# Archive for category Uncategorized

### LaTeX in WordPress

Writing up my post Project Euler in Clojure – Problem 15 I wanted to represent the formulation for combinations in a nice manner. As I previously had found the [sourecode] tags, I figured it was worth a shot at doing some searching to see if WordPress.com supported any forumla formatting plug ins out of the box.

I have known of LaTeX for formulas but as I use a wordpress.com site, I knew it only ships with a limited number of plug ins, so I did a search about mathematical formula formatting in WordPress.com. Through the blog post Math for the Masses, I discovered that WordPress.com does indeed support LaTeX.

In my previous post mentioned above, I had the following formula for combinations:

$\frac{n}{\big((n-k)!*k!\big)}$

So to break that down and outline how I display that lets give the WordPress markup I used to get that:

$\frac{n}{\big((n-k)!*k!\big)}&s=3$


So to start with we have $latex which begins our LaTex statement, and if you notice we have a $ that signifies the end of the expression. The example on for the LaTeX in LaTeX is coded:

$\LaTeX$


Which results in the following:

$\LaTeX$

The next part in the LaTex statement begins the expression, which is the fraction part of the expression where

\frac{numerator}{denominator}


giving:

$\frac{numerator}{denominator}$

The parenthesis are done using \big( and \big). The last part of the expression is parameters to update the size of the display in WordPress. The WordPress support page for LaTeX discusses the different parameters available for the LaTeX. The parameter s is the parameter to specify the size of the LaTeX, of which I set as 3 which is the numeric representation of \LARGE.

The posts mentioned above contained links to other resources for LaTeX. The two additional ones I used were: a LaTeX wiki on The Student Room and The Not So Short Introduction to LATEX 2ε.

### Welcome

Hello and welcome. I have recently realized that I should start chronicling my journey to becoming a better software developer and honing my skills and my craft. Sometime around the first quarter of 2009, I began to realize that my career growth had started to slow, and that if I was not vigilant, my career would stagnate.

Since that time, I have been reading software development books as well as blogs, and trying to understand, absorb and apply that knowledge to writing better code, making better software, and making the software better. I was also fortunate to have come across a user group in the area that somehow manages to get software development luminaries, such as Martin Fowler, Dave Thomas (PragDave), Kent Beck, and others, in the software development field to come out and speak to them for free, and have since started to attend those. I have also just come back from the Software Craftsmanship North America 2010 conference and CodeRetreat, and as a result have plenty of ideas and half-formed thoughts in my head which need to be captured.

As such, is finally time to stop wondering if I have anything worth saying, and time to just start journaling, even if no-one else will ever come across this blog; for even just trying to record those thoughts will clarify them. With that, here is looking forward to being able to document, and reflect, on my journey of continuous improvement as a software developer.