01.16.06
Posted in html/css, Mac OS X, LaTeX at 9:01 pm by Haris
I’ve recently run into two really cool (IMHO) widgets, which I’d like to share with you. One is iCal Events, very simple and elegant. I probably don’t need to tell you what it does.
The other really impressive widget is called Symbols, and it contains a pretty large and well indexed list of commands/escape sequences for various symbols in both LaTeX and HTML, as well as keyboard shortcuts that directly produce those symbols in Unicode. Very useful to all us LaTeX users.
Edited to add: Another cool widget, very helpful when working with CSS.
Later
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12.28.05
Posted in html/css, computers, Gregarius, ruby/rails at 10:36 pm by Haris
The time has finally come for me to jump on the Rails-wagon and learn Ruby on Rails. I will document here my efforts to port the fabulous Gregarius feed aggregator to Ruby. I admit this is not a tutorial for the complete novices, and definitely of no use to a seasoned Rails developer, unless they enjoy a good laugh. In particular, I am assuming that you have glanced at the standard tutorials here and here, as well as Amy Hoy’s wonderful list of articles on her site. I am sure there are other worthwhile tutorials out there, and you can probably find them documented at the wiki.
So to recap, I am assuming that you have Ruby and Rails installed and you have two terminal windows open, as well as your favorite editor ready to work on any file in the directory we are about to create, and of course your favorite browser open, so that we can view our results. Also keep in mind that whatever is presented here is my view on things, and it might very well be incomplete/inaccurate. Please feel free to correct me. This might also be an opportune moment to have a look at the Gregarius source code, to have some idea what we are trying to replicate. Of course for now we’ll only do some small bits of the overall monster.
Ready? Alright then, on with the show!
Read the rest of this entry »
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12.07.05
Posted in html/css, Gregarius at 10:18 pm by Haris
Gregarius is coming along nicely! They have just created a nice setup for plugins to save user options on the database, and this prompted me to write my second plugin. It’s called Auto highlighter, and what it does is that you select a keyword, and a color, and it highlights that keyword anywhere in the feed items it appears. It was one of the plugins on the todo list, not sure whose idea it was originally, but it wasn’t mine. It might have originated here. You can find it through the plugins page, or directly here. It looks great. Let me know what additions you would like to see in it.
By the way, if you are an expert regexp user, then you can put a regexp instead of a keyword. If you are not an expert regexp user, I recommend you become one.
Edited to add: The second version of the plugin is now ready, and it’s bigger, better, not faster, but more! It now allows you a variable number of keywords, with different colors each, and it hosts a very sexy config screen, if I may say so myself (ok, sexy with my standards, don’t expect too much 
). You can see its results on my gregarius installation, where the words apple, drm and mac are highlighted with three different colors. Let me know what you think, and as usual what other features you would like to see.
Edited again to add: Third version, slicker, using associative arrays to make everything easier for me. Unfortunately, it is not compatible with the previous version, so whatever custom keyword-color pairs you have there will be lost.
Later
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12.05.05
Posted in html/css, computers, Mathematics at 10:36 pm by Haris
I just finished converting my cv to html format, using Tim Bray’s template, which I must say I find wonderful. As he so eloquently puts it, “Why would anyone want a word processor any more?”
It am very pleased with the result. Have a look and tell me what you think, and if you have a job for me, let me know! You can find other relevant documents here, though that page is under heavy construction.
Later
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11.27.05
Posted in html/css, TextMate at 11:53 pm by Haris
Textmate never ceases to amaze me. This time I was editing an html file, and I used the internal html preview window that it has, and then I left the window open. The miracle that occurred is that as I continued editing, the preview window was automatically updated instantly! Without me even having to save the file! As I was typing! It’s those little touches that make me love it!
Edited to add: I just found out a tip from Tim Door for a great snippet. Just use the following lines for the snippet:
//-${1/(.)|(?m:\n.*)/(?1:-)/g}
// ${1:${TM_SELECTED_TEXT:Comment}}
//-${1/(.)|(?m:\n.*)/(?1:-)/g}
I wish I could show you in a movie what this does, but I can’t. Basically, when activated, it will create three lines:
//--------
// Comment
//--------
And as you edit the Comment part, the length of the dashes increases to match exactly the length of your comment. It’s awesome! Now if only I could figure out how it works…
Later
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