lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

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.

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; }

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.

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Where I found this tip and a knowledgebase for mozilla products (a bit outdated, but still good)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