Everything happens for a reason

I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they are right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

- Marilyn Monroe

My baby

My first car.

I inherit nothing

“But you see,” said Roark quietly, “I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.”

-Howard Roark to the Dean, from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

I enjoyed this book tremendously, and would definitely recommend it to a friend.

[Emacs] compile-command

compile-command is a variable which holds the target for compile command in Emacs. By default, it holds "make -k" , but we can change it if we need a slightly different target. For example, while I am editing my latex files I can set it to "pdflatex myfile.tex".

An easy way to accomplish this is using a file local variable. For my latex file, I added the following comments at the end of the file to set some file local variables.

% Local Variables:
% compile-command: "make -k ch2"
% fill-column: 80
% comment-fill-column: 80
% End:

Local value of compile-command can also be used in source files where someone need to build the whole project instead of only compiling the source targets in the current directory from Emacs.

% Local Variables:
% compile-command: "cd .. && make -k"
% End:

Trek 7100 Hybrid :-)

You can find more about this bike HERE.

Wiki Compilers

Wiki compilers are great for those less blessed people who has an account in a web server but only with static pages( i.e University , Corporate Home pages). They work the same way a compiler works, produces ( actually compiles the wiki syntaxes into static html) offline contents of the static site beforehand.

Wiki Compilers

1. Wiko
2. ikiwiki
3. WikiWikiWftk!

I like the Wiko one a lot. See the creator's(Pau Arumi) page generated by this wiki engine. And the syntax is very similar to Wikipedia and Markdown.

Emacs-Muse
You can also use Emacs-Muse to manage a static web site. Alex Ott maintains a nice web site with Muse.

Markdown
This is the simplest approach, it just generates html from markdown files. Markdown syntax is very easy to work with, and it can readily convert simple text files to html files with footnotes, references, links, etc.

Org-Mode
Emacs' Org-mode can generate htmls (as well as lots of other formats, I use it to take my notes and generate technical documentation for softwares, it helps me to generate info/pdf/html/text documents from a single source. Very handy).

Save your emacs Fingers

To save my emacs fingers, I swapped all CTRL and ALT keys in the keyboard, and also mapped the CAPS LOCK key to the ALT.

Here is the xmodmap code in my Thinkpad T41p for swapping CTRL and ALT keys.

These keycodes are system-specific. Use `xev` to find out the keycodes in your system before applying this `xmodmap` script.

!
! This is an `xmodmap' input file for
!   PC 105 key, wide Delete, tall Enter (XFree86; US) keyboards.
! Automatically generated on Sat Nov 22 23:28:24 2008 by xxxxx with
! XKeyCaps 2.47; Copyright (c) 1991-1999 Jamie Zawinski; 2005-2006 Christoph Berg.
! http://www.jwz.org/xkeycaps/
!
! This file presupposes that the keyboard is in the default state, and
! may malfunction if it is not.
!
remove Lock    = Caps_Lock
remove Control = Control_L Control_R
remove Mod1    = Alt_L Alt_R
remove Mod4    = Meta_L Meta_R
remove Mod5    = Scroll_Lock

keycode 0x42 =    Alt_L    Meta_L
keycode 0x25 =    Alt_L    Meta_L
keycode 0x40 =    Control_L
keycode 0x71 =    Control_R
keycode 0x6D =    Alt_R    Meta_R

add    Control = Control_L Control_R
add    Mod1    = Alt_R Alt_L 0x009C Alt_L Alt_R Alt_L Alt_L
add    Mod4    = 0x007F 0x0080
add    Mod5    = Mode_switch ISO_Level3_Shift
!
! For Mouse Swap.
!# pointer = 3 2 1 4 5

Check more tips at , http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs