Posts on /usr

Thank You, Bram Moolenaar.

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Bram Moolenaar is no longer with us. The creator of Vim passed away last week at a relatively early age, leaving behind a rich legacy of the immensely popular modal text editor. He will be missed by millions of users and fans, who use it daily, and whose first interaction with any *nix system (at least on Linux and macOS) would have involved vim.

I had written about my Vim experience a few years back. Since then, my toolkit has always included Vim (or rather, MacVim). While Emacs remains my primary tool, Vim has a geeky elegance, and its hyper-focus on editing performance is hugely attractive. Also, while Emacs is sometimes (and rightfully) called a kitchen sink, Vim is equally so, at least as the “can do everything” text editor. And it is the standard text editor, after all[1].

Phoenix

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Nine years! It has been that long since I posted. Personal life and work-priorities both conspired to the silence in /usr land, which I finally hope to correct.

A lot has happened in the world in the last decade. Technology has moved on (and continues to accelerate), two presidencies have come and gone, climate change is real, and computers might soon become sentient [1]. And the topics I usually posted about: Emacs, the Mac, *Nix, Open Source, and programming, have all made great strides (not always for the better, I’m looking at you: macOS). And while I have been immersed in these transformations, and have things to say, I just never got around to actually writing. And with each passing year, procrastinating slowly changed into a nagging fear: is blogging still relevant these days? And with the overwhelming rise of social media, does the voice of a blogger even matter?

The Other Emacsen

Sun, 30 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

While Emacs remains my primary text editor, there are times when starting a full Emacs session with tons of packages is simply too slow, especially on a terminal window, and when the task at hand is simply to make a few lines of changes in a configuration file.

Yes, I do know about the handy -q command-line option, which prevents the init.el file from being loaded, thereby ensuring a sub-second initialization of Emacs, or the emacsclient route (which I have enabled, and do use), but sometimes it is just more convenient to have a fast editor that has the Emacs feel, without the bloat. And for a text nerd such as myself, it is also a matter of curiosity to try out other editors once in a while.

What's New in Emacs 24.4

Mon, 30 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Mickey Petersen has written up an excellent round-up of the latest features of the Emacs 24.4 release.

Read the whole article at http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2013/12/29/whats-new-in-emacs-24-4/.

He had also written a similar article for Emacs 24.3 (current stable version), which can be found here.

New Settings that I am using

I have already setup the load-prefer-newer, cycle-spacing, and ns-use-srgb-colorspace options.

The new electric-pair-mode options also look interesting, and I have set these up (I was using skeleton-pair for the auto-pairing function till now).

Enabling Postfix on OSX as a Relay: Revisited

Sun, 22 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Postfix on OSX: Revisited

A few years back, I had written a post on enabling the Postfix MTA as a relay server on OSX, which was quite well received. The article was originally written for OS X Lion, though it remained valid for OSX Mountain Lion, and more recently on OSX Mavericks as well.

However, things have changed on the OS since the last two versions, which warrants a revisit of the instructions, and a refresh of some of the steps. While the old set of instructions still work, there are changes needed that will keep the configuration future-proof.

Copying the previous line to current position in Emacs

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I came across a scenario where I had to quickly copy the previous line in an Emacs buffer to the current position. The usual method for doing this has been to invoke:

C-p C-a C-k C-y RET C-y

Which basically does the following:

Moves to the previous line (C-p)
Moves to the beginning of the previous line (C-a)
Kills the line (i.e., cuts the line with C-k)
Yanks the line back (i.e., restores the original line with C-y)
Creates a newline (RET), and
Yanks another copy of the line with the final C-y (which is what we wanted in the first place)

While this works, it is certainly not the most optimal mechanism to perform such a simple (albeit infrequent) operation.

OS X Mountain Lion: Need to reinstall Xcode command line tools

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So I upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion yesterday. The install was pretty smooth (though had a tough time with the redeem code for the upgrade, worked on the third code that Apple sent across).

Most of the software is working fine. However, I found that my existing Xcode installation needed an upgrade (via a Xcode install from the App Store).

