Org-mode, Another reason to learn it

You know why people fall in love with org-mode?  Because of posts like this, explaining how to do source code and results with the minimal of overheads.  That's why.  It's all in a bloody, blooming, text file, dammit.

What's your excuse in not learning it?
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sotto voce: Emacs?

SSL certificates, why do they bother?

After reading this article from The Register, why bother with SSL?  A banking heist of the century is waiting to happen, me thinks.  And that innocuous padlock on your browser is going to be the reason for the vanishing money.   You can think of even more ingenious ways of using it to snooker anyone...

Certificate Authority Trustwave has revoked a digital certificate that allowed one of its clients to issue valid certificates for any server, thereby allowing one of its customers to intercept their employees' private email communication.
...

And it's all downhill from there.

No Gnus v0.19 is released

Lars has tagged and released v0.19 and created a new branch ma gnus 0.1 too.

Installing AucTeX and Preview LaTeX on Windows

So, I upgraded my Emacs to the latest version and went through the steps of compiling my elisp packages on my Windows XP laptop and promptly struggled a bit on getting Auctex and Preview LaTeX to work.  I've decided on documenting it; well, only the key steps with a lot of hand waving and assumptions thrown in.

Namely,

Cygwin toolchains are installed(that's what I have)
MiKTeX is installed(whatever version)
Win32 Emacs from the official GNU site (I used 23.4)
Ghostscript is installed too (I used the cygwin based one)

In the cygwin terminal, either checkout the cvs version of Auctex or download the tarballs and untar it somewhere.  Presumably you have MiKTeX and Emacs installed already somewhere; preferably in a folder path that doesn't contain spaces in it's name(It should work with spaces in the path name but I haven't and daren't try that; I really don't need that aggravation).

First you run configure to generate the Makefile

./configure --with-emacs=c:/gnu/emacs-23.4/bin/emacs --prefix=c:/gnu --with-texmf-dir=c:/MiKTeX2.9

If you haven't got all the build tools needed (make, install, latex,perl..) it will stop.  Fix each one of them by installing the necessary packages by using the cygwin package manager setup.exe. Of course, you need to adjust the paths above.

By default, the preview build is enabled by default, which, you can disable by adding the option --disable-preview to configure above, if you don't want to preview your latex document that's got figures and maths.

When the Makefile is generated, run make.  Do not do a make install.  You can use the files in situ by following the instructions of Tassilo Horn here.   You'd probably need to add the following to get the correct info files of Auctex.

;; AUC TeX
(add-to-list 'load-path "C:/gnu/elisp/auctexcvs/auctex/")
(load "auctex.el" nil t t)
(add-to-list 'load-path "C:/gnu/elisp/auctexcvs/auctex/preview/")
(load "preview-latex.el" nil t t)

;;set the path to info files of auctex

(setq Info-default-directory-list
      (cons "c:/gnu/elisp/auctexcvs/auctex/doc" Info-default-directory-list))

I prefer it this way as this does not change the directory structure of a stock install of Emacs on Windows.  Easier to share the folders for someone to copy without borking something.

Navigate to the preview folder and load the circ.tex and compile it.  It should hopefully do so.

For preview you need the png or jpeg image support with Emacs. I've used the dlls mentioned in the Emacs README.w32 that are hosted on the GTK website. Specifically, the png and zlib ones that I downloaded and just dumped  in the Emacs bin directory.  Added the following to my .emacs

(setq preview-image-type 'png)

Ran the preview command on the circ.tex buffer and it showed the equations and images inline which is what it's supposed to do.  If you want jpeg support you'd have to get the jpeg dlls for win32 somewhere(the install files mentions gnuwin32 site)

Which is where I stop now as it all works fine and dandy for me.  The various install files tell you not to mix the cygwin paths and normal DOS paths and other such warnings.  But I haven't seen anything that has knackered my installation or borked my usage of them with different bits of win32 and cygwin tied together with AucTeX

So far.

Emacs 24.1 Fourth Pretest out

The fourth pretest of what will be Emacs 24.1 is out. The Windows binaries are also out.

Emacs 23.4 Released

GNU Emacs 23.4 which fixes a security flaw in EDE, along with other bug fixes has been released .

It's not Coincidence, it's Providence!

Browsing my local paper, found this little gem tucked away in a small article.  This year is the 125th birthday celebrations of mathematical genius Ramanujan, so The Hindu runs lots of maths related stuff as well as vignettes about Ramanujan, this year.  Here's a weird but nice clip from the article.

A tale Robert Kanigel repeated a couple of times during his recent visit to Madras to launch the 125th birthday celebrations of mathematical genius Ramanujan related to his first visit to Madras in 1988 to start following the Ramanujan trail on the ground as he got down to working on the mathematician's biography.


That November day he landed from London was a bandh day in Madras and the airport was virtually deserted. There was a lone auto rickshaw with a passenger in it and another person haggling to get aboard. That person was Viswanathan Venkataraman, who had also arrived from London. When he noticed the forlorn foreigner wondering what he should do, Viswanathan told him that the only way to get to the city was to squeeze in with them. And Kanigal joined them for that ride in a sardine tin.


During the ride, Viswanathan discovered that Kanigal was not a tourist but a well known writer who was working on Ramanujan's biography. “What a coincidence,” remarked Viswanathan, “I am the grandson of S. Narayana Aiyar with whom Ramanujan worked in the Port Trust.” No, it's not coincidence, it's Providence, a surprised Kanigal enthusiastically replied. And so began Kanigal's first steps in Madras that led to The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan.

A quick round up on Org, Emacs 23.4 news

Looks like I'll be busy for the next couple of weeks on work related stuff.  Here's some newsworthy posts from various mailing lists.

Konrad Hinsen has posted a patch for org-mode for IMAP support for VM links in orgmode.  Possibly of interest only to VM users.

Due to a security issue, there will be a Emacs 23.4 release in the next week or so, here's the announcement of the first release candidate by Chong Yidong.

Sending Emails with Attachments from the Command Line Revisited

Previously I had posted about trying to send attachment emails from the command line here and here.  But the hitch was, every time I changed computers(which while infrequent) I still had to download and compile mpack and install it every time.

On a whim, when I asked on the cygwin mailing list, I was asked to try the Email package.  And I have to report it works beautifully.  It needs an MTA to connect to the mail server, for which there is msmtp and is part of the Cygwin packaged utilities already.   That sort of solves my portability issue.

Configuring Email was simple.  Edit the email.conf file with the following minimum details and you're set.


############################################################
SENDMAIL_BIN = '/usr/sbin/msmtp -t'
MY_NAME  = 'Sivaram '
MY_EMAIL = 'nnsivaram.nnet@gmail.com'
#REPLY_TO = ''
USE_TLS = 'true'
TEMP_DIR = '/tmp'
SMTP_AUTH = 'LOGIN'
SMTP_AUTH_USER = ' nnsivaram.nnet' 

And you call it in the shell script as follows


    echo "Mailing... $mailid with $attachfile"


    /usr/bin/email  -s "Mailed report on `date`" -a $attachfile  $mailid < $mbody
    echo "email Return code is $?"

The github repo can be found here.

C gave you "Hello World" while Haskell....

gives you

ghci> filter (`elem` ['A'..'Z']) "i lauGh At You BecAuse u r aLL the Same"
"GAYBALLS"

Cue me, laughing like a juvenile, suddenly, in office. 

But on a more serious note, learnyouahaskell.com teaches 

you Haskell, a FP language.