lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

one relating to, belonging to, or resembling lunatech

using google api from PHP

Now available for your downloading pleasure, is my GoogleSoap class. have you eveer felt the sudden need to use the Google's web APIs through PHP ? Worry not as help is at hand. You can use the GoogleSoap class to make your job easier. I have put the code and related documentation/examples in the public domain, so you can hack it up further. Some rudimentary instructions are included in the README file, I will add more to it as and when time permits me. Any additions/suggestions are always welcome.

Get the code here

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why code maintainance sucks

I have had to work on updating someone else's code for a few days now. The code was a headache to read because

  • It was not formatted to conform to my coding standard ... in fact it did not conform to any coding standards.
  • There was no version control ... oh wait, yes there was version control. It was version control by commenting out unwanted code. So I had to scroll through screenfuls to commented out code. I must take a moment to thank the programmers of Anjuta IDE, which helped me a lot a with their excellent syntax highlighting. Here is how you delete code.
  • Did I say there was no version control. There was a version control system. It looked almost like this
  • There was no comments.
  • There were spelling mistakes in variable names
  • PHP code and HTML were mixed
  • there was more .. i have forgotten it.

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Hyperlinks with LaTeX

I am big fan of Texinfo for writing articles or any other documentations work (yes, I do sometimes try to write the specification document). For a few weeks now, I have been trying to learn LaTeX, sice it can be used to typeset good quality presentation slides and letters too.

A problem that I faced when writing the articles in LaTeX was on how to make a hyperlink to a webpage. I was using latex2html to convert the latex file to HTML format. LaTeX comes with a hyperref package which can be used to create links. It has a \href command which can be used to create hyperlinks, but the links did not come out in the HTML page. I found that this was a known problem with hyperref and latex2html. However, the solution, as I found out, is much easier. The command to use is \htmladdnormallink{link text}{universal resource locator} You have to include the package html in your document to use it

\usepackage{html,makeidx}
....
The text of this article can be downloaded from our
\htmladdnormallink{web site}{http://www.example.org}.

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