The problem is that any new Xcode install seems to nuke the command line development tools (think make, autoconf, etc.). The solution is pretty simple though. Once Xcode has been installed, run Xcode and then open the preferences. There is a section on downloads, which lists installing the command line tools as an option.

Enabling postfix for outbound relay via Gmail on OS X Lion (and newer OSX versions)

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Update on Oct 25, 2014: Updated For OS X Yosemite.

Update on Dec 21, 2013: I have posted an update to the launchd setup for postfix. You should still read through this post, as most of the setup remains common to both posts.

The background

Mac OSX comes with the postfix MTA, which is a fully featured SMTP server. Under normal circumstances, there is usually no need to enable or configure this software, as most email access is usually done via GUI clients such as the Mail.app - which uses the POP/IMAP and SMTP settings to connect with the email service provider.

Heretical Confessions of an Emacs Addict - Joy of the Vim Text Editor

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Context

As an experiment, I have recently started using Vim as my primary text editor. While I have been an Emacs aficionado for a very, very long time - clocking in at almost 16 years - Vim is something that I have always been curious about, and tinkered with from time to time, while ending up going back to Emacs. This time however, I intend to stick around for a while, and try to get a feel of the Zen of Vim.

The Missing iSync in OS X Lion (and what to do about it)

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The short answer to someone looking for a solution: just copy over iSync from your Snow Leopard installation back to the /Applications folder in Lion, and also copy the phone plugin you need back into /Library/PhonePlugins folder. Everything will be as it was. Enjoy.

The longer story requires more explanation …

The Problem

I have been looking forward to upgrading to the latest version of OSX (Lion) ever since the announcements were made in the WWDC earlier this year.

2010 in review

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 7,800 times in 2010. That’s about 19 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 9 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 33 posts. There were 14 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 941kb. That’s about a picture per month.

Three nifty alternatives to the M-TAB key in Emacs, and a replacement.

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The M-<TAB> key in Emacs provides a useful completion function (`completion-at-point’), which tries to complete the current symbol at point to something useful, usually based on other symbols in the buffer which have the current partial symbol as a prefix.

However, using this key is a pain in most OS GUI systems, since it is usually mapped to the Task Switching function as well. Note that the <Alt> key doubles as <Meta> on most keyboards.

How I Learned to stop using Firefox and love the Chrome

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

One word: SPEED.

Seriously. I have been a long proponent and user of Firefox, having been lured into it by its relative elegance and the extension framework many moons back. Also, the web development support has always been far better than its competition, with Firebug and Web Developer to name just two great reasons for it being the developer’s browser of choice.

The sheer number of Firefox add-ons and extensions (about 13,000 in the last count) is staggering - and list absolute essentials such as Adblock Plus, XMarks and DownThemAll! This combined with the themes (I suggest GrApple Yummy on the Mac) has been making the web browsing experience a far better one for me than Safari.

Emacs 23.2 has been released.

Sun, 09 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Emacs 23.2 has been released.

The source downloads are available at: ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/

For those who prefer access to the VCS, the read-only bzr URL is:

http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/emacs/emacs-23.

Enjoy!

Converting from TaskPaper to Emacs Org-Mode

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Why TaskPaper and Org-Mode?

TaskPaper is a simple and elegant task management software for the OSX platform. It combines the simplicity of a text micro-format to mark the tasks, and the elegance of a Mac UI. It also provides a quick launch time and a nice system-wide quick entry window that is accessible with a single shortcut key.

I have been a heavy user of Emacs’ Org-Mode for some years now, and love the power and flexibility it offers for tracking not just outlines and tasks, but any text based item, including notes and calendar entries. In fact Org-Mode has become one of the primary software that I use regularly, every day.

Firefox 3.6 finally allows true Fullscreen mode on Mac OSX

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Updated to Firefox 3.6 today. As usual, a very solid update, and was pleasantly surprised by the full-screen mode (finally!) that works exactly as you would want it. This was one of the few areas where Firefox on OSX was lagging behind as compared to other platforms.

