Adventures in Tech

At work we have been doing most of our development in Java, and it has been serving us quite well. For a new project that we started, we looked at other JVM based languages, that would help us develop a little bit more efficiently, as well as leverage the big code base that we have. Since a couple of people on the team knew Groovy and Grails, and have used it in the past to develop web applications, we went with that choice, and so far it has served us well. Development became a little bit more pleasurable, and we got rid of some of the Java boilerplate. Out of curiosity I started experimenting with other JVM based languages, and since a lot of my friends at other company were singing praises for Scala, I decided to play with that. The first step is setting up a Scala development environment, and with a couple of additions to my .emacs file, I got just that: For Scala development in emacs, you need a couple of things: scala-mode ensime You can download scala-mode from...

I have been using mutt for some time now as my primary email client, and have found that I have not missed using any of the more graphical interfaces like Mac Mail, or Gmail web interface. Not even to look at HTML emails, PDF documents, or Word documents. Thanks to a couple of open source utilities, I can convert these documents to text, and read them from within mutt, leading to a seamless experience, and a much more pleasant email workflow. The following lines in your   ~/.mailcap config file configure the utilities and do the magic: HTML emails text/html; links -html-assume-codepage utf8 -html-numbered-links 1 -dump %s; copiousoutput I use the  links browser to do the conversion from HTML to text. There are many other options to use, such as Lynx, or w3m, but I like links because it formats the HTML tables better than Lynx or w3m, and handles utf8 characters better. You can also turn off the html numbered links easily if you choose to. PDF files application/...