9.02/doc
/usr/local/share/ghostscript/9.02/examples
/usr/local/share/ghostscript/9.02/examples/cjk
/usr/local/share/ghostscript/9.02/lib
/usr/local/share/man
/usr/local/share/man/de
/usr/local/share/man/de/man1
/usr/local/share/man/man1
/usr/local/texlive
/usr/local/texlive/2011

Clearly, there are some directories that should not be removed! My revised dir list was

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/Applications/TeX
/usr/local/texlive/2011
/usr/local/lib/ImageMagick-6.6.9
/usr/local/share/ghostscript

So, in addition to the two trees we already expected to prune, the additional installed ImageMagick and ghostscript dirs will be removed. These were removed by invoking

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$ cat mdirs-short.txt | xargs sudo rm -rf

where sudo is necessary, as it was installed as root. On to the files, like removing the dirs, invoke

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$ cat mfiles.txt | xargs sudo rm -f

Once complete, you should feel about 1.7 GB lighter for the full install.

The preference pane

To remove the old preference pane from System Preferences

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$ sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/TeXDistPrefPane.prefPane

Comments

If you instead installed the smaller package, or also added the extras, use the same process once you obtain a toc from the files.

Now the upgrade

Out with the old and in with the new. The old cruft is gone and you can install the new release. Happy $\TeX$-ing.

Disclaimer

This is the process I used to clean-up Mac$\TeX$ 2011. Use it at your own risk. This procedure is provided AS-IS and without warranty of any kind. In no event will I be liable for any damages arising out of the use or inability to use this process. For example, if it causes wild flying monkeys to burst from your bum, proceed to rend your citadel down around your ears, put your old floppy disk into your toaster and use it to set fire to the detritus of your keep and salt the very earth, all while you watch from the last remaining parapet: your problem, not mine.

The problem: post-local CSS

In a recent post, I wanted to add a zebra table ([1],[2]) via the CSS3 tr:nth-child selectors, see StackOverflow. But the default Octopress markdown drove me crazy by wrapping everything in <p></p> which killed my <style> attempts. A quick glance at the markdown syntax doc suggested I could use <div> to get around this.

An example

It is useful to define the style locally since a global definition may not fit all circumstances. In the style below, we define a the table class ztab1 along with a few other style elements to dress up the table.

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<div>
  <style>
     table.ztab1 {
        margin: auto;
        font-size: 70%;
        border: 1px solid black;
      }

      table.ztab1 th {
        font-weight: bold;
        background-color: steelblue;
        text-align: center;
        border-bottom: 2px solid black;
      }

      table.ztab1 th,td {
        padding: 4px 5px;
      }

      table.ztab1 tr:nth-of-type(odd) {
        background-color: lightsteelblue;
      }

      table.ztab1 tr:nth-of-type(even) {
        background-color: cornflowerblue;
      }
  </style>
</div>

The result

Using the ztab1 table class defined above allows us to input raw HTML table to produce

The first column entries are centered by

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<td style="text-align: center;">1</td>

Conclusion

using a <div> tag wrapper prevents the default Octopress markdown from eating <style> definitions. However a better solution would be to change the markdown parser, as suggested by Chico and Aral Balkan.

The default Octopress style does not indent OL and UL lists, i.e.,

• flight of bees
• lodge of beavers
• rabble of butterflies
• murder of crows

I dislike this very much, and prefer

• flight of bees
• lodge of beavers
• rabble of butterflies
• murder of crows

After a quick search, Octopress Issue #417 provided the the simple solution: add

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article {
  ol, ul {
    padding-left: 3em;
  }
}

or any other custom css to sass/custom/_styles.scss.

Recently, as an educational experience, and a place to share lessons learned, I decided to setup this Octopress blog hosted via GitHub.

Configuration

While I have a Linux server at home, I do most of my work from my Early 2008 MacBook. Since I am a conditions to and a fan of the GNU tools, I use Macports to manage them and other useful tools. You will need a compiler, git, ruby, bash shell, and a terminal. The following table summarizes my the various items I happen to have installed.

Setup and pitfalls

In addition to the Octopress documentation, there are many excellent guides to setting up Octopress hosted via GitHub, e.g.,

• Getting Started With Octopress
• Custom Domain With Octopress and Github Pages
• How I built my blog in one day
• Setup Octopress Under Mac OS X Lion

Studying these guides closely provided the outline for setting up my particularly instance.

Most of my difficulty came from order of operations. I looked at the instructions, and presumed I knew better, but order was important. So, I present the following items in the order that finally worked for me.

Git

Git is the fashionable and powerful revision control system. Get it and try it, even from your browser.

If you are CLI-shy, try GitHub for Mac. There are several other Mac GUI options, e.g. GitX or SourceTree. GitX is flexible and works well enough, particularly to visualize branching. SourceTree certainly looks glossy, however I have only toyed with it because I’m not a huge fan of Atlassian.

