Moshe Zimmermann - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Moshe Zimmermann - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Being interview on the radio (Deutschlandfunk) Zimmermann (an Israeli historian and publicist) just made a statement on his former student Moshe Katsav, Israel's former, 8th president, who was convicted of rape today.

diff XML documents

What's the Diff? Diff XML Documents

I just tried that IBM Java utility on the command line of a Linux system. Not bad.
I only tried it on a rather simple example, where I removed a single element.
Looks like you better run the command twice, with permuted arguments.

Facebook Chat – connect your client

Facebook Chat

Facebook chat, Jabber, XMPP

Integrating with Facebook Chat - Facebook developers

writing procmail rules querying Return-Path

I prefer writing procmail rules querying Return-Path instead of From.

The Return-Path header field gets faked rather rarely as opposed to the From header field, it's far more often machine generated, that's why I regard it more reliable.

Today I found myself in a situation, where the Return-Path header field looked differently after my usual fetchmail+procmail execution chain. I didn't recognize that from the beginning. I tried hard for a couple of hours matching the "original" Return-Path, but I did not succeed. Only after I recognized the difference and turned my interest towards the "new" Return-Path, I immediately succeeded creating another nice procmail rule for that message resp. for messages from that sender.

I still cannot explain myself, why and how Return-Path gets changed, but now I know and respect it does.

'Tamara Drewe' (2010)

'Tamara Drewe' (2010)

La tête en friche (2010)

La tête en friche (2010)

the Chinese population growth and how to give readers an incorrect impression

the Chinese population growth and how to give readers an incorrect impression

Sol Gabetta performing Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla's Oblivion

It was played live at Harald Schmidt Show from 2010-12-16.

"aligning text in programs is ASCII art"

I love indenting and aligning, I love structuring, be it in tables or in data structures.
The human mind enjoys and rewards structure.
Some people don't understand that and punish others' credo with arrogant disrespect.

I currently associate this kind of intolerant mentality with the Python community. I hope some Python disciples will prove me wrong sooner or later.

MuPDF – a lightweight PDF viewer and toolkit written in portable C

MuPDF

Fuse::PDF – Filesystem embedded in a PDF document

Chris Dolan's Fuse-PDF-0.09 - search.cpan.org

Chris is also the author of the very well known and admired CAM::PDF.

I think it's worth having a very long look at this.

book: Programming Groovy

The Pragmatic Bookshelf | Programming Groovy

From the wikipedia article on Groovy:

Most Java code is also syntactically valid Groovy. […]

In July 2009, Strachan wrote on his blog that "I can honestly say if someone had shown me the Programming in Scala book by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon & Bill Venners back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy."[1] Strachan left the project silently long before the Groovy 1.0 release in 2007.

Maybe I better focus on Scala than on Groovy.

Update 2011-07-01:
Purchased it as a used book through Amazon.de.

The Pragmatic Bookshelf | Programming Scala

The Pragmatic Bookshelf | Programming Scala

book: Programming Clojure

The Pragmatic Bookshelf | Programming Clojure

Lisp on the JVM – maybe a nice idea.

Update 2011-08-07
Found a Clojure User Group Berlin.
Order the book through Amazon as used book, but with Amazon Prime service.

CAM::PDF - PDF manipulation library by "Clotho Advanced Media"

CAM::PDF - search.cpan.org

I am currently into PDF "reading", and this software looks rather promising.

There are also a couple of nice command line utilities in the TAR ball's bin/ subdirectory.

• appendpdf.pl
• asciify
• changepagestring.pl
• changepdfstring.pl
• changerefkeys.pl
• crunchjpg_tmpl.pdf
• crunchjpgs.pl
• deillustrate.pl
• deletepdfpage.pl
• extractallimages.pl
• extractjpgs.pl
• fillpdffields.pl
• getpdffontobject.pl
• getpdfpage.pl
• getpdfpageobject.pl
• getpdftext.pl
• listfonts.pl
• listimages.pl
• listpdffields.pl – sic!!! – I adapted that a little, now it shows page num. (with a little extra help from Chris Dolan) and the position for each field
• pdfinfo.pl
• readpdf.pl – shows you the PDF data structure as perl data dump
• renderpdf.pl
• replacepdfobj.pl
• revertpdf.pl
• rewritepdf.pl
• setpdfbackground.pl
• setpdfpage.pl
• stamppdf.pl
• uninlinepdfimages.pl

Of course, they all use /usr/bin/perl and not /usr/local/perlbrew/bin/perl, and I am currently still into perlbrew., so how would I replace all these occurrences?
That reminded me of that fixin utility from the very old days, which updates the #! ("shebang") line appropriately.

form fields in PDF – how to retrieve their details?

This command line shows you a few details:

$ pdftk … dump_data_fields

Not enough details for me.

What about CAM::PDF?
It comes with a couple of nice sample utilities (the bin/ subdirectory), one of them is called listpdffields.pl . It also does not show me enough details, but I think I will enhance that one.

Update / 2010-12-11:
Yes, CAM::PDF works very well for me. I wrote another article on that.

App::perlbrew : the man page and "perlbrew list"

The man page makes you think, there is a "perlbrew list", and older versions didn't have it. Older versions had a "perlbrew installed" instead. Quite a good reason to upgrade you perlbrew.

editing JRXML in emacs using nxml-mode

Just created an RELAG-NG ("compact") grammar for editing JRXML files.

I used trang for that, and the "input module" was a sample JRXML file. Yes, that means: occasionally some JRXML file will have tags or attributes, that my jasperreport.rnc does not know yet. But then re-running trang on an additional sample file is not really a big job.

I really love editing XML.

I re-ordered and "grouped" the XML pieces for the elements in my sample reports. That helps to clean up some things, that got a little messy over the time. In the end you recognize, how much duplicate code you have.

You may want to fight the redundancy problems through JRXML subreports.
I actually made my JRXML a "here document" for a shell script. A couple of hours later I knew, that a perl script is the better approach. Another couple of hours later there were plenty little parameterized "here documents". I have solved my redundancy problem here through "looping over lists of configurations".

building pdftk-1.44 on opensuse-11.3

I just succeeded building the current pdftk using Makefile.Redhat with no modifications at all.

Precondition: have the GCJ RPM-s and the fastjar RPM installed.

I tried hard to ignore all the warnings regarding the Java source code.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)