ArunRocks

Note this currently works only if you have Firefox installed

The Hindu is is one of the newspapers I have great respect for. I am allergetic to fresh newsprint, so I have no choice but to read their online edition even if I have subscribed to the print edition. But their website badly needs a redesign. However, in this Web2.0 era you are not at the mercy of the site admins to do something about it. You can improve your browsing experience in 2 steps:

1. Point your firefox to the Greasemonkey add-on page and install the add-on. Now restart Firefox before you go to step 2. Don’t worry all your open tabs will be restored.

2. Go to the Hindu Printer Redirect Script and click on the Install this Script button

Voila, start browsing Hindu, for example this page and enjoy the difference!

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The first New Year after marriage is always special. It will be a lot quieter (and sober?) than one’s earlier outings. In Mangalore, most of the discs were either overcrowded (Zero Degrees?) or charging like hell (GoldFinch?). So we decided to go to Palki and have a nice buffet at the rooftop. What we didn’t know was that it offered an amazingly close view of the fireworks in the surrounding area. It was a great way to start the new year.

Speaking of starts, for most of us January 1st is like a reset button. Or at least we wish it is. Here comes an opportunity to cut down on that chocolate addition or make a habit of paying bills on
time. They go by the ominous term ‘Resolutions’. For me, a self described procrastinator, I had to bring to speed my time planning tools to the brand new 2008. In case you are wondering, they are:

• Hipster PDA/PocketMod
• My customised-till-my-fingers-bled Emacs 23.0

I printed out my Pocketmod from the website directly. I was using version 2 for the first time and loved the idea of being able to customize the front page with my details. You can have print your name and address printed rather than typing it each time.

I’ve been reconverted to emacs from Notepad++, after seeing the very useful Org mode. Once again I have spent many, many hours cutomising the my .emacs file. When it comes to emacs the word customising is really misleading, it should be actually called reprogramming

Actually, this time I have added some very neat features like TextMate-like snippet expansion upon pressing TAB, personal menu, windows Postscript printer support (Emacs prepares gorgeous printouts of code). They are very useful and I hope I will be able to blog about them soon. In fact, this post was written in Emacs using a markdown mode

So for all my readers out there here is wishing you and happy, prosperous and well-planned New Year!

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Launchy is a great productivity tool and a cool way to impress your friends. You can launch any application by pressing a hotkey (say Alt+Space) and the first few letters of the application for eg: typing ‘gi’ will display the GIMP icon and pressing Enter will launch GIMP. You can download Launchy from its website and its beta is pretty stable (and gorgeous) on my XP laptop too.

Using Launchy gets pretty addictive and soon you will hate using the Start menu or even Explorer on Windows for opening applications or files. So I took the red pill and started automating the following things with a little help from Python:

• Launching Intranet applications inside Internet Explorer (even if Firefox is your default browser)
• Bringing minimized or overlapped windows to the foreground

Some Necessary Evil

Don’t get me wrong, I hate IE as much as you do. But the fact of life is that many web apps out there “Work best when viewed in IE” (TM). Even if you have launchy plugins to launch the web app, if your default browser is Firefox, it might show incorrectly. Here is the solution:

1. Install Python and Pywin32
2. Copy the following script to the Utilities directory (it will be in the path where you installed Launchy) and save it with a .pyw extension not a .py extension

In the above code replace the URL http://intranetapp/home with the URL of your choice.

Finally, open Launchy, right-click and say ‘Rebuild Index’.

No more Alt-Tabbing around

If you are like me, you’ll have a lot of windows open at the same time. I have tried increasing the task bar height and grouping similar windows feature in XP to manage them. But I always wish I could invoke commonly used open applications like my chat window in just a few keystrokes. Launchy doesn’t index open programs by default, but with some python magic I can show you how to bring some commonly used windows to the foreground:

1. As before, install Python and Pywin32
2. Copy the following script to the Utilities directory (it will be in the path where you installed Launchy) and save it with a .pyw extension not a .py extension

In the above code change the string Microsoft Excel - Expenses.xls with the title the window you would like to summon.

Finally, open Launchy, right-click and say ‘Rebuild Index’.

This works even if the window was minimized.

I hope, finally you can throw your mouse away. Ah… What a bliss!

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