Signal Grey

I have just set up the Rails Planet at www.dakota.net.nz to aggregate the two logs currently hosted there (this one right here included). Rails Planet is used at www.planetrubyonrails.org and does not appear to be in active development. As such I found there were a couple of querks to getting it set up.

Amoungst other things I suspect are mostly specific to my set up one big problem I faced was getting access to the admin interface. Since there was no default login with the install and there did not appear to be an initial setup phase I had no way of creating a user in order to then access the admin interface.

The solution I found was to comment out line 4 of app/controllers/admin/base_controller.rb:

class Admin::BaseController < ApplicationController

  layout "admin"
# before_filter :login_required

end

This essentially disabled authentication for the admin interface so I could access it without a login. Once I had set up a user account I then uncommented the line again and restarted the server to ensure the authentication was back in place.

Hopefully this helps anyone who is having similar problems.

I have been considering a project that would involve defining a mathematical procedure preferably in a format like XML. The definition would need to include the definition of variables/inputs, logic/sequence and mathmatical equations.

The calculation would then be executed by a programme based on user inputs. The resulting calculation would then be saved (again preferably in an XML format) for further editing if required and/or printed/exported (calculation report) to a number of formats (i.e. latex, pdf, html etc).

I have been trying to locate any pre-existing components that may be able to fulfill the about requirements. MathML, LaTeX, OpenXM/OpenMath all seem to fulfill parts of the requirements.

I would like to avoid having more than one definition of the equations in the xml definition i.e. one for the actual calculation and one for visual representation. To avoid this I either need a library that can convert Latex/MathML into executable code or one that can execute the code directly from the Latex/MathML input.

Would appreciate any input here. In the mean time I will continue my search.