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It's not Coincidence, it's Providence!

2012-01-23T22:06:00.001+05:30

Browsing my local paper, found this little gem tucked away in a small article. This year is the 125th birthday celebrations of mathematical genius Ramanujan, so The Hindu runs lots of maths related stuff as well as vignettes about Ramanujan, this year. Here's a weird but nice clip from the article.

A tale Robert Kanigel repeated a couple of times during his recent visit to Madras to launch the 125th birthday celebrations of mathematical genius Ramanujan related to his first visit to Madras in 1988 to start following the Ramanujan trail on the ground as he got down to working on the mathematician's biography.

That November day he landed from London was a bandh day in Madras and the airport was virtually deserted. There was a lone auto rickshaw with a passenger in it and another person haggling to get aboard. That person was Viswanathan Venkataraman, who had also arrived from London. When he noticed the forlorn foreigner wondering what he should do, Viswanathan told him that the only way to get to the city was to squeeze in with them. And Kanigal joined them for that ride in a sardine tin.

During the ride, Viswanathan discovered that Kanigal was not a tourist but a well known writer who was working on Ramanujan's biography. “What a coincidence,” remarked Viswanathan, “I am the grandson of S. Narayana Aiyar with whom Ramanujan worked in the Port Trust.” No, it's not coincidence, it's Providence, a surprised Kanigal enthusiastically replied. And so began Kanigal's first steps in Madras that led to The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan.

A quick round up on Org, Emacs 23.4 news

2012-01-21T21:03:00.000+05:30

Looks like I'll be busy for the next couple of weeks on work related stuff. Here's some newsworthy posts from various mailing lists.

Konrad Hinsen has posted a patch for org-mode for IMAP support for VM links in orgmode. Possibly of interest only to VM users.

Due to a security issue, there will be a Emacs 23.4 release in the next week or so, here's the announcement of the first release candidate by Chong Yidong.

Sending Emails with Attachments from the Command Line Revisited

2012-01-15T21:25:00.000+05:30

Previously I had posted about trying to send attachment emails from the command line here and here. But the hitch was, every time I changed computers(which while infrequent) I still had to download and compile mpack and install it every time.

On a whim, when I asked on the cygwin mailing list, I was asked to try the Email package. And I have to report it works beautifully. It needs an MTA to connect to the mail server, for which there is msmtp and is part of the Cygwin packaged utilities already. That sort of solves my portability issue.

Configuring Email was simple. Edit the email.conf file with the following minimum details and you're set.

############################################################
SENDMAIL_BIN = '/usr/sbin/msmtp -t'
MY_NAME = 'Sivaram '
MY_EMAIL = 'nnsivaram.nnet@gmail.com'
#REPLY_TO = ''
USE_TLS = 'true'
TEMP_DIR = '/tmp'
SMTP_AUTH = 'LOGIN'
SMTP_AUTH_USER = ' nnsivaram.nnet'

And you call it in the shell script as follows

echo "Mailing... $mailid with $attachfile"

/usr/bin/email -s "Mailed report on `date`" -a $attachfile $mailid < $mbody
echo "email Return code is $?"

The github repo can be found here.

C gave you "Hello World" while Haskell....

2012-01-10T22:32:00.000+05:30

gives you

ghci> filter (`elem` ['A'..'Z']) "i lauGh At You BecAuse u r aLL the Same"
"GAYBALLS"

Cue me, laughing like a juvenile, suddenly, in office.

But on a more serious note, learnyouahaskell.com teaches

you Haskell, a FP language.

New Emacs version(23.4) to be released due to security flaw in CEDET

2012-01-09T20:51:00.000+05:30

Apparently, there's a security flaw in CEDET's code that allows arbitrary execution of code. To fix it, the Emacs maintainers are going to release a new version of Emacs 23.3 with the patch as Emacs 23.4.

You can read more about it here.

Org-mode Release 7.8 out

2011-12-13T20:07:00.000+05:30

Org-mode release 7.8 is now officially out with a few minor bug fixes. The list of changes can be found here and the tarballs and zips here.

And BTW, the google+ page for org-mode is here.

LaTeX tutorial videos for beginners

2011-12-08T09:30:00.000+05:30

Joe DiNoto has posted a number of LaTeX tutorials on youtube, available conveniently as a playlist. If you're new to LaTeX, it might be worth checking it out. Each video is about 3 minutes long.

The History of Unix

2011-12-05T20:01:00.000+05:30

Just stumbled on this fantastic IEEE article on the The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix; A fantastic read, worth the 15 minutes of time in knowing how Unix came about.

Unix: an emasculated version of Multics!

Third Emacs pretest out

2011-12-01T09:44:00.000+05:30

The third Emacs pretest is now out. Binaries and tarballs can be found here. The NEWS file will have the list of changes.

Moving buffers between windows

2011-12-01T07:36:00.006+05:30

If you're new to emacs, it might be a good idea to read this post to know the difference between frames and windows before you can follow this post.