There were a few plugins that claimed to enable this in prior versions, but never worked very well.

The option is available under the “View”menu and has a standard Apple-Shift-F shortcut as well.

Emacs function to add new path elements to the $PATH environment variable

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A very simple eLisp function to add new path elements to the PATH environment variable. Very useful for adding new comint executables from within .emacs/init.el files.

(defun my-add-path (path-element)
"Add the specified path element to the Emacs PATH"
(interactive "DEnter directory to be added to path: ")
(if (file-directory-p path-element)
(setenv "PATH"
(concat (expand-file-name path-element)
path-separator (getenv "PATH")))))

Google Search from within Emacs

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A quick and dirty eLisp function for searching on the internet from within Emacs. The default is to search using Google, but you can add to the *internet-search-urls* variable to setup additional search URLs.

By default, the search term is appended at end of the URL - however, you can also encode the specific search term insertion point in the URL by marking the position using the “%s” marker.

;;; The custom search URLs
(defvar *internet-search-urls*
(quote ("http://www.google.com/search?ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=%s"
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=")))
;;; Search a query on the Internet using the selected URL.
(defun search-in-internet (arg)
"Searches the internet using the ARGth custom URL for the marked text.
If a region is not selected, prompts for the string to search on.
The prefix number ARG indicates the Search URL to use. By default the search URL at position 1 will be used."
(interactive "p")
;; Some sanity check.
(if (> arg (length *internet-search-urls*))
(error "There is no search URL defined at position %s" arg))
(let ((query                          ; Set the search query first.
(if (region-active-p)
(buffer-substring (region-beginning) (region-end))
(read-from-minibuffer "Search for: ")))
;; Now get the Base URL to use for the search
(baseurl (nth (1- arg) *internet-search-urls*)))
;; Add the query parameter
(let ((url
(if (string-match "%s" baseurl)
;; If the base URL has a %s embedded, then replace it
(replace-match query t t baseurl)
;; Else just append the query string at end of the URL
(concat baseurl query))))
(message "Searching for %s at %s" query url)
;; Now browse the URL
(browse-url url))))

Quickly diff the changes made in the current buffer with its file

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Update (23rd Jan 2010): Separated the key-assignment and function definition.

A simple function to quickly do a diff of the current buffer contents with its underlying file. Very useful if the file has been changed outside (e.g., a log file).

;; Diff the current buffer with the file contents
(defun my-diff-current-buffer-with-disk ()
 "Compare the current buffer with it's disk file."
(interactive)
 (diff-buffer-with-file (current-buffer)))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c w") 'my-diff-current-buffer-with-disk)

gnuplot with AquaTerm on OSX Snow Leopard

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The gnuplot graphing utility has always had excellent support for multiple terminal types. While the X11 terminal is a satisfactory GUI view for the graphs, I prefer to use the AquaTerm terminal on OSX as it is more ‘Mac-like’ and feels more natural.

Also, I do prefer to compile gnuplot by myself on OSX rather than downloading the pre-packaged binaries - as this gives me more control over the compilation (including getting around the stupid Apple readline bug - where Apple has essentially shipped a broken readline by using libedit to emulate the non-existent libreadline).

RIP Mafia Wars. Was nice knowing you.

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Finally! With a heavy heart and spasms of grief and guilt, I finally managed to delete Mafia Wars from my Facebook account. It was nice while it lasted - but the horror of the Lost Hours! The incessant and obsessive desire to click-click-click and level up - only to find …. more of the same thing. This is addiction.

For good measure, have parted company with Farmville (which thankfully was only a 2 minute fad) and a few other data grabbing apps too. Finally can get back to the Face of Facebook.

Signed up to posterous - aggregating my online presence

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Have just signed up to http://posterous.com. Needed something like this for a long time.
My new Online Grand Central is now at http://evolve75.posterous.com/

Enjoy!

Posted via email from evolve75’s posterous

Snow Leopard - First Impressions

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I finally bit the bullet and installed Snow Leopard over last weekend. I did a clean install (i.e., reformat and install afresh) - considering the significant under-the-hood changes that this OS revision has.

