lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

I am no fan of sending HTML mail. I have configured my mail client, Thunderbird to send out only plain text messages. However, today I needed to send out an article which contained lots of link. It turns out that you can always shift-click the "Write" button in Thunderbird and it will allow you to compose HTML mail.

Where I found this tip and a knowledgebase for mozilla products (a bit outdated, but still good)

While chatting on #linux-india (irc.freenode.net), I came upon one of the participant's blog entry about Infosys campus. Since a few of my friends works there, I have a bit of idea how the Thing works. The infosys is nice looking so that the animals can stay inside, work and die there content without wanting to see the outside world. That is the way most sweatshops in IT work and that is why this industry has such a high bun out rate

At this point, Niyam Bhushan came up with an interesting definition.

Software employment

slavery for the educated. so, give them a cosmetically nice looking pig-sty, an iron-clad contract that favors the master, pay them a small pittance per month to FOREVER own their SWEATWARE, and then patent and license it to customers for a killing. meantime, boot out the slave, unless he/she has more sweat to offer

I guess till the time you become an independent consultant, this definition holds true. Just a random observation.

As I had pointer out in my previous entry, I had not been able to search google from within my emacs environment. Hence the "need" to write a command line script which I would be able to call from within emacs

The code is not the best I have written and any decent Python programmer would be able to make more improvements to it. If you do something clever with the code, it would be very kind of you to let me know about it too (raj at rajshekhar.net).

You need to have Pygoogle module installed. In its unaltered form, the script will require Python2.3 to run. However, if you remove the #--ugly hack part (see the comments in the code), it will run with Python2.2 too.

Code now available at mouse click from here.

Ftrain.com has a bunch of productivity enhancing tips that can be used with emacs. I could not get the "search the web within emacs" working but I hope to write a shell script that will do the job and then call that script from withing emacs. I had found that link from this post by Merlin, called Calling all Terminal nerds. One of the comments there has pointed to the rockin' the emacs post, which points out how to use planner.el from Sacha Chua.

I was reading through the google news item IBM Donates Voice Code to Apache, which reminded me of a interesting thread in the Full disclosure mailing list.

The poster to the mailing list said that one of his users had contated him with a weird problem. As soon as the user had turned their machine on, brought up Word, the following message started "typing itself"

": 121-nighters and windows of confidence in your own problems in the matters when the company has no problems regarding .... [snip] "

Though it may seem that there is a glitch in Word, or some overflow in the clipboard memory, it is possible that the speech recognition software was the actual culprit. If the speech recognition software is turned on and there is a radio playing nearby, it will pick up by the software and transcribed on Word.

Original thread here and here .

Installing compiled packages with checkinstall

As Macbeth would have said "To GET or to POST , that is the question". The general consensus is :

• Use GET when you want to give the user the ability to bookmark a page (as all the data is held in the URL and does not rely on an existing session on the server.) The "get" method should be used when the form is idempotent (i.e., causes no side-effects).
• Use POST when a form causes side effects (for example, if the form modifies a database or subscription to a service).

formed discussion over this topic in this usenet thread. Some words from the bible covering this topic. A more lengthy but not boring discussion on this topic is URIs, Addressability, and the use of HTTP GET and POST