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.

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}.

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; }