IT and finance blog

Информация на русском и на английском | Information both in Russian and in English

The same information for Kindle 3.

English

Google Contacts allow setting birthdays, which are then picked up by Google Calendar automatically and displayed as events on the relevant day. This is very convenient for keeping track of your relatives', friends' and other people's birthdays. Having a reminder saves you an embarrassment of forgetting your girlfriend's/boyfriend's/auntie's day of birth and prevents unnecessary bad feelings.

I've been experimenting with GWT (Google Web Toolkit) recently. GWT allows you to write responsive and consistent user web interfaces in a subset of Java programming language. The source code is then compiled into JavaScript, which can be run in any supported web browser.

Sometimes you might need to generate tables in good old plain text. Python can be used to perform this task. Here's a link to the relevant python recipe.

Vim (vi) is a very powerful and customizable text editor. There are many parameters you can fine-tune to adjust the way your data is displayed. For example, vim can visually wrap lines, which are too long to fit the width of the screen. This is "virtual" wrapping - no new line characters are actually added to the text.

I have released a new product: Event Importer for Google calendar. It allows importing iCalendar files (.ics), downloaded via browser quickly and easily. Possible use cases: event export from Facebook, Meetup, other online services, e-mailed .ics files etc. Please give it a try and let me know what you think.

I have been introduced to Markdown format some time ago and today I find it extremely convenient for most of the writing I need to do. Markdown is essentially "markup without markup" - it requires you to do very little in order to format your text and it can be easily converted in a number of other formats, such as PDF, Word, ODT, LaTeX, HTML, Docbook etc.

If you want to right-align the "Help" (or any other) menu entry in your menu bar in a WPF application, you can use the following example:

<Menu>
    <Menu.ItemsPanel>
        <ItemsPanelTemplate>
            <DockPanel HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"/>
        </ItemsPanelTemplate>
    </Menu.ItemsPanel>
    <MenuItem Header="File">
        <MenuItem Header="Exit"/>

Bash allows users to do very advanced things when defining shell prompt, including colours and propagation of information into xterm title. Unfortunately, when you want to use mc (Midnight Commander) in conjunction with bash prompts, you may find, that not all advanced escape sequences are handled by mc properly. To overcome this issue you can have a special prompt just for mc.

Vim is a very powerful and convenient text editor for Unix environments. I certainly don't wish to start any disputes along the lines of the old vim/emacs frontier, especially since I used both of them for long periods of time and find unique features in each. However in recent years I tend to use vim most of the time, mainly because it is quite lightweight.