I had to do some fair amount of coding recently with lots of interlinked files. With so many windows open and with my limited screen estate, I soon settled on a 3 window layout with the screen split horizontally and the top half split again into 2. This way I could read code flowing off to the right on the bottom half while referring to the called functions in the other 2 windows on top.

But I soon found myself switching to those buffers to read a bit more on the definitions and losing my window layout. A quick ask on gnu.emacs.help turned up this emacswiki page, the last elisp function that I reproduce below was perfect for my needs.

(defun rotate-windows ()
"Rotate your windows"
(interactive)
(cond ((not (> (count-windows)1))
    (message "You can't rotate a single window!"))
    (t
    (setq i 1)
    (setq numWindows (count-windows))
    (while (< i numWindows)
       (let* (
        (w1 (elt (window-list) i))
        (w2 (elt (window-list) (+ (% i numWindows) 1)))

        (b1 (window-buffer w1))
        (b2 (window-buffer w2))

        (s1 (window-start w1))
        (s2 (window-start w2))
        )
         (set-window-buffer w1 b2)
         (set-window-buffer w2 b1)
         (set-window-start w1 s2)
         (set-window-start w2 s1)
         (setq i (1+ i)))))))

There are a number of other options available too as mentioned by Sundar Vasan in his post. They give your more options and key bindings to use.

Gnus Tip: Customising the position of point when replying

2011-11-28T07:35:00.000+05:30

If you have a need to top post or inline or below the mail depending on whom and where you're replying to, Gnus allows you to customise it by setting message-cite-reply-position whose doc string is reproduced below

message-cite-reply-position is a variable defined in `message.el'.

Its value is traditional

Documentation:

*Where the reply should be positioned.

If `traditional', reply inline.

If `above', reply above quoted text.

If `below', reply below quoted text.

Note: Many newsgroups frown upon nontraditional reply styles. You

probably want to set this variable only for specific groups,e.g. using `gnus-posting-styles':

  (eval (set (make-local-variable 'message-cite-reply-above) 'above))

I've highlighted the warning just in case you missed it. :-)

Hat tip to Eric Abrahamsen's reply to a poster. And in his post, you can see an example customisation of gnus-posting-styles to do group specific behaviour of reply.

VimOrganizer, an Org-mode clone in Vim

2011-11-04T09:39:00.000+05:30

I seemed to have missed this announcement. For vim users, apparently, there is a way of using vim with org-mode. The good news is that you use vim, the bad news is that it does use Emacs at the backend to work on the files. :-)

The relevant links are
An intro to some of the stuff in the new version is here:
https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer/blob/master/intro.txt
Git page is here:
https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer

And the page on Vim's website is here:
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3342

Second Emacs Pretest Available

2011-11-02T13:30:00.000+05:30

The second Emacs Pretest is now available for testing. The windows build announcement can be found here. The link on the right, next to the popular posts links you to the Windows binaries.

It's these little things....in Emacs

2011-11-01T18:46:00.000+05:30

You know why I continue to use emacs? It's those little things that DTRT. So, here I am looking at some octave code and trying to look at a function definition in another file.

% Randomly select 100 data points to display
rand_indices = randperm(m);
sel = X(rand_indices(1:100), :);

displayData(sel);
^Point is here
fprintf('Program paused. Press enter to continue.\n');
pause;

Any other editor, I'd have to do one or the other; Go to File-->Open.... or switch to Explorer view and open the file by double clicking on it.

In Emacs, I just do M-x ffap at point and it simply prompts me with the completed file name and waits for me to hit RET.

Awesome.

Searching the Internet from any buffer in Emacs

2011-10-30T09:35:00.001+05:30

From the post here by Peter Munster, here's a method to search for any keyword that you're reading in the emacs buffer.

(defun pm/region-or-word (prompt)
  "Read a string from the minibuffer, prompting with PROMPT.
If `transient-mark-mode' is non-nil and the mark is active,
it defaults to the current region, else to the word at or before
point. This function returns a list (string) for use in `interactive'."
  (list (read-string prompt (or (and transient-mark-mode mark-active
                                     (buffer-substring-no-properties
                                      (region-beginning) (region-end)))
                            (current-word))))) 

(defun pm/google (string)
  "Ask a WWW browser to google string.
Prompts for a string, defaulting to the active region or the current word at
or before point."
  (interactive (pm/region-or-word "Google: "))
  (browse-url (concat "http://google.com/search?num=100&q=" string)))

This will work if you have set

;;point to the appropriate browser
(setq browse-url-firefox-program "C:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/firefox.exe")

(setq browse-url-browser-function 'browse-url-firefox
browse-url-new-window-flag nil
browse-url-firefox-new-window-is-tab t)

Put this in your .emacs and when you see a word or highlight a region, issue a M-x pm/google (you can rename the function to a mnemonic, if you want to) and it will search for the word before point or region in google. You probably would want to change the search engine if you want to some other search.

Direct links to mail messages in Gmail through Org-mode

2011-10-21T22:17:00.002+05:30

Here's something I didn't know was possible. It's possible for org-mode links to point to Gmail's individual emails. This thread on the list outlines the different options and caveats to do it from various posters.

