CSC 341: Miscellaneous questions and answers
From CSWiki
Note: Please use '=====' before and after your question. Doing so will add your question to the list of contents at the top of this page.
Q. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
A. He would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could, if a woodchuck could chuck wood. Richard Thomas, a naturalist working for the state of New York, has estimated that in the course of digging a burrow, a woodchuck moves thirty-five cubic feet of dirt. Accordingly, Thomas suggests that if a woodchuck could chuck wood, he would chuck an amount of wood roughly equal in weight to this displaced dirt -- in other words, approximately seven hundred pounds of wood. (Cited in Cecil Adams, Return of the straight dope, New York: Ballantine Books, 1994, p. 414.)
Q. How can I stop other users from modifying a page while I'm editing it?
A. Add {{Inuse}} to the page. This displays the following message:Remember to remove this message when done editing. See Template:Inuse for more information on this template, such as how to specify the purpose and estimated duration of the edit.
Q. How do templates work?
A. If there is a page called "Template:templatename", then "{{templatename}}" will include the contents of that page into another page.
Q. The timestamps on the history and recent changes seem to be off by 6 hours. Does anyone know how to fix this?Apparently they are on Greenwich Mean Time. On the other hand, in signatures, the time appears correctly, for example, Perlmutt 12:48, 29 January 2007 (CST).
Q. I sometimes post an edit and forget to enter a summary description. Is there any way to enter a summary retroactively?
Q. How can I edit latex when I'm not on the MathLAN?
Online LaTeX is useful for rendering my LaTeX when I'm not on the MathLAN. It only gives you one page of output though.
You can also download LaTeX for your computer. Working in Microsoft Windows, I have found the Texmaker development environment to be useful. Texmaker is also available for linux, but I find that in linux the command line is accessible enough that I don't need a development environment, whereas in Windows the command line is not intended for heavy use. You must install a dvi viewer and a LaTeX compiler separately from TexMaker. I have used the Yap dvi editor and the MikTex LaTeX compiler. Yap was included with MikTex. I'm a bit displeased with Yap because it sometimes freezes up on large files (i.e. 40 pages), so I might switch. If you do use Yap, then call it with the --single-instance switch to update the current window with your edited file rather than opening a new window every time you update your LaTeX code. (This is the default behavior for xdvi, which also handles large files better than Yap. But xdvi is not available for MS Windows. )
Here are the relevant links. MikTeX TexMaker
Q. What clever person converted the Front Door links to the syntax {{frontdoortop}} and {{frontdoorbottom}} ? How does one do that?
A. The {{frontdoortop}} and {{frontdoorbottom}} are templates, located at Template:frontdoortop and Template:frontdoorbottom. By creating a page whose name is "Template:whatever", you allow people to add {{whatever}} to pages to include the contents of that page. Some templates on, e.g., Wikipedia are quite sophisticated and can accept parameters. See [1] for some (unintuitive) documentation. Template:Inuse on this wiki also accepts some parameters, through rather esoteric means. Thompso1 16:21, 1 February 2007 (CST)
Q. What are the LaTeX commands that produce all those exotic symbols in the handout on recursive function theory?
A. A lot of them come from the American Mathematical Society's symbol package amssymb; to use them, write \usepackage{amssymb} in the preamble of your LaTeX file. Unfortunately, they don't work on the wiki.
For the benefit of those of you who are curious or who are using LaTeX for homework papers, I've shared the LaTeX source file for the handout on recursive function theory; it's at /home/stone/courses/automata/handouts/recursive-function-theory.tex and includes three other files, which are also shared:
- /home/stone/courses/automata/tex/definitions.tex
- /home/stone/courses/automata/tex/recursive-function-definitions.tex
- /home/stone/courses/automata/tex/acknowledgements-and-license.tex
Note added later: I've also made the LaTeX source files for the homework exercises available:
- /home/stone/courses/automata/exercises/problems*.tex
Any of you who are curious about the Smark programmable text filter, which I mentioned in class on March 7, will find the Scheme source code and several small examples in /home/stone/projects/smark and its subdirectories, and the application of that filter to the creation of the course Web site in
- /home/stone/courses/automata/html/automata.smark-format
- /home/stone/courses/automata/html/*.smark
which I have now shared.
Q. Problem 7.18 pg 295 caught my eye because of my fondness for abstact algebra and group theory. Although this isn't a "selected problem", could I express my thoughts on it?
A. Because the contents of the wiki are accessible all over the Internet and can even be indexed by search engines, I'd prefer not to publish solutions to Sipser's problems here. I'd be happy to receive and evaluate your thoughts as an extra-credit exercise, though. -- Stone 10:30, 30 April 2007 (CDT)
Q. How does one link to a subsection of a page from a different page? For eg. In HTML, one would use the id parameter in a tag to link to the content of that tag.
You can link to a section by adding #SectionName to the end of your link. The section name is the text enclosed in the '== ==' tags. For example, we can link to CSC 341: Cooperative commentary#Automata and Languages with [[CSC 341: Cooperative commentary#Automata and Languages]]
