Habitually Good

While I have faced this problem many times, it was only recently that I got ticked off by it a bit too much. The problem? If you are writing a document, and you have non-English things such as Code snippets, or foreign language phrases, etc. in it, you will end up with a lot of red and green squiggly lines in your document. See the image to understand what I mean:

Not only do these spell and grammar checks become irritating, sometimes they can detract you from observing other errors in your document. So, I asked myself the questions, can I turn off spell and grammar check for certain parts of the document? It turns out that I can.

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I have been back for over a week after a long trip out of home; I got to visit a lot of interesting places this time around and had a lot of fun. Here’s a quick log of our recent trip to Vegas, Grand Canyon, and California Bay Area. This was a family outing – Divya, me, and Aanya – along with some friends for part of the vacationing. I will start posting photographs on Flickr as soon as I have time to start going through them.

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IE9 beta is available, and I finally decided to give it a spin. I wanted to actually title this post: Internet Explorer 9: the complete circle. Why? Because, it is a full circle for me, the moment I downloaded IE9. Let me explain:

• Years ago, after getting fed up with IE, I shifted to Firefox. At that time of course, I used Internet Explorer to download Firefox and installed it. And that made Firefox my primary browser.
• A couple of years ago, when Chrome was released, I used Firefox to download Chrome and installed it. And that made Chrome my primary browser.
• A few hours ago, I used Chrome to download Internet Explorer 9 beta and installed it.

It remains to be seen whether IE9 will become my primary browser, but just after a few clicks in the browser, I am actually pleased so far. This post is being written side by side as I quickly take IE9 for a spin, and record my impression so far.

And wherever it is relevant, I will compare it to my current primary browser: Chrome.

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I recently got the bug to tinker around with Google App Engine (last night, actually) and then decided that I want to do this in Python (instead of Java which is also supported – maybe I like snakes better than coffee).

So, I downloaded the App Engine SDK, and then realized that I need to install Python – which I promptly did. Then I configured all the App Engine Started variables, and tried to churn out Hello World. First road-block, I didn’t have a Python IDE. So, I started coding this in NotePad++. Everything was smooth sailing till I started using some of the App Engine libraries, and had to start typing out long code sentences. For a guy who has done much of the coding on Visual Studio, you can imagine how I would be missing nice IDE features such as auto-complete and auto-suggest.

That is when I read somewhere that I can use Eclipse for Python development, and it will do some of those nifty IDE things that I was sorely missing. So, I downloaded Eclipse, and ‘installed’ it. And then I used the nice “Marketplace” feature to locate the PyDev plugin to install it (by the way, I am sure you already realize that to code in Python on eclipse you need a plugin such as PyDev since Eclipse doesn’t support Python out of the box).

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Some time ago, I had the need to setup a dialup connection on my computer running Windows 7 to connect to the Internet. Well, the need was for a couple of days. However, ever since then, I have been bugged by a popup dialog from this connection asking me to connect whenever my computer was having trouble finding the Internet. This was getting bothersome, and I looked and looked for how to go and delete this. It used to be pretty straight forward in Windows XP to delete this, as I could go and see a list of all Network Connections in the Control Panel.

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