April 2009

With all the discussion around URL shorteners, Diggbar, blocking it, and the rev=canonical proposal, I decided to implement a URL shortening service on this blog with the least effort possible. This probably won’t impact you just yet, but when tools become more popular and sophisticated, it would hopefully eliminate the need for tinyurl, bit.ly, etc. Since the blog runs on WordPress, every post has an ID. The short URL for any post will simply be http://www.s-anand.net/the_ID. For example, http://s-anand.net/17 is a link to post on Ubuntu on a Dell Latitude D420. At 21 characters, it’s roughly the same size as most URL shorteners could make it. ...

Writing a program to draw or change slides is sometimes easier than doing it manually. To change all fonts on a presentation to Arial, for example, you’d write this Visual Basic macro: Sub Arial() For Each Slide In ActivePresentation.Slides For Each Shape In Slide.Shapes Shape.TextFrame.TextRange.Font.Name = "Arial" Next Next End Sub If you didn’t like Visual Basic, though, you could write the same thing in Python: import win32com.client, sys Application = win32com.client.Dispatch("PowerPoint.Application") Application.Visible = True Presentation = Application.Presentations.Open(sys.argv[1]) for Slide in Presentation.Slides: for Shape in Slide.Shapes: Shape.TextFrame.TextRange.Font.Name = "Arial" Presentation.Save() Application.Quit() Save this as arial.py and type “arial.py some.ppt” to convert some.ppt into Arial. ...