Even in the modern times of AJAX, Web 2+ and what not,
Elinks is one of my favourite browsers, at least for browsing some sites. The reasons are simple: it cuts the unnecessary distractions, and allows you to digest text based information rather quickly. In addition, since it doesn't display any images or flashy elements like Flash, pages load lightning fast even on poor connections, making it an excellent option.Unfortunately, some sites don't really work very well with Elinks, and for those, I do one of two things. For the ones which are really complex, such as secure login sites with too much AJAX, I just resort to one of the "standard" graphical browsers. For some others, I try to work around the problem using Elinks' rich scripting interface available in many programming languages including Perl and Ruby. I chose Lua, since it seemed simple enough to learn. I wanted to share with you some of the simple workarounds I implemented for some sites I visit often.The first quirk is with the
Debian BTS, whose CSS isn't properly interpreted by Elinks (see
593804 and
593840 for details). The short story: the BTS renders like this:
So, I grabbed the CSS, and made some small changes (described in the above mentioned bug reports), and got a new CSS file. I put it in
/home/kumar/Kumar/bugs.css, and added the following to my
~/.elinks/hooks.lua:
-- Use an alternate CSS for the Debian BTS to work around some quirks
function debian_bts_format_html_hook (html)
return string.gsub(html, "/css/bugs.css", 'file:///home/kumar/Kumar/bugs.css')
end
function pre_format_html_hook (url, html)
if sstrfind (url, "bugs.debian.org") then
return blonnet_format_html_hook(html)
end
return nil
end
and with it, the BTS renders like this:
Much more readable!The second simple example, for which I won't include images, is the Mobile Twitter interface. The mobile Twitter interface is very convenient and functional in Elinks; however, by default, the text font seems to be a light grey, which is not discernible in the bright background. A default user.css file would be a possible solution, but I have not decided whether to go for it just yet. So, for the Twitter site, I add a function like this:
-- Make the status messages black on Mobile Twitter
function mobile_twitter_format_hook(html)
return string.gsub(html, ".status.- ", '.status word-wrap: break-word; color : #000; ')
end
And alter the actual hook function to:
function pre_format_html_hook (url, html)
if sstrfind (url, "bugs.debian.org") then
return debian_bts_format_html_hook(html)
elseif sstrfind (url, "mobile.twitter.com") then
return mobile_twitter_format_hook(html)
end
return nil
end
Finally, a more complicated example. I like reading the Indian business newspaper the
Hindu Business Line. However, if you try browsing to the site with Elinks, you'll notice that, barring the top hyperlinks in each sectcion, the links on the left are not "linked" at all.In addition, there are some other irritants which are easy to remove, such as the navigation bar on the top, and the text colour being too light for my taste etc. So, I write the following Lua blurb. Why I write this is left for the interested readers to figure out, though it shouldn't be surprising if you open the page. The workaround for the missing links is interesting, though; it is because the website authors have put a hyperlink (
<a>) tag
before a list item (
<li>) tag, and Elinks seems to not like that too much. So, I just swap the two around, and Elinks is happy.
-- Reformat the Business Line website
function blonnet_format_html_hook (html)
html = string.gsub(html, "<body ", '<body text="#000000"') -- I like the text in black on the white background
html = string.gsub(html, "<[Ff][Oo][Nn][Tt] class=leftnavi color=brown>.-</[Ff][Oo][Nn][Tt]>", '') -- An ugly hack to remove the navigation bar
html = string.gsub(html, "<TD align=left vAlign=top width=\"500\"><IMG.-</FONT><BR>", '', 1) -- Remove description
html = string.gsub(html, "<A class=groupnavi href=\"http://epaper.thehindubusinessline.com/\">.-</FONT><BR>", '', 1) -- Remove other group links
html = string.gsub(html, "(<[Aa] class=navi.-)<li>(.-</[Aa]>)", "<li>%1%2</li>") -- Fix the erroneous section sidebar
return html
end
function pre_format_html_hook (url, html)
if sstrfind (url, "blonnet.com") or sstrfind(url, "thehindubusinessline.com") then
return blonnet_format_html_hook(html)
elseif sstrfind (url, "bugs.debian.org") then
return debian_bts_format_html_hook(html)
elseif sstrfind (url, "mobile.twitter.com") then
return mobile_twitter_format_hook(html)
end
return nil
end
And here's the old and new rendering:
Version 0.1 of gmtkbabel has just been released! 
It consists of a set of shell scripts, which use zenity to give a nice GUI
over mtkbabel.
Future improvements might include providing a Qt alternative (and the "g"
in the name might just mean "GUI" instead of "GTK" then), and whatever users
need. It might also become something more serious, written in a more complex
language, who knows 
In a great post a few days ago, 
) in a comment.
I was finding myself to be running the same povray command lines over
and over again. And then ffmpeg2theora. And occasionally forget to
update one or two .png files in the mean time, because I was trying and
trying and trying some stuff all the time, and forgot that one frame in
the final render. That's silly; that's why we have make.
So I wrote me a makefile.
I'm now using 
there was a recurring catchphrase during DebConf10, worded something like
"Debian derivatives are also our users", that appeared quite often
in talks as well as in hallway chats.
It has come up on the 
DebConf continued until Saturday, but Friday the 6th was my last day as I left New York that evening. I m a bit late in getting this summary written up.
This post concerns Romanian politics, internal affairs and improper direction of public funding for new hideous churches in spite of education, culture, health, technic development and old monuments. Thus I will write this in Romanian. Curious foreigners can try to read the text via 
...awesome.
OK, I'm writing this while I'm still in USA, but there are so many
things to say about these weeks that I can't write them in only one
blog post. And, still, this one will be quite long as it will talk
about hacking, running and sightseeing...:)
Let's start about hacking: after all, this is the first reason for
being there in US, isn't it?
I cam to DebConf with a very long TODO list and, for the first time in
seven DebConfs, I'm pretty happy with what I achieved from it:
There s some hype in the Ruby community about RVM (Ruby Version Manager). It s a tool that allows to switch between Ruby versions on the same system (much like what the alternatives system provides for Java on Debian, except that RVM does it either system-wide or per-user).
However, when you look at it, RVM looks quite scary.
The