The basic steps I followed are:

Cleaned up the existing Leopard install to remove applications, preference panes and documents I did not need
Reviewed the preferences under ~/Library/Preferences as well as the application support items under ~/Library/Application Support and removed the items which were out of date or detritus from old installs
Took an image backup using SuperDuper! of the Leopard install
Took a backup of the disk using Time Machine to allow easier data restore during the installation
De-authorized my iTunes to prevent increment of the install counter after reinstall of the OS
Popped in the Snow Leopard DVD and started the install
During installation, I used the Disk Utility to reformat the Mac OS partition
I also did a custom install to prevent the printer drivers (over 2 GB) being installed. In addition, I selected the optional Rosetta and Quicktime 7 components (seriously Apple, these take less than 10 MB - why the optional tag?)
Waited for around 20 minutes to have the base image installed, and then used the migration assistant to restore data from my Time Machine backup

The install was relatively smooth, and restoring the data from my Time Machine backup also went without any issues. However, post-install, some of the glitches started appearing:

Importing contacts from OSX Addressbook to Emacs BBDB

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A major aspect of using Emacs is that it is more than a text editor - it is more of an application platform - some would call it an Operating System - that allows a host of applications to run within the same context and session - and vastly enrich the user experience. This is in fact a primary reason why many Emacs users spend their entire computer interaction via Emacs.

Replacing Mail.app with Gmail on OSX

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Off late the Mail.app email client on OSX has been acting up on me. It often stalls or displays the spinning beach ball of death till a forced quit is required. Also, it seems to have display rendering issues when a mail classified incorrectly as junk is moved back to the inbox.

I tend to use the Mail.app as a local email client for three main purposes:

Offline mode for reading my emails when there is no Internet connection available
Easy desktop search for the mails via Spotlight, and
Easy archival of important mail in my project workspaces (either in Devonthink or plain text export)

The other features (TODO and Notes) are nice, but not really useful for me as I use other tools for these items. The mail itself is served out via gmail accounts and IMAP synchronization.

Tips for using emacsclient using Emacs 23.1 daemon mode

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In an earlier post I had listed the server-mode mechanism to allow client/server editing using Emacs. However, this require some setup and also an active Emacs session.

With the latest version of Emacs (23.1), a new mechanism to invoke Emacs in a server mode has been introduced. Basically, emacs can be invoked with the –daemon option from the shell command line:

$ emacs --daemon

This will run emacs in the background as a daemon which will be listening in to emacsclient connections. To actually start a edit session, use emacsclient from the command line as before with the file name as a parameter.

Tips for using emacsclient and server-mode on OSX

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Emacs is a great editor, but has one setback - it is slow to startup if you have loads of packages to load. On my G4 iBook, it takes around 45 seconds before Emacs becomes usable (OK - I use lots of packages).

However, Emacs is not meant to be restarted every so often. The canonical usage is to start Emacs once, invoke the server mode (see EmacsClient) and then use the emacsclient from the command line to invoke the editor instance when needed. I.e., the classic client/server model for editing!

Setting the PATH variable from within Emacs

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A Small function to set the PATH variable from within Emacs. You can define the function and the path definitions in your .emacs file:

Very useful for OS X, where the default path is set by plists.

;; Define a function to setup additional path
(defun my-add-path (path-element)
"Add the specified path element to the Emacs PATH"
(interactive "DEnter directory to be added to path: ")
(if (file-directory-p path-element)
(setenv "PATH"
(concat (expand-file-name path-element)
path-separator
(getenv "PATH")))))

and use it as:

Emulate a three button Mouse in Emacs on a single button Mac trackpad/mouse

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Traditionally, mice on Macs have had just one button (including the iBook/Powerbook trackpads) - even through Mac OS (including OS X) can accept 2 or 3 button input without any problems.

Emacs on the other hand maps quite a few functions to the second and third chords of the mice. If you want to emulate a three button mouse in Emacs on OS X, a simple customization option will do the trick.