And do note this post on how to refer to individual mail messages in the most general case.

Windows Emacs Pretest binaries available

2011-10-20T08:11:00.000+05:30

Apparently, the Windows binaries are now available here after the announcement.

Emacs Column Editing Cua Mode

2011-10-16T19:48:00.000+05:30

Not sure whether it's been seen before but here goes.

Generating PNG images of math equations in LaTeX

2011-10-16T19:29:00.000+05:30

This is an interesting thread on comp.text.tex, which discusses various options of generating PNG images of your LaTeX math equations. Useful when you want to embed in a webpage or Word documents (at least compared to the built-in option).

Org Mode Parser for nodejs

2011-10-05T08:01:00.000+05:30

From the org-mode mailing list, here's an org-mode parser for nodejs that can read org-mode files.

Emacs Poll on the DEL key

2011-10-04T23:27:00.000+05:30

This might look a bit weird for some OS users but if you want to influence Emacs key chord behaviour implementation for the DEL key, now is the time to get involved. I quote partially from the post by Dr. Richard Stallman

In Emacs 24, now in pretest, a change is being considered for ASCII DEL (on most keyboards, the Backspace key) and the Delete function key. The change affects the case of an active region that was not dragged with the mouse. The change is that these commands would delete the region, rather than just one character as now.

Read the post and thread in full (search for poll) and drop your feedback to the asked questions to the mail id listed in the post. And spread the word.

First Emacs Pretest Out

2011-09-26T22:37:00.000+05:30

From the emacs-dev list, here's the announcement of what will eventually be 24.1. To see what's new check here. Thanks to Eli Zaretskii for pointing it out.

Getting python-mode completion to work in Emacs

2011-09-23T07:39:00.000+05:30

If you have issues with getting python-mode completion to work in the Windows port of Emacs, this post might be of help.

A beta launch that may end in failure for google+

2011-09-19T22:51:00.000+05:30

I believe google+ is headed for an also ran status against Facebook. I wish I were wrong but I don't see anything dramatic that would cause people to come to google+ in droves. (Well, they could, if Zuckerberg says something silly about users' intelligence and privacy again)

I think the biggest mistake was to launch google+ without a complete superset of features of facebook plus the things google wanted.

Think about it, if the experience is not seamless and does not do it the way facebook users think it should, why would they shift? Unequivocally, their target is facebook users and not new users. if it's going to woo them, the system had better be complete for them to use it like before and better. Unlike Gmail, which was in beta for quite some time where features were slowly added/removed before removing the covers, google+ should have been compelling in all respects to sway facebook users from the get go.

Apart from circles and privacy thingy(which sort of backfired with their 'real names' banning fiasco), what exactly is compelling about google+? On the other hand, if they had apps on facebook(why not?), Ipads, Android phones, Google Apps, Wallet and Merchant services all tied together at the google+ launch, maybe they'd have had a better chance. Currently, curiosity will drive things for a while but most users would drift back to facebook because that's where their friends are and most importantly, facebook does put in the same features as google+, probably the next month or so. All the less reason to switch to google+.

I don't see how they can improve unless they give some feature to clone the current facebook user data and import into google+ with the least disruption to the user(I mean, the facebook user allows for some sort of 'import' to their google+ account). Or just buy Ebay with its Paypal system and turn it into one huge noisy marketplace.

An individual datapoint: I'm on google+ but not in facebook (where I probably won't register) but all my friends and colleagues are on facebook. Apart from a few who created their ids(I suspect, just to lock in their name profile in google+), pretty much no activity happens in my google+ account.

Which is saying something about me, my circle or google+ ! :-)

The State of Desktop Search

2011-09-07T19:56:00.000+05:30

Everyone might be talking about the cloud buzz and all that but there are still a significant lot carrying around laptops and desktops with monstrous hard disks. The Register paper has an interesting article on local search in the light of Google's dropping support and EOL'ing of Google Desktop software. The author bemoans the lack of good alternatives or rather the options one has,(if one was not happy with Google Desktop) that at present don't seem to be good enough for the task at hand.

It's not pretty.

We get 2TB HDDs for about $100 and given the hoarder mentality that makes people fill it faster and faster compared to the earlier HDDs, we have a big problem. An insane amount of file clutter and no good methods to find the document with a specific text, photo or information.

On the XP machine that I use, the local search interface is....well...sad and could do with a dedicated tool to help users search. A bit strange that Microsoft does not seem to have anything to address this. hmmm...though I vaguely remember seeing some papers on semantic filesystems and other stuff by Microsoft back in the days when NTFS was being hyped about.

The unix find, locate, slocate, rlocate custom built scripts seem to be what passes for cutting edge for rooting through your HDDs; makes you look victorious in the smugly, sad, nerdy way. Which, truth be told, is what I end up doing when I'm not working with Microsoft files.

I looked up a few pieces of software mentioned in the forums but it all seemed a bit much while a few posters in that forum carped, "organise the stuff beforehand".

Very helpful, that.

What do you use to root through your hard disk?