Installation guide for Mac OSX

One day, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Markdown to LaTeX converter.” Theoretically, one could combine these two tools to quickly create beautiful documents. That’s how I found Multimarkdown which is basically a souped up version of regular markdown. The documentation made it sound like this would be a breeze, but it actually took me way to long to get this to work on my machine. So I made a step-by-step guide.

For the uninitiated, Markdown is a simplified way of writing html markup. If you don’t know about it please check it out. It is in fact how this very webpage was created.

Then today I had to install it all over again on a different computer. To save my future self and you a lot of trouble, this time I noted what I did to get it to work (Mac OSX only).

I’m in the 3rd week of Functional Programming Principles in Scala course on Coursera, taught by Martin Odersky, the creator of Scala. The class has been surprisingly awesome so far, but one thing above all struck me as impossible: the “functional” implementation of the union of two immutable binary search trees.

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def union(other: IntSet) = ((left union right) union other) incl elem

WWWHHAATTT??

After an intensive investigation, I eventually determined that this operation performs what I’m calling a ‘post-order insertion’ of the elements of this (non-empty) IntSet into other.

Introduction

My hope is that this website shall become a place where stuff I’ve been up to and thinking about gets documented. The plan is for it to also have tutorials on how to do things, especially if I could not find a good explanation for myself. I’m a man of few words, so it may start out a little forced and certainly not well written; that’s okay though.