The sky suddenly glowed bright yellow, then to orange, and finally ending in a fiery red. These were what I saw this evening, between 6:17pm to 6:34pm, from my room at South City Garden, Kolkata. A perfect May sunset. The angle of view looks towards northwest to north.
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These are photos from the seminar on Hardware Freedom Day and Document Freedom Day, organized jointly by the IGLUG-Cal and FSMWB on 27th April, 2013. The venue was the auditorium of Paschim Banga Vigyan Mancha, Kolkata.
A report on the event has been published by A. Mani on the IGLUG-Cal website.
web-mode for Emacs by François-Xavier Bois is the latest addition to my Emacs arsenal. It is a major mode that takes off all the pain in editing web template files in Emacs.
To the uninitiated, web template files are used in generating “views” in websites and web applications, and usually consist of different languages mixed in the same file. For example, a normal view file for a PHP application can include PHP code intermixed with HTML, CSS and Javascript.
In my experience, web-mode works far better and way faster than MuMaMo, multi-web-mode and other multi-modes for Emacs. This is because, unlike those major modes, web-mode does not keep changing between major modes within the same buffer, but handles different languages by itself, without switching modes. The result is a smooth writing experience, and more importantly, zero flicker when entering, say a PHP block within HTML.
Further, given that web-mode handles different languages internally, it has been extended to support various templating engines like Twig, Smarty, Velocy, and more recently, Laravel’s Blade templating engine.
All in all, web-mode has greatly improved the ease of using Emacs 24 for web development.
Kudos to fxbois and the team of contributors behind web-mode 
We have just launched a fresh new look of CodeBinders.com. This is the first public launch of the website. It uses a simple, lucid and responsive layout. Something out of the box. Something that signifies CodeBinders.
I have started working on a Python port of Avro Phonetic that I call pyAvroPhonetic. My main inspiration here has been Rifat Nabi‘s jsAvroPhonetic, and I owe a good deal of code and ideas to him for this project. The project is on Github at kaustavdm/pyAvroPhonetic. It is also listed on PyPi as PyAvroPhonetic. Continue reading
The first birthday of CodeBinders! The last year went past pretty fast and served as a reminder of how time flies. Last year, on this day, CB was incorporated. It has been a tough journey since then, trying to balance between the new requirements of work, family, study and health.
But it has not all been in vain. We have gained a lot of experience in the process. Now we are all set to dedicate our energies to CodeBinders. Happy Birthday CB!
I have been searching for lots of ways of turning Emacs into a
full-featured web development tool. Recently I found Bozhidar Batsov’s
emacs-dev-kit and it felt pretty good a starter kit. I like the
customizations he did to the Emacs interface, particularly, the choice
of plugins were excellent. Running emacs 23 in daemon mode gave me a huge
performance boost on my 1GiG laptop running on Debian 6. I added some more spice to make a pretty neat Emacs web development kit.
As a web developer, the only thing I felt missing was multi-web-mode. So I simply
forked out Bozhidar’s repo on GitHub and added multi-web-mode support to
it. The whole setup now works smoothly, with emacs daemon using up less
than 30 MB of RAM.
The emacs developer kit with my customizations can be downloaded from:
emacs-dev-kit GitHub repository.
scim-avro has been replaced by ibus-avro, and that too pretty successfully. Bangla users on GNU/Linux can now install ibus-avro from the ibus-avro GitHub repo.
The present version supports intelligent word guessing as you type, one of the features that I missed on scim-avro. It works across LibreOffice/OpenOffice, Firefox and text editor, thanks to the stability of iBus.
Overall, a big round of congratulations to the Avro team for this lovely piece of work.
For details, check iBus page at OmicronLab.
Image source: http://github.com/sarim/ibus-avro used under the Mozilla Public License 1.1.
This is the third set of images from our Nepal tour. This set covers our road to Pokhara, the first night at Pokhara and a visit to Sarangkot for sunrise next morning. All images at Sarangkot were shot by Nayanika.
The sunrise at Sarangkot was such wonderful(ly shot) that I decided to dedicate a set entirely for it. Continue reading
Here is the second set of images from the Nepal Tour. This set covers our activities and stay at Chitwan, including our visit to the Chitwan National Park, along with an elephant ride.
I feel sad for the way the mahouts mistreated the elephants, and the poor elephants can’t even understand that they are being mistreated. Continue reading