Compiling the countdown plugin for pidgin.

Given my current situation I will have my 3 most difficult exams on Thursday and Friday. So I decided to find a way to put it into my Pidgin status. At first I thought that updating it from time to time would be enough. But then I thought, "there must be something to automate it."

I asked the saint of the searches Saint Google and he answered me almost immediately (I damn my ISP).(Remember that this plugin is not the final one. But it works.)

https://launchpad.net/pidgin-countdown

I found this page and downloaded the file. Decompressed it and then used the ol' trusty Terminal.

cd ~/Documents/count/

Inside that directory there are 2 files.

ls
countdown.c Makefile


Now before compiling, check that you have this directory: ~/.purple/plugins/

If you don't(like me) do the following

mkdir ~/.purple/plugins/

Time to compile.Inside the directory where the Makefile is found.

Make -f Makefile

If you have some errors after this step install this:

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install pidgin-devel

Fedora:

su -c'yum install pidgin-devel'

Then try again the command to compile.

Now the only thing left is to go back to our beloved pidgin and go to tools and then to plug-ins.Check the countdown check-box and then go to "Configure Plug-in". Select the date that you want the countdown to show and then close those windows. Your personal message will display the time until your specified date.

Have fun!

Tips with latex

I am going to post a few tips with latex so those of you who are learning how to use it dont have to break their heads trying to figure out something.

Putting an image on the first page on a report.

Firstly you need to import this package. Just download it from here and just extract the titlepic.sty where you have your .tex file.

\usepackage{titlepic}

Then you just have to put the image you want like this.

\titlepic{\includegraphics{image.png}}

You may modify the size of the pic too if you want but to do that you have to add the options between [] exactly after the includegraphics command and before the {image.png}.

You could write something like

\titlepic{\includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{image.png}}

and thats it.

On to the next point do you want to customize the margins of your documents and dont know how? Well if you did it normally you would have to mess around with 11 different measures. Quite crazy isnt it?

Well thank goodness someone made a package for that. Just put the following command to change the margins.

\usepackage[left=A,top=B,right=C,bottom=D]{geometry}

You may omit the margins that you do not care about its size. So if you want you can do this:

\usepackage[left=A]{geometry}

Geometry is much more powerful than that so if you want to read more you only have to go here.



Another little thing if you want to change the size of your default font just add this to your \documentclass

\documentclass[12pt]{report, book, etc}

Finally to end today's post I will tell you about one last command to make your life easier.

\setcounter{secnumdepth}{-1}

What this little beauty does is to remove the numbering from the chapters, sections, etc. Your document only has the different sections and still appears in the table of contents.


I hope this little tips may be of some help to someone.

After a long while I am back

...and gosh I have learned quite a few things. So many things happened.

But let me explain a bit about everything. 2008 New year's eve I said to my mom: "I feel this will be an awesome and interesting year" I was absolutely correct.

Among the few things that made this year interesting were the outbreak of influenza here in mexico, receiving the news that one of the family dogs died, getting a tablet and starting to draw with it(with highly favorable results) and lately learning to use Latex.

This year has been great, I have been way happier than ever before and made new and wonderful friends.

I dont intend to bore you with my life(well maybe ocassionally). I intend to make this blog a place where you will find tips from computing to cooking and everything in between.

So to however reads this,

Welcome to my life.