Getting the right Ruby

Octopress requires Ruby v1.9.3+. There are a number of ways to get to v1.9.3 on the Mac: MacPorts, Ruby Version Manager (RVM), rbenv.

Upgrading the Apple native v1.8.x is highly discouraged. Believe me. I know. I tried it, and it was painful undoing what I did.

Ruby Version Manager

RVM seemed the best choice for me. Being so tired after recovering my native Ruby, I thought I could simply

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$ sudo gem install rvm

but after some issues, I uninstalled it from the native ruby environment and followed the processes suggested on the RVM quick install guide

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curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

The first try, it failed with the error:

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You requested building with 'gcc-4.2' but it is not in your path.

and I discovered I had a CC environment variable set that pointed elsewhere. So an unset CC and rm -rf ~/.rvm, then the install again was successful, however it warned me

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RVM is not a function, selecting rubies with 'rvm use ...' will not work.
You need to change your terminal settings to allow shell login.
Please visit https://rvm.io/workflow/screen/ for example.

After checking the link, it all seemed unnecessarily complicated, but I did verify the warning:

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$ type rvm | head -n1
 -bash: type: rvm: not found.

The was easily solved by issuing

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[[ -r "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"

Trying the check again,

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$ type rvm | head -n1
rvm is a function

things look good. Simply adding it to your .bash_profile ensures it will be loaded each time you do login.

My rvm install had already installed Ruby 1.9.3 selected selected it as the default, however you can verify and ensure this by

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$ ruby --version
ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20 revision 35410) [x86_64-darwin11.4.0]
$ rvm use 1.9.3
Using /Users/username/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194
Running /Users/username/.rvm/hooks/after_use

GitHub

First, as mentioned in all guides, sign up for a free GitHub account, and then create a repository for as indicated for User Pages. The repository naming scheme is username/username.github.com. There is no need to add anything to the repository, GitHub will recommend adding a README.

I have yet to setup a custom domain, but a portion of the process is described here.

Octopress

Clone the Octopress repo with

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$ git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git octopress.git
$ cd octopress.git  # trust the .rvmrc when asked, i.e. yes

Next, install the bundler Ruby gem

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$ gem install bundler
$ bundler install

which will installed a number of items. Once complete, we can setup the default classic theme with

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$ rake install

This repo will hold both your content and the Octopress code. To update Octopress, see the Updating Octopress guide.

Connecting Octopress to GitHub

The Deploying Octopress to GitHub Pages instructions clearly outline how to accomplish this. In summary, from the top of the octopress.git repo

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$ rake setup_github_pages

answering the questions as required, i.e., repo url is git@github.com:username/username.github.com.git. Then,

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$ rake generate # generate the content from markdown
$ rake deploy   # copy the content to be deployed

Commit and push your changes

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$ git add .
$ git commit -am 'initial import' # a very poor commit message :(
$ git push origin source

The last line pushes source to the master branch of your GitHub repo.

Waiting …

Lastly comes the waiting. GitHub recommends about 10 minutes. My experience is that it take 1-5 min to receive the e-mail that the page(s) have been created, and 10-15 min for the site to appear initially. Afterwards, content appears much more quickly, at the 1-5 min range.

Blogging

Finally, you are ready to generate content. The Octopress Blogging Basics page enumerate the helper functions and process to get your content to your GitHub repo.

So far, I have found the rake preview version useful. In one Terminal.app tab, I invoke

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$ rake preview  # start local web server

while in another, invoke

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$ rake watch    # auto-regen on change

while editing markdown in a third. I verify my blog changes via browser on localhost:port. The port will be listed on one of the first few INFO lines after preview startup

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$ rake preview
[2012-09-08 21:53:52] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2012-09-08 21:53:52] INFO  ruby 1.9.3 (2012-04-20) [x86_64-darwin11.4.0]
[2012-09-08 21:53:52] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=77869 port=4000

and voilà, we see port=4000, so http://localhost:4000 should do it.

Conclusion

This was a straightforward process, once I thought more carefully about order of operations. I also, unfortunately, messed up my repo to start due to a typo, which caused my source to push to a source branch in GitHub, rather than master. This caused me no end of heartache as I waited for my pages to be created, but of course they weren’t because there was no master branch. After a few repo deletes, and typing correctly, it finally worked. Personally, I hope you have less trouble.

Probably not the blog you’re looking for … move along.

The stack:

• Octopress v2.0+
• GitHub
• VIM v7.3+
• git v1.7.11.5+
• ruby v1.9.3+
• rvm v1.15.8+ (stable)
• kramdown v0.13.7
• MathJax
• rot13

Now, with $\LaTeX$y goodness!