Vort.org, now with Erlenmeyer

Welcome to the new Vort.org! After much fussing about, I’m finally migrating away from my old blogging platform and officially re-launched. I’ve built a new blogging tool specifically designed for science. It’s called Erlenmeyer. Erlenmeyer is still a work in progress, but even in its current larval instar it is already quite nice to use, especially if you have something to say like

$\underbrace{\nabla p}_{\cal{O}(\beta)} + \underbrace{\frac{\nabla B^2_{\mathrm{T}}}{2}}_{{\cal O}( 1 )} + \underbrace{\frac{\nabla B^2_{\mathrm{P}}}{2}}_{{\cal O}( \epsilon^2/q^2)} + \underbrace{\frac{B^2_{\mathrm{T}} \nabla R}{R}}_{{\cal O}(\epsilon)} + \underbrace{B_{\mathrm{P}} \cdot \nabla B_{\mathrm{P}}}_{{\cal O}(\epsilon^2/q^2)} = 0$

Erlenmeyer has built-in citation management, so blog posts can seamlessly include a proper bibliography, generated automatically. For example, the equation above comes from a paper I wrote a few years ago. [1] Erlenmeyer also supports a syntax highlighting in a large number of languages.

def findregions( data, N ) :
"""
Return all the regions of an array that exceed N.
"""
pos = filter(lambda(a) : a[1] == abs(a[1]), zip(range(len(data)),data-N) )
if len(pos) == 0 :
return []
pos = numpy.array( zip(*pos)[0] )
regions = []
for k,g in itertools.groupby( enumerate(pos), lambda(i,x):i-x ) :
l = map( operator.itemgetter(1),g )
regions.append( {'start':l[0],'stop':l[-1] } )
return regions

There’s still a lot of work to do, but at this point, the best way to make sure that it gets done is learn to eat my own dogfood.. There have been a lot of things I’ve wanted to blog about, but I was so annoyed with my software that I didn’t bother with it. So, this is both a return to blogging and a return to web development – now with more Science!

References

1. Neches RY, Cowley SC, Gourdain PA, Leboeuf JN (2008) The convergence of analytic high-β equilibrium in a finite aspect ratio tokamak. Phys Plasmas 15: 122504. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3008049.

Posted by Russell Neches

on 17/06/2014 at 23:50 under a Creative Commons Attributuion License.