Using M-` from switching Emacs Frames on OSX

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The standard Emacs key-binding for moving to the other frame (‘other-frame’) is C-x 5 o. That’s quite a few key-strokes, and also does not match with the standard OS X key-mapping for switching windows, which is Command-`. On OS X, the Command key maps to Meta in Emacs.

However, this is easy to fix. Put the following code-fragment into your .emacs file:

(define-key icicle-mode-map [?\M-`] nil) # Only needed if you use Icicles
(global-set-key [?\M-`] 'other-frame) # This sets the key binding

Note that by default M-` invokes ‘tmm-menubar’ which can also be accessed via [F10]. Also, you do not need the first line (to undefine the key binding in Icicles) if you do not use that package.

Use the Capslock as a Control key on OSX for Emacs

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is an absolute must, unless you like contorting your fingers and risk RSI. It is also an easy thing to do on OS X.

You need to bring up the System preferences → Keyboard & Mouse

and then click the “Modifier Keys” to remap the Capslock to Control.

This is available on OS X 10.4 and later versions.

Using OSX Spotlight from within Emacs

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Emacs comes with a ‘locate’ command that uses the locate system command to find files within your system.

On OS X, it is easier to use Spotlight, which is trivial to enable in Emacs.

In your .emacs file, add the following code:

(setq locate-command "mdfind")

Now try: 
M-x locate <enter your search here>

Your search results will be displayed in a new Window.

Musings on my Inbox Zero and GTD workflow

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

My time-management revolves around email, Calendar and to-do lists. While tools definitely help, it is more important to understand that we are processing information and acting on them, and it is just managing or tracking the items. A few pointers on what I use for Emails:

Email

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it. - Edward R. Murrow

Hurray! NetNewsWire 3.2b13 has removed Advertisements

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The latest beta of NetNewsWire (3.2b13) has removed the annoying advertisements that were a major distraction. Also, they have brought back the clipping feature - which is really one of the most useful functions for storing interesting RSS articles for reading later.

However, the resurrected clippings do not sync with Google Reader, which cripples the function. In my usual use case scenario, I used to use the Newsgator online web interface to store long articles for reading later at leisure at home. Looks like this is not going to be possible.

Emacs 23 is finally released!

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Hurray! The latest version of the Emacs Operating system … erm text editor has been released today. The new version is at 23.1 and has a lot of goodies packed. The three features I am looking forward to the most are:

Native transparency
Easy sizing of the font display via C-x C-+ and C-x C–
Full unicode support!!

The third one is going to be most useful in the long run - with an easy ability to use the editor for texts in my native language and script. MULE was a workable option - but clunky compared to the solution in this release.

Moving away from NetNewsWire RSS Reader

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So today morning I got an email from http://www.newsgator.com, makers of the excellent NetNewsWire RSS Reader for OS X. NetNewsWire was originally a paid for application and a best of the breed at that. It was made a free download last year and has been my primary RSS Reader till date.

The main USP I found in NetNewsWire was the companion http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/WebEd2.aspx online RSS feed aggregator site, and the excellent synchronization between the local client and the web edition. This basically meant that I could read RSS feeds where I wanted to - even when away from the OSX laptop, and my reading history would be in sync when I fired up the OSX client. Heck, there was even a iPhone client to do the same sync up.

Blog movement complete!

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Finally managed to move over the entries from the old site! Adieu X10Hosting. It was definitely NOT nice knowing you.

Hello / users!

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome! This is the reincarnation of my earlier blog site @ http://anupamsg.elementfx.com/

After suffering through frequent outages and juvenile tempers by the admins at http://x10hosting.com/, I have finally decided to give up on the custom Wordpress deployments and have decided to have http://wordpress.com host the blog.

I will be moving over the blog entries in the next few days. Till then …

Dependency hell with darwinports

Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I have had the need to produce charts and graphs for my work lately - and wanted to start using gnuplot. Should be easy right? After all, there is a darwinports port available, and install should have been a breeze, with just a:

sudo port install gnuplot

Or so I thought. For some unknown &!@^% reason, darwinports with its immense intelligence decided that it needed to download 75 other ports that I did not ask for, including its own version of X11, even though Apple does provide a perfectly decent implementation that I have installed.

