lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

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.

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 .

Installing compiled packages with checkinstall

As Macbeth would have said "To GET or to POST , that is the question". The general consensus is :

• Use GET when you want to give the user the ability to bookmark a page (as all the data is held in the URL and does not rely on an existing session on the server.) The "get" method should be used when the form is idempotent (i.e., causes no side-effects).
• Use POST when a form causes side effects (for example, if the form modifies a database or subscription to a service).

formed discussion over this topic in this usenet thread. Some words from the bible covering this topic. A more lengthy but not boring discussion on this topic is URIs, Addressability, and the use of HTTP GET and POST

I knew that a whole different universe of mp3 blogs existed, but was never motivated enough to go out and investigate them. In my office, I have cycled through most of my music collection (I like to hear Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ministry of sound, Yahel(sp?) while working) and decided to find out what these blogs offer. A good starting point is Fluxblog. There is also MP3 blog Aggregator (however it does not show full postings and there are just a "lot" of blogs being aggregated). This article MP3 blogs serve rare songs, dusty grooves, points out some good mp3 blogs too. I have bookmarked the following sites

• Looking for askance
• Said the gramophone
• Royal music
• Music (for robots)
• The number one songs in heaven

There is a very interesting article at on interface design, which I am slowly reading and digesting. The authors say that a good interface has the following properties which allow the users to get "into flow"

• Challenge and require skill
• Concentrate and avoid interruption
• Maintain control
• Speed and feedback
• Transformation of time

The law of the lost idea states that

Any idea not put down on paper/harddisk within 10 minutes of it occuring will get lost.

Yesterday morning, I had thought of an ingenious workaround for a problem that we had been facing in one of our projects (while putting on my shoe). Now I have forgotten both, what the problem was and (quite obviously) what the workaround was.