Microsoft kills off newsgroups

From the Register, this story is pretty sad.  Newsgroup support for Microsoft products is being removed and users are asked to use forums.

I wonder why they do this, that anything old and that works perfectly well needs to be atrophied and become an internet relic.  Like Gopher.  Being a gnus user, I of course have an axe to grind, though I have no subscription to any Microsoft newsgroups.

I'm afraid, other companies  too would also head for the exits and remove their news servers and everyone ends up on flashy, kitschy website that produces a horrid amount of hits for simple web searches. 

My primary objections to forums are that you need  a browser, logins and lots of clicking hither and thither to get things done and I'm yet to see a good forum software whose search feature works well.  Besides, there is something soothing about text only postings viewed in my news reader.

I wish they'd not do this.

Eighth Emacs Pretest Available

The eighth Emacs pretest is available at the usual locations here and here.

The All New Compact Org Mode guide

Well, at a short 34 pages (PDF), it's definitely smaller than the 200 page manual. And it just goes to show, how much development has gone into org-mode keeping the same simplicity(well, you could argue this doc refutes that notion) but extending it do lots of other things like LaTeX publishing.

I got started on LaTeX with the The Not So Short Introduction to LATEX2ε (PDF) which convinced me to use LaTeX to prepare my reports, presentations and letters. And that's definitely longer than the 34 pages of this tutorial.

So, give it a try, it just might help you get started on org-mode.

The LaTeX Beamer project has a new maintainer!

From the Beamer mailing list, Dr. Till Tantau has just announced that the Beamer package will be maintained by Vedran Miletić.

Vedran Miletić plans for Beamer are here.

The Beamer package is one of the best presentation classes for LaTeX. I'd urge you to give it a try, if you haven't.  It's worth the effort to learn it.

Another Emacs Pretest available

The seventh Emacs pretest is available at the usual locations here and here.

Google buying ITA software?

So is this also going to be another Lisp success story? Apparently, Google is in talks to buy ITA software for about $1bn. ITA software has been one of the companies which use Lisp a lot and so this is a big deal for the Lisp supporters.

Remembering the last edited location in a file

From the emacs newsgroup, one way to get to back to the last editing location in the file is described here in this thread. Pretty useful, if you jump between a lot of files and need to scroll down to the end every time or some such repeatable action.

April Emacs Pretest 23.1.95 available

Another Pretest versions of Emacs can be found here and here.  Thanks to Sean who posted it on Emacs Windows mailing list.

Using org-mode to send HTML mail

From the org-mode mailing list, here's a way to post HTML mail messages using org-mode. The link that works is this one. Apparently, one can still see the text part even if you set the Gnus reader to discourage HTML. And in it's present form, it works only with Gnus and not any other Emacs MUAs.

Presumably, one would use this feature only when required, as HTML is not something that is recommended as mail text as there is no guarantee that mail clients would be able to render it or render it the way you'd initially formatted the HTML.

Stick to plain text; Besides, if you're going all flashy in getting your point across, you've got a bigger problem than using HTML to say it.

Another Emacs Pretest Release Available

Another pretest release is available here and here.