ASCII Art - Converting JPEG images to ASCII

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Found an interesting ASCII Art conversion site at http://www.typorganism.com/asciiomatic

The site takes 60x50 pixel JPEG images (size has to be exactly that) and converts them to a ASCII glyph based image.

Do you Twitter?

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Twitter is one of those Web 2.0 applications that at first  glance seems to beg the question: why? But first, a description of the service  from its home page: Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and  stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple  question: What are you doing? In short, it allows you to post a short description of what you are doing right  now (or in fact, any short phrase at all - the trend seems to be for posting  witty or funny comments). The next obvious thing is to track what others are doing - which can be a  limited set of your friends, or for anyone who has chosen to make their status  public. Another interesting use is to use it as a virtual SMS mechanism on the  web - you can choose to only track your friends, and use the service to keep in  virtual touch with each other. Twitter offers tracking and update via the web, IM as well as SMS via a  cell-phone. The service has already gained a large following, and many web celebrities such  as Marlin Mann of 43Folders fame or Cali Lewis from  GeekBrief TV are on board. Yours truly is also testing the waters right now, and has the handle evolve75  on the service. There are also quite a few tools already available to make the usage easier. A  Firefox extension called twitbin enables live tracking via  a side-bar on your browser, and OS X dashboard widget called  Twadget is available for updating Twitter from your Mac desktop (for  Vista users, an alternate version for the sidebar is available  here). Whether Twitter is just another Web 2.0 meme - or here to stay - remains to be  seen. The service is useful, but carries the risk of the novelty fading away  to becoming a chore :-( ~ Anupam

Some useful Emacs Links

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Found an interesting Emacs blog with lots of tips and tricks, and  is run by Ryan McGeary. The entry for running Emacs on OS X is useful. Ryan recommends the Carbon  Emacs package, which is a pre-packaged version of the GNU Emacs version  22, and contains a ton of extra packages not available in the CVS Version. I personally use the latest Gnu Emacs Version 22 from the CVS repository, and compile  the application manually (well, via a cron job actually) every month or so, to keep up with the  latest developer changes being made in the code-repository itself (which - BTW - can be tracked via  the Emacs devel newsgroup), and prefer to manually setup the packages I need. Apart from the literally thousands of site on the net dealing with Emacs, one  wiki Site I can whole-heartily recommend is the Emacs Wiki:  http://emacswiki.org/, a fantastic resource on Emacs of all  varieties, and catering users from newbies through über-geeks.

Using Emacs and Markdown for Wordpress posting

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

While setting up this site (which is based on Wordpress), I was evaluating  a few offline blog editors, and came upon MarsEdit and Ecto - both of which seem to be well-accepted commercial blog editors in the Mac  world. Both allow easy setup of the blog configurations, have a hassle-free  configuration, and allow a mail-inbox like access to previous posts. My needs for the offline blogging tool are:

Support Wordpress (obviously)
Support formatting in Markdown (the default Wordpress formatting is atrocious). Note that you will need to enable Markdown syntax on your blog by using any of the plugins available for Wordpress.
Provide easy access to prior posts
Have a decent text editor built-in
Provide at least a subset of my current editing muscle-memory

However, I happen to be a Emacs fanatic, and perform majority of my day-to-day computing tasks in that tool (another post on this later). So I googled around a bit for the current state of blogging using Emacs, and voila! EmacsWiki pointed to the weblogger mode, which supports Wordpress, and also handles Markdown formatting easily with the markdown mode. And to top it off, the code is open-source, which means that I can tinker and change the functionality when needed.

Extension List Dumper for Firefox

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Since Firefox 3.0 released, I have been on a extension binge"evaluation" spree - and currently have around 37 of these installed. The problem is that having the same set of extensions across different installs of Firefox on my machines has been rather tedious, given the fact that Firefox does not provide a easy way to list the installed ones. The only way out so far has been to manually scroll through the list of add-ons and hope that I recorded the name correctly :-)