Miscellaneous Knowledge

If you’ve ever set up MediaWiki, you will probably know how difficult it is to get equations (or LaTeX rendering / math tags) working. Under windows, it requires a lot of tweaking, ImageMagick support, a full LaTeX install and in quite a few cases fails to work. While trying to get equation rendering working on my personal (read, private!) wiki, I came across an interesting solution to this problem. Simply put, it is in extension which interprets <tex> tags and then sets the image URL to that of an image generated by a CGI-Script on another page. This means that no LaTeX or ImageMagick support is needed on the localhost.

The full details of how to get this working are documented here. It is very simple to set up, with the only drawback being that you have to use <tex> tags instead of <math> tags.

If you are interested in the script itself, perhaps to use it for something other than a Wiki, you can visit the creator’s site here. If you have a large wiki or other project however, it is recommended that you host the CGI script yourself to reduce the load on the server that provides this free LaTeX equation rendering.

Aaah, first post. Good feeling no?

So you’re probably wondering what the hell a blog about Miscellaneous Knowledge is, or perhaps you thought you’d read the first post on here. Quite simply, this is just a collection of interesting facts, methods and odd problems, with a bit of ‘other’ stuff thrown in. The other stuff could be interesting things I find around the web, a little bit of personal life or, well, anything! Hopefully Google will index this and next time you have a really obsure problem, a post will crop up and you will forever bask in my glory (ok, so i’m making the last bit up, but a thanks would be nice).

If you have your own little information tiptbit you’d like to contribute, let me know. It’s always good to have more knowledge.

And now for something completely different – me. I’m a person (last time I checked) and a technology enthusiast (I spend my time around computers). I play a lot of games, mainly source-based ones and 3rd party mods infact, I also have my own game server business which is doing quite well. I also manage a (private) wiki and several game community websites – and thats just the tip of the iceberg.

Enjoy!