Free DNS provides easy shared DNS hosting & URL forwarding

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Thunderbird beats Evolution

I recently decided to get my email stored locally in case my internet connection fails and I need them. I used to have them save in Outlook Express (for backup purposes), but I dropped this habbit when I start forwarding everything to Gmail.
I decided to give Evolution a shot and see how it's doing these days. This is mainly because of it's "great integration with Gnome". The overall interface it's not very impressive, and looks like it's an old application. I could have gone along with it, no problem, but something else was a show stopper: I use POP3 and all email clients I used allowed me to "delete email on server when deleted from Inbox". Guess what? Evolution does not have this (again, for POP). It's either "delete emails when retrieving" or "delete after X days". It seems that this feature was requested back in Evolution 1.0 but it was never implemented. I search a lot on forums for an explanation and I found two Evolution developers (back in a 2003 thread):
  1. this feature is a POP hack and will not be implemented
  2. Evolution is targeted more to enterprise users which use IMAP
My reaction was:
  1. is it "hack" to use two POP commands to get a feature implemented? I guess no, since all other clients are doing it. Or maybe, they are all hackers, and Evolution developers are the real-deal.
  2. then why "force" it into my new Ubuntu desktop install (like that other half application that tries to replace Pidgin)?
One way or the other, Evolution is purged and Thunderbird is installed on my system (btw, same goes with empathy and pidgin). I care less for "Gnome integration" than I care about functionality.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Hiding Tight VNC tray icon

As stated in the TightVNC FAQ, in order to hide the tray icon of the server, you need to add/set in the registry the DWORD DisableTrayIcon entry to 1 inside the HKLM\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3 container.
A .reg file that does this automatically is this:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3]
"DisableTrayIcon"=dword:00000001

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Setting up Synctex for Sumatra PDF and TexnicCenter

Everytime I need this information I have to search for it on forums, then filter out the broken solutions in order to find out the corect one. So, I'm posting it here to have it for future reference:
  1. Install & setup SumatraPDF and Texniccenter (including the output profiles of TexnicCenter).
  2. Open the Output profiles window (Alt+F7).
  3. Select the Latex => PDF output profile.
  4. In the Latex section, add -synctex=-1 at the end of Command line arguments to pass to the compiler textbox (leave a space between this and the previous arguments).
  5. In the Viewer section, set the Path of executable textbox to C:\Program Files\SumatraPDF\SumatraPDF.exe -inverse-search "\"c:\Program Files\TeXnicCenter\TEXCNTR.EXE\" /ddecmd \"[goto('%f','%l')]\"". This will start SumatraPDF as the PDF viewer and will provide it with the program to run whenever a back search is performed.
  6. Still in the Viewer section, set for View project's output and Forward search the following options: Enable DDE Command and set Command to [ForwardSearch("%bm.pdf","%Wc",%l,0)], Server to SUMATRA, and Topic to Control. This will allow forward search to work.
Update: Step 5 refers to an older version of TeXnicCenter installed on Windows XP. Read the comments to find out the updated folder (for Windows 7) and file name (latest TexnicCenter).