lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

There is a Bloglines Web Services (BWS) . Never knew about it . In another news, I discovered a nice skin for my wiki. \0/ One of my friends has launched a new blog devoted to books, music and movies. If you are a geek who enjoys reading and movies, have a look or volunteer to participate in the effort

I have been experimenting with a few wikis for my site. A great place to look for your wiki needs is the Wiki Engines page on the WikiWik (which incidentally was the first wiki). I have settled for Pmwiki, which you can see here. My reasons for choosing the Pmwiki are

• Written in PHP and released under GPL
• Does not need a database backend to run
• Easy to understand documentation
• Customizations are in a separate configuration file
• InterMap capabilities to provide links to other WikiWikiWeb systems
• Ability to organize pages into WikiGroups, with headers and access controls shared among all pages in the group

Link to my wiki

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

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.

I have been reading the Web 2.0 post archives. A quote by Cory Dotcrow which stands out

Tech companies need to understand that easy copying of media on-line is not a bug to be fixed. It's a property of the Internet. They're convincing the world that this is a problem, and we need to fix that.

I would rank it up there alongwith the William Gibson quote

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.

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}.

A bit of Mozilla-goodness overdose today. Discovered del.icio.us > PHP yesterday, saw quite a few interesting links on it today and have taken the RSS feed for it now. One of the links was XUL: rendering GUIs with PHP, which has a load of useful links and ideas.