lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Yesterday I attended a meeting of a few fellow-geeks. The points that make a geek gathering different from normal people's gatherings are

• The idea of the meeting was conceived on an IRC channel
• More time was spent on planning what to do, than the time spent on actually doing
• People kept referring to each other by their IRC nicks
• Pictures were taken using a mobile camera
• After the geeks had a shot of beer/vodka, they started debatng the OO capabilities in Python, history of python, squeak and other obscure topics.
• And of course, how can I forget the debate on which CMS rules - mambo/Drupal or Plone

An evening I enjoyed a lot

Firefox 1.0 got released yesterday. Yay !! If you have not downloaded it as yet, get it and reclaim the web. Google has put up a firefox on their search too. . Surprisingly BBC is covering the launch too. Officially, Firefox is not "just for geeks " anymore. Welcome abroad unwashed masses. Here is the list of newspapaers covering firefox launch.

While reading through the talkback pages at mozila, I saw that most people were having trouble getting Firefox from their local mirrors (which I guess had not gotten updated) or in accessing the Mozilla's website. Well, I took the easy route and just used the torrent to download my favourite browser. It was the first time I used torrent, and i must add I was amazed at how easy the whole process. Bittornado put a nice GUI and a easy to understand interface to the whole process.

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 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}.

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; }