Month: April 2012

I just started setting up my personal Blog after forays into WordPress and Mephisto I have settled on Radiant. Radiant is a very flexible system with lots of development. The folks in #radiantcms are extremely helpful and the entire site is in ruby and uses the rails construct.

How did I set up GIT?

Which submodules did I install?

What is the best way to get radiant to function with a blog?

Why use disqus?

:code.to_s 

Recently, I purchased the upgrade to Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 for Windows
and experienced some difficulty installing the software. Officially, the web-site
lists the following supported versions:

• Windows Server 2000
• Windows Server 2003
• Windows XP SP2 or higher, 32-bit
• Windows 2000 SP4 or higher
• Windows Vistaâ„¢ or Windows Vistaâ„¢ SP1, 32-bit
• 64-bit OS not currently supported

I started the installation on my virtual box which is running Windows Server
2008, but when I clicked on the setup.exe, I was greeted with the following
error:

From a google, search it looked like DNS 9.5 successfully installed: http://www.speechcomputing.com/node/1766,
but I was not able to find out much help with version 10. It is clear that DNS
10 required, the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package, which I
downloaded here.
After downloading, I tried the setup.exe again with the result of the same error
shown above. At this point I turned to the forums on voicerecognition.com/,
which provided a pdf of quick-tips found here.
From this pdf, I found the following directions:

1. Click on the Start menu> click on Run> type in msconfig and hit Ok
2. Click the Startup Tab then note all items enabled
3. Click Disable all
4. Click Apply then close and restart computer as prompted
5. Download http://download.scansoft.com/naturallyspeaking/10/DragonInstall.zip
.
6. Extract DragonInstall.zip to a location on your system.
7. Open the DragonInstall folder that was created in this location.
8. Double click the install_vcruntime.vbs file and follow the installation through
to the end
9. Once finished, double click the install_dragon.vbs file.
10. Answer YES on the prompts on where the Dragon NaturallySpeaking installation
files are located.
11. Follow the Dragon NaturallySpeaking installation through to the end.
Note #1: You may still see an error but the error will ask you if you want to
cancel the installation, click no and
continue on.

Steps one through three produced:

After reboot I downloaded http://download.scansoft.com/naturallyspeaking/10/DragonInstall.zip,
unzipped and ran http://download.scansoft.com/naturallyspeaking/10/DragonInstall.zip.
You’ll see something like this:

But when I clicked on the install_dragon.vbs file, I got:

I tried another approach. From looking at the install script: install_dragon.vbs,
I tried to manually run the msi:

But this resulted in yet another error that d:setup.cab is missing (which
you can clearly see above).

I know windows server 2008 is not supported, but I think I really should be able to figure this out. If anyone can help, please put comments below and I’ll update the entry to help out any others.

I love LaTeX and I love ruby/rails. I want to use rtex, it seems perfect for me. But, I am having trouble and am looking for help — once i get this working i’ll make a blog post for the world.

First, do i have what it takes?

tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which pdflatex
/usr/bin/pdflatex
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which latex
/usr/bin/latex
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which rtex
/usr/bin/rtex
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which pdflatex
/usr/bin/pdflatex
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ rails -v
Rails 2.2.2
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [i486-linux]
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ more /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=intrepid
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 8.10"

Now I need a rails app to test this with:

rails test_rails/
cd test_rails/
./script/generate controller make_pdf

i was getting a sqlite3 error and I had to

sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

Now I needed a model to work with, so using the scaffold generator:

./script/generate scaffold Item name:string purpose:string next_step:text
rake db:migrate

in emacs, i created, app/views/layouts/application.pdf.rtex

documentclass[12pt]{article}
 begin{document}

 end{document}

i also created: show_pdf.pdf.rtex in app/views/make_pdf

  section*{Items}
  begin{itemize}
     @items {aaa01f1184b23bc5204459599a780c2efd1a71f819cd2b338cab4b7a2f8e97d4}>
  end{itemize}

now i create the controller:

class MakePdfController < ApplicationController

def index
end

def show_pdf
    @items = Item.find(:all)
end

end

but from ./script/server and went to http://localhost:3000/make_pdf/show_pdf.pdf

Routing Error

No route matches "/make_pdf/show_pdf.pdf" with {:method=>:get}

I thought i might need to initialize the gem as a plugin

test_rails$ rtex -i .
Installed at ./vendor/plugins/rtex

but i still get the same error after restarting mongrel

after adding config.gem "rtex" to my environment.rb and getting a nasty stack error (caused because i enabled a gem and a plugin). i realized that i can't use both together and commented out the config.gem "rtex".

in discussions with August Lilleaas on IRC, it became clear that I needed to add:

map.connect ":controller/:action.:format"

to my routes.rb.

Now, this is very close to working -- when i load: http://localhost:3000/make_pdf/show_pdf.pdf in firefox, I can open or save. If I save, all I get is simple text:

documentclass[12pt]{article}
 begin{document}
      section*{Items}
  begin{itemize}

  end{itemize}

 end{document}

if I try to open (in ubuntu using document viewer) I get:

File type TeX document (text/x-tex) is not supported

As an interesting aside, I wanted to test that rtex was actually working.

Creating a textile file test.textile with some basic textile.

rtex -o output.pdf -f textile test.textile

generates output.pdf, which is a true pdf formatted file.

After some excellent help from Bruce Williams, I was able to get it working just fine -- just download the new gem (rtex 2.1.0, and you should be fine)

tim@polycarp:~/web_apps$ git svn clone http://svn.fitwit.com
Can't locate SVN/Core.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/local/share/perl/5.10.0 /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.10.0 /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.10 /usr/share/perl/5.10 /usr/local/lib/site_perl .) at /usr/local/libexec/git-core//git-svn line 29.

so i realized i needed to install the perl git-svn libraries:

 sudo apt-get install git-core git-svn

did the trick. enjoy.