Procrastination

Ever since our Civic was totaled in an accident, we have had one car. Most of the time, this car has been in use by Amber. Now we think we need another car. So I am looking for a new car.

I want a fun car to drive that should be fast, handle well (especially on curvy mountain roads) but be comfortable and reliable for the daily commute as well. Among other requirements, the car should have:

Originally, we were thinking of buying a roadster like Nissan 350Z, Honda S2000, Chevrolet Corvette or Porsche Boxster (Ok, so the last two were a bit out of our reach, but I can dream; wait, if I dreamed I would get this car). But with an almost-eight-month old kid, that is not practical. So now our choices are limited to 4-seaters, though the requirement of sportiness is still there.

The cars I am considering are the Infiniti G35 Coupe and Mazda RX-8, both with manual transmission (more fun and Amber can’t drive it!). Does anyone have any thoughts on either of these cars? Opinions of owners of G35 or RX-8 would be especially appreciated.

The infant/toddler/booster seat will definitely be an issue. The larger convertible or 3-in-1 seats don’t fit in either G35 or RX-8. Infiniti has a list of seats that fit in the G35, but even then I need to check how problematic it would be to put my daughter into a rear facing car seat. But I like the G35 coupe much better than their sedan. And let’s face it, the Coupe looks like the 350Z.

Also, feel free to chime in with other models that you think I could like.

You might have noticed the new look of this weblog. It all started due to Asif and Jacques Distler. Asif just started using
$LaTeX$

formulae on his weblog and Jacques has been doing so for quite a while. Asif is using a Wordpress plugin to convert
$LaTeX$

equations into images while Jacques converts them (or rather itex) to MathML. I am trying to follow Jacques.

The first step needed was to make my pages valid XHTML 1.1. Previously, my site was valid XHTML 1 Transitional. This required changes in my templates. The old MT 2.6 templates I was using were up to no good. Therefore, I took the new MT 3.o default templates and modified them to my own tastes. Even then, I needed to make some changes in the templates and my entries to make them all pass XHTML 1.1 validity tests.

Right now, all the weblog pages other than the individual entry archives are valid XHTML 1.1. The individual entry pages need some more work because the comment forms need to be changed and the comments themselves are very invalid and require a lot of work. I’ll be slowly fixing that over the next few days or months.

Following Jacques’s advice, I also had to serve my pages as application/xhtml+xml instead of text/html. Actually, this needs to be done only for those browsers which can handle MathML, the rest can be fed text/html. Right now, I am only serving my blog home page as application/xhtml+xml using the Accept header. But later on, I’ll move to Jacques’s scheme.

One of the problems with serving application/xhtml+xml is that the browser does not show anything if the code is not valid. Therefore, it is extremely important to validate all your pages. This could cause problems with comments since commenters can’t be trusted to use only valid XHTML 1.1. I might later try Jacques’s idea of forcing comment previews and validation. But for now, I’ll have to fix them manually myself.

I have tested the new templates in Firefox 1.0 and Internet Explorer 6.0 on my Windows XP machine. The pages looked OK in both. If you find any problems viewing any of the blog pages or the layout doesn’t seem right, please let me know.

I have installed the itex2MML plugin for Movable Type to create MathML content.

And now for some math tests. If you are using a Mozilla browser (use Firefox please, it’s a much better browser), you’ll need to install Math fonts. If you are using Internet Explorer (why?), you can install the MathPlayer plugin.

As I am lazy, I am using the LaTeX (or
$LaTeX$

) code from a few tests by Jacques and Asif.

First, an integral expression from Asif.

And here is a passage to test arrays.

Establishing driving point impedances works on the principle of simple R-L-C networks, where
$Z_L=L.\frac{\mathrm{di}}{\mathrm{dt}}$

,
$Z_C=1/C\int i\mathrm{dt}$

. Driving point impedances and admittances (in terms of effort and flow) are given as:

In the case when we have a 2-port and we have effort of one port and flow of other as inputs and vice versa, then the transfer function of this hybrid formulation can be written as:

or

Now let us test inline and display equations in a blockquote from a post by Jacques.

This is a test of the new itex2MML+parbreaks filter. Here is an inline equation:
$2\sin (x)\cos (x)=\sin (2x)$

.

And here is a display equation

(5)
$${\int }_0^{\mathrm{\infty }}{e}^{-x^2}\mathrm{dx}=\frac{\sqrt{\pi }}{2}$$

And here is some more prose.

Please note that these equations will be properly rendered only on the main page right now and not work on any of the archives (monthly, category and individual entry). I’ll fix that in time though.

Also, unlike Jacques and Asif, I am not allowing Math in the comments, at least until I figure out and implement forced preview and validation.

Finally, I probably have broken my RSS/Atom feeds and accessibilty. I’ll look into that next.