Setting term mode colours

For those of you using term mode in Emacs, this suggestion here might be useful if you want to tinker with the colour scheme.

Basically you need to hook the following into term mode as mentioned in the thread.

;; Redefine the 8 primary terminal colors to look good against black
(setq ansi-term-color-vector
[unspecified "#000000" "#963F3C" "#5FFB65" "#FFFD65"
"#0082FF" "#FF2180" "#57DCDB" "#FFFFFF"]))


The colour sequences are of course in hex.

R support added to Org mode

Carsten has just released 6.23 of org mode with R support. From the release notes

Dan Davison has contributed /org-R.el/ which is now in the
contrib directory. Org-R performs numerical computations and generates graphics. Data can come from org tables, or from csv files; numerical output can be stored in the org buffer as org tables, and links are created to files containing graphical
output. Although, behind the scenes, it uses R, you do not need to know anything about R. Common operations, such as tabulating discrete values in a column of an org table, are available "off the shelf" by specifying options on lines starting with `#+R:'. However, you can also provide raw R code to be evaluated.

The R tutorial for org can found here. Of course, you should have R and ESS installed for it to work.

Using Licenses as a Marketing Tool

After reading this article on moonlight, I've got this uncomfortable feeling over Open Source licensing.

Let me explain.

In the context of moonlight, it is clear that Adobe has significant lead over Microsoft with its flash tools. So, Microsoft has released a competing tool with an Open Source license and patent infringement protection support. It does appear to be a marketing ploy aimed at Adobe by making it available for free and getting market share from the open source crowd(if it works, that is).

As it stands right now, we have two competing tools that deliver rich content or whatever, one with overwhelming market share and the other just about starting out. The underdog ups the ante by releasing under an opensource license and providing support for cross platform running.

While I'm not claiming the open source crowd cannot see what is happening, does it need to get into this at all?

Two software companies are fighting it out, it's their fight; one ropes in the Open source crowd to fight the other. If there was some ideal to all the Licensing stuff, it now looks like it's now used as a marketing ploy between companies. And in the trenches, the programmers are getting played?

The licensing was about rights to programmers(at least I used to think so), now, it's one more tactic in marketing fights.

Cui bono?

A single standard phone charger. What took them so long?

Via Boingboing, an idea that makes eminent sense.  The amount of irritation that one goes through to get a cell phone charged when you can't find yours....this is a no brainer.

The European Commission plans to force mobile phone manufacturers to manufacture one mobile phone charger for all mobile phones, according the European Commissioner for Industry, Gunther Verheugen in an interview with the German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

Can't wait for that to happen. Seriously.

February TUG News

Karl Berry posted this on the comp.text.tex that they're planning to apply for the Google Summer of Code. If you're interested, do get in touch with TUG.

And there are other bits of interesting information on the same post.

Org-Mode Beginners Customization Guide

Just saw this on the org-mode mailing list. If you're a novice org user or thinking of using org, this tutorial out to be useful to you.

I also suggest that you post to the thread with your own point of view as a beginner. That would help in making a better guide. You probably need to subscribe to the mailing list to post.

Importing a CSV file into LaTeX

I didn't know that csvtools were deprecated in favour of datatool.

A request on the comp.text.tex newsgroup led to this article (PDF file) written by Uwe Ziegenhagen which, though in German, is pretty much self explanatory if you look at the sample code and the generated tables. At least, some were.

The good news is, that the article should soon get translated in English some time later in a couple of month's time.

Which is a bit of a timesaver when you consider that you might have to write another shell or perl script to snarf and spit out a LaTeX file if you didn't have datatool.

Emacs Pretest 1 available now

The first pretest release of what will be Emacs 23.1 is now available for testing.

It might be a good idea to take it for a spin.

The Windows versions are available here.