Help

    Navigating

    The most natural way of navigating is by clicking wiki links that connect one page with another. The “Front page” link in the navigation bar will always take you to the Front Page of the wiki. The “All pages” link will take you to a list of all pages on the wiki (organized into folders if directories are used). Alternatively, you can search using the search box. Note that the search is set to look for whole words, so if you are looking for “gremlins”, type that and not “gremlin”.

    Creating and modifying pages

    Registering for an account

    In order to modify pages, you’ll need to be logged in. To register for an account, just click the “register” button in the bar on top of the screen. You’ll be asked to choose a username and a password, which you can use to log in in the future by clicking the “login” button. While you are logged in, these buttons are replaced by a “logout so-and-so” button, which you should click to log out when you are finished.

    Note that logins are persistent through session cookies, so if you don’t log out, you’ll still be logged in when you return to the wiki from the same browser in the future.

    Editing a page

    To edit a page, just click the “edit” button (currently at the top left of the text box).

    You can click “Preview” at any time to see how your changes will look. Nothing is saved until you press “Save.”

    Note that you must provide a description of your changes. This is to make it easier for others to see how a wiki page has been changed.

    Page metadata

    Pages may optionally begin with a metadata block. Here is an example:

    ---
    format: latex+lhs
    categories: haskell math
    toc: no
    title: Haskell and
      Category Theory
    ...
    
    \section{Why Category Theory?}

    The metadata block consists of a list of key-value pairs, each on a separate line. If needed, the value can be continued on one or more additional line, which must begin with a space. (This is illustrated by the “title” example above.) The metadata block must begin with a line --- and end with a line ... optionally followed by one or more blank lines.

    Currently the following keys are supported:

    format
    Overrides the default page type as specified in the configuration file. Possible values are markdown, rst, latex, html, markdown+lhs, rst+lhs, latex+lhs. (Capitalization is ignored, so you can also use LaTeX, HTML, etc.) The +lhs variants indicate that the page is to be interpreted as literate Haskell. If this field is missing, the default page type will be used.
    categories
    A space or comma separated list of categories to which the page belongs.
    toc
    Overrides default setting for table-of-contents in the configuration file. Values can be yes, no, true, or false (capitalization is ignored).
    title
    By default the displayed page title is the page name. This metadata element overrides that default.

    Creating a new page

    To create a new page, just create a wiki link that links to it, and click the link. If the page does not exist, you will be editing it immediately.

    You can also type the path to and name of the file in the browser URL window. Note that in that case any new directory included in the path will be created but only if you tick the corresponding boxes (in the edit window) to confirm their creation.

    Deleting a page

    The “delete” button at the bottom of the page will delete a page. Note that deleted pages can be recovered, since a record of them will still be accessible via the “activity” button on the top of the page.

    Markdown

    This wiki’s pages are written in pandoc’s extended form of markdown. If you’re not familiar with markdown, you should start by looking at the markdown “basics” page and the markdown syntax description. Consult the pandoc User’s Guide for information about pandoc’s syntax for footnotes, tables, description lists, and other elements not present in standard markdown.

    Markdown is pretty intuitive, since it is based on email conventions. Here are some examples to get you started:

    *emphasized text* emphasized text
    **strong emphasis** strong emphasis
    `literal text` literal text
    \*escaped special characters\* *escaped special characters*
    [external link](http://google.com) external link
    ![folder](/img/icons/folder.png?1710321796) folder
    Wikilink: [Front Page](Front Page) Wikilink: Front Page
    H~2~O H2O
    10^100^ 10100
    ~~strikeout~~ strikeout
    $x = \frac{{ - b \pm \sqrt {b^2 - 4ac} }}{{2a}}$ x = \frac{{ - b \pm \sqrt {b^2 - 4ac} }}{{2a}}
    A simple footnote.^[Or is it so simple?] A simple footnote.1
    > an indented paragraph,
    > usually used for quotations
    

    an indented paragraph, usually used for quotations

    pre> #!/bin/sh -e # code, indented four spaces echo “Hello world”
    #!/bin/sh -e
    # code, indented four spaces
    echo "Hello world"
    * a bulleted list
    * second item
        - sublist
        - and more
    * back to main list
        1. this item has an ordered
        2. sublist
            a) you can also use letters
            b) another item
    
    • a bulleted list
    • second item
      • sublist
      • and more
    • back to main list
      1. this item has an ordered
      2. sublist
        1. you can also use letters
        2. another item

    pre> Fruit Quantity ——– ———– apples 30,200 oranges 1,998 pears 42

    Table: Our fruit inventory
    Our fruit inventory
    Fruit Quantity
    apples 30,200
    oranges 1,998
    pears 42

    For headings, prefix a line with one or more # signs: one for a major heading, two for a subheading, three for a subsubheading. Be sure to leave space before and after the heading.

    # Markdown
    
    Text...
    
    ## Some examples...
    
    Text...

    Links to other wiki pages are formed this way: [Page Name](Page Name). (Gitit converts markdown links with empty targets into wikilinks.)

    To link to a wiki page using something else as the link text: [something else](Page Name).

    Note that page names may contain spaces and some special characters. They need not be CamelCase. CamelCase words are not automatically converted to wiki links.

    Wiki pages may be organized into directories. So, if you have several pages on wine, you may wish to organize them like so:

    Wine/Pinot Noir
    Wine/Burgundy
    Wine/Cabernet Sauvignon

    Note that a wiki link [Burgundy](Burgundy) that occurs inside the Wine directory will link to Wine/Burgundy, and not to Burgundy. To link to a top-level page called Burgundy, you’d have to use [Burgundy](/Burgundy).

    To link to a directory listing for a subdirectory, use a trailing slash: [Wine/](Wine/) will link to a listing of the Wine subdirectory.

    Creating your sandbox

    The ‘sandbox’ is a place where you can share your code and results and more generally communicate about yourself and your work. See for example Antoon’s sandbox for a very comprehensive example.

    It is also a good place to put the code necessary to reproduce results published in your scientific articles, thus allowing reproducible research.

    To create your sandbox, you need to:

    • get an account and login.
    • create your own ‘README’ file in a new sandbox directory. By convention
      this file is an entry point to other files/codes you want to share. To create this new file and directory, you need to edit the URL in your web browser to read something like
    http://basilisk.fr/sandbox/YOURNAME/README

    where YOURNAME is obviously replaced with something else. You will then be able to edit and save this page. Note that you will also be asked to confirm that you want to create the new YOURNAME directory. This is to avoid creating new directories when there is a typo in the URL, so please check that the new directory name is correct before validating.

    To add new code and files to your sandbox, you can either repeat the process above or better, create links from your README file to the new files you want to add. You can then save the README file and click on the new link to edit the new file.

    Running code on the server

    Many of the graphs, videos and other results displayed on the web pages are generated by the page itself i.e. the code you see, for example here, is active: whenever it changes, the corresponding graphs, movies and results can be automatically regenerated.

    This way of doing things has many advantages, some of which are:

    • It encourages people to share not only their ‘core’ computational code but also the way results are post-processed and displayed: something which is often as complicated as the core computation.
    • It motivates people to document their code: once you have the figures, it is nice to add captions, discussions of the results etc.
    • It allows anyone to reproduce all the results, down to the figures published in articles, which is again a requirement for truly reproducible research.
    • It makes sure that you can reproduce your own results, something which seems obvious but is not, for example when you are using a modified version of Basilisk on your local machine and have forgotten which modifications you have made (you should read about darcs). You can thus see your sandbox as a way of storing a reproducible backup of your work, which is guaranteed to include all that is required to reproduce your own work.

    Running code on the server is simple. When you edit a file/page which is recognised as executable i.e. files ending with:

    You will have the option to run the code by clicking on the corresponding button. A few important things to note:

    • For security reasons, you need to first ask me to add you to the list of people allowed to run code (email me your login).
    • ‘Discarding’ the page does not stop the running simulation if the running simulation matches the current version of the page (i.e. if you haven’t made any modifications). This allows to re-run simulations “in the background”.
    • The simulations run on a relatively slow server with 24 cores shared by all users.
    • The runtime is limited to three hours, after which the simulation will be brutally terminated, so only use the server for relatively simple/fast calculations. If you want to share ‘runnable’ code which was used to produce very large/long simulations, you can still do so, for example by running a 2D version or a low-resolution version.
    • The server runs the code exactly as you would do on your own machine using Makefiles i.e. for a file called mycode.c it does
    make mycode.tst mycode/plots
    • This can be useful for debugging your code/graphics on your local machine before publishing it (see also how to generate HTML pages).
    • Similarly, any file generated by the running code (log, out, movies etc.) is available in the corresponding directory, for example in http://basilisk.fr/sandbox/YOURNAME/mycode/mymovie.mp4 for a file/page called http://basilisk.fr/sandbox/YOURNAME/mycode.c.

    Editing the wiki locally with darcs

    The wiki uses darcs as a backend and can thus be edited using a local darcs repository mirroring the web site.

    To create a local darcs mirror of the entire wiki (and its history) do

    darcs get --lazy http://basilisk.fr/wiki
    cd wiki/sandbox/YOURNAME/...

    You can then synchronize your local copy using darcs pull etc. Local edits are of course possible and can be darcs recorded.

    You can also use Makefiles, make plots, and generate HTML pages typically in the local copy of your sandbox/, to make sure that everything works before darcs recording and darcs pushing your changes to the web site.

    Pushing local changes

    To be able to push your local changes to the darcs wiki repository on the website, you will need write access permissions which you need to get from the site administrator. These rights will be granted based on your SSH public key.

    Once this is done, you can push your local changes using:

    darcs push wiki@shell.basilisk.fr:wiki

    1. Or is it so simple?