lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

one relating to, belonging to, or resembling lunatech

make your google search box in firefox bigger

initially I thought of giving this post the title "make your bigger ..." ;-)
While going through the Mozillazine's Firefox forum, I came across this interesting discussion on how to make the google search box bigger. In your userChrome.css, put in the following lines
/ Make the Search box flex wider /
#search-container {
-moz-box-flex: 600 !important;
}
#searchbar {
-moz-box-flex: 600 !important; }

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Satyendra Dubey case update

This is really good new if you have following the Satyendra Dubey whistle blowing case. The CBI has said that it would "look into each and every allegation and complaint made by Satyendra Dubey.". The CBI has also registered a case against two of the men accused in the letter sent by Satyendra Dubey.

Indian Express story.

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HTML mail in Thunderbird

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Where I found this tip and a knowledgebase for mozilla products (a bit outdated, but still good)

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Software employment

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.

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Search Google from command line

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.

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emacs goodies

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.

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speech recognition

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 .

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