...

For the last two weeks, I've been down with chicken pox. While the first
10 days were pretty bad things are improving as I'm finally off of curd
rice and raw onions and slowly getting back to eating some tasty food.

This little period of rest is a god-send for me as I was getting worked
up at work and an ever piling reading list adding to the irritation. The
last few days, apart from reading, the tool seeker in me has found some
really cool tools and when you start dreaming of use cases for these
cool toys and tools, the pain and the irritation just vanish. Hopefully,
I shall blog about them here this week as I'll be quarantined for atleast
another week.

LyX, LaTeX and books...

I'm typesetting a book for a friend. Initially I had to decide between LaTeX and ConTeXt. Although LaTeX had a WYSIWYM editor in LyX I've always liked ConTeXt for its perceived completeness (their documentation always looked better than the rest) but I haven't touched it since 2002 when I last used it for preparing reports for college. However after checking out LyX 1.61 the choice was easy. LyX has come a long way since the early versions that used the XForms toolkit.

As for the document class to use for the book the popular choices seemed to be KOMA-Script and Memoir. I almost selected KOMA-Script when at the last moment decided to take a look the Memoir documentation and I was pleasantly shocked! The documentation for the memoir class is simply brilliant! (and beautifully typeset too!). It is not only a class documentation but also a complete introduction to typesetting. I'd say it is mandatory reading for any novice getting into typsetting. Google for memman.pdf and give it a good reading.

I ended up using LyX with minimal ERT needed to customize the memoir document class.

Here's an article that presents a good overview on designing a book with LyX:

http://www.linux.com/feature/56471

Also a good set of tips was picked up from
http://www.markschenk.com/tensegrity/latexexplanation.html

For preparing bibliographies, JabRef is a nice utiility for managing your BibTeX databases.

I haven't really looked at indexing options but the book is mainly an internal monograph so the index can be omitted.

Hello again!

Back to blogger after roaming elsewhere for three years. As was mentioned in my last post here, I moved my blog to WordPress but was never happy which ofcourse had to with the then prevailing confusion in my life rather than wordpress itself. I eventually deleted that blog in early 2008 and then moved my blog to my own VPS on linode. After grappling with toolset issues (dokuwiki, blorg, ikiwiki) finally settled on pier which is what the fork of this blog is currently running on at http://scriptek.co.in/seaside/pier .

In the meanwhile this "dead" blog was getting more hits than all the other blogs put together. Also blogger is now a google service which meant that it was auto-associated with my gmail account which happens to be my primary email account. There were also additional conveniences like mail2blogger which suits my workflow than logging in and editing posts inside a HTML editor (which I really hate btw). All these factors made me want to switch back to blogger and continue my original blog. However there was a nasty problem: I forgot the password and the email that was associated with my blogger account was no longer there. So this blog was more or less orphaned but the hits kept coming. Wrote a few times to Google but I guess my requests went to /dev/null.

Finally, today I sat down to methodically try and eliminate all the passwords I've used so far in my life. After an hour of trial (and getting kicked out) I managed to login!!!

So here I am, back to where I first started.

Bye Bye Blogger

After rambling here for 3 years, I've decided to move my blog to a different home. My reasons: Got bored of the same interface and themes even though I've not posted much. Actually, I was looking forward to Google's blogger beta but as of now, it does not allow you to migrate your blog entirely and I don't want to have multiple blogs. Also, much of what Blogger lacks, what blogger-beta promises/provides, Wordpress already has. So, I've moved to Wordpress. My new blog can be found here . I donno if it is within the blogging ethics to move a blog entirely from one host to another but I want to keep all my posts in one place so I've imported this blog to the new site.

A big thank you to Blogger for the good service provided over the last 3 years.

FICS...

I've rejoined the Free Internet Chess Server . I plan to play a few games there everyday. My handle is "MrPunch" and my current (provisional) rating is 1902.

Emacs artist mode...

I was blown away when I saw emacs's artist-mode (M-x artist-mode activates it). Artist mode switches emacs's text buffer to a nice canvas where you can draw ascii art using the mouse!!! Coooooool!

Here is a sample scribble:

 

    ** **   *
    *  **    *      **  *
    ****     *     **  *****  *****
    *****   *    *  **  **  *   *
    * **  *   *  **   *  *   *
  ***  *  ****  ********    *  ********

Note: I was trying to scribble 'kicha'. Guess the CSS has ruined my fine drawing :-(

This weekend...

Indrani came to Salem this week and stayed with us for the weekend. We drove to Yercaud hills. It was a one and half hour drive from my place. The weather was very pleasant, misty and a little bit of rain. We saw the various vantage points. At the highest point, 1500m above MSL, is the Servarayan cave temple. The temple houses Lord Servarayan and goddess Cauvery and it is said that the cave runs so deep that it touches the river Cauvery. It is believed that the god and the goddess are the protectors of the surrounding hills and hence they take the name from him which the Britishers have anglicized to "Shervaroy hills". We walked on the nearby meadow and it was an interesting experience to see the mist covering and clearing every now and then. From the other side of the meadow, one could clearly see portions of the hill that were shaved off by the bauxite miners. Not a pretty sight. We could'nt go to the waterfall because of bad roads and we were too lazy to walk 10Kms. We missed out on a few places but given the short stay, we managed to cover a lot. On our way back, we even climbed a fire monitoring tower installed near a hair-pin bend where we got a nice view of Salem!

I'm quite bad at photography. Indrani sure had a tough time teaching me framing etc. However, I still ended up taking pictures by simply "pointing and clicking". Here are some pictures.

We got a lot of things sorted out regarding acharya/peixes and the direction that the urdu editor will take. Apart from that, we also chatted for a long time. Little did I know that Indrani can sing well. She sang a few Bangla songs and I also made her sing a few verses from Thiruvasagam. Needless to say, it was fun listening her sing Thiruvasagam.

Overall, it was a great weekend.

Turbo Power!?

Borland has finally made the Turbo product line available for download. Rushed over to the download site and started to download Turbo C++. The package came in two parts - a prequisite that weighed 230MB and TC++ itself which weighed 390M!. Wonder whatz inside. Turns out .Net 1.1 is required. Hmm. As the download was progressing, began to read the FAQ. When I read that the commandline compiler was not included in the package I lost interest and cancelled the download. I was just curious to try out the compiler. Am not a big fan of IDEs. Emacs is fine for most of my needs.

Relocations....

Indrani has quit ETV after working there for 7 years!. She'll be moving to Mysore and join the Central Institute of Indian Languages as a research fellow. IG, good luck!.

Monkey has quit HCL and joined Wipro. He has moved back to Hyderabad to take care of his many families ;). Right Durga?