Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Learning Rails 3: Live Edition - O'Reilly Media

Learning Rails 3: Live Edition - O'Reilly Media

O'Reilly Media book: Sinatra: Up and Running

Sinatra: Up and Running:

Take advantage of Sinatra, the Ruby-based web application library and domain-specific language used by GitHub, LinkedIn, Engine Yard, and other prominent organizations. With this concise book, you will quickly gain working knowledge of Sinatra and its minimalist approach to building both standalone and modular web applications.


Saturday, May 21, 2011

/tmp/docview500 ???

I found that directory on my openSUSE Linux computer, with really a lot of files, whose names were derived from files in my home directory. The time stamps were quite recent. I have no idea, which software created that directory (tree). It would be a relief to know it was KDE, but actually why should it?

Friday, May 20, 2011

"A picture is worth a thousand words"

A picture is worth a thousand words - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Unicode (UTF-8) Test – looks a little like the ASCII table from the old times

Unicode (UTF-8) Test

extracting infos from a rather detailed PDF (from a software developer's point of view)

If I access PDF, I rather read the XML created by "pdfthtml -xml" for a PDF file. Although there are features, that I miss with XML::Simple, I find that module rather convenient.

Think of a pay slip as PDF. It has quite a regular structure. (Of course, you might also want to receive an XML representation of it directly from the salary software, but that's another issue. In this very case this looked like rather hard to achieve.)
There are labels and there are values. I want to access values by their labels. Therefore I need a specification describing, where the value belonging to a specific label is located relatively. I do this by giving a relative rectangular range / region. All text strings provided by "pdftohmtl -xml" (i.e. the text elements) get stored into a matrix (X×Y). So far there were no big obstacles accessing the value for a label by scanning the matrix within that relative rectangular region.
I actually and also usually don't want and need to specify, where the label is located on the page. Why would you want to specify that, as long as it's not necessary?
But certain labels appear more than once. I add the absolute rectangular region of the label, in case that is needed. Of course, this spec. is as terse as possible. A PDF page has its origin at the upper left corner (you do know that). So if the label is just above y=500, you neither need to give the left upper corner of the resp. rectangular region nor the lower right corner. This makes the label/value spec. just as verbose as needed.
(Right, I know a picture would help: A picture is worth a thousand words.)

My software is implemented in Perl, and so far the label/value specs are done programmatically. Of course, I would like to have a spec as XML or as a DSL, but I am not there yet.

To be continued …

Blogger Buzz: Add a virtual tip jar to your blog

Blogger Buzz: Add a virtual tip jar to your blog


Google Checkout as competition to Flattr.
I have not made reasonable amounts of money through Flattr yet; I have no idea, how it works for real writers; question is, whether Google Checkout will make it easier to earn money through sharing "text" on the web.

Here is the Google Checkout Blog.

The article mentioned above is in fact a promotion link between Google's Blogger department and Google's Checkout department.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

how does Skype show you to yourself?

Skype on Mac OS X shows you, as if you look into a mirror – I find that rather "natural" and "usual", just what I prefer.
Skype on Windows seems to show you "the other way round" – like other people see you.

If you are having a video conversation via Skype, you will occasionally look whether your face is still rather centered within the shown window. If you move or turn left and right and if that's not shown like in a mirror, I find that weird.

XML text nodes in Ruby and Perl

the Ruby REXML Tutorial deals with this.

in Perl …

Monday, May 16, 2011

O'Reilly Media book: Perl Cookbook

Perl Cookbook, Second Edition - O'Reilly Media

Chapter 22 XML

  • 22.9: Reading and Writing RSS Files -> meta feeds
useful scripts in their example code at http://examples.oreilly.com/9781565922433/:
  • oreilly--Perl_Cookbook--code/ch09/symirror – build spectral forest of symlinks

"meta feeds" bookmark collection

Ruby Cookbook - O'Reilly Media

Ruby Cookbook - O'Reilly Media

11.16 A Simple Feed Aggregator -> meta feeds

book: Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers, by Michael Schrenk

Official Web Site: Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers, by Michael Schrenk

Chapter 12 features aggregation "webbots".

book: Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts | No Starch Press

Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts | No Starch Press

  • Chapter 1: General Purpose Utilities
  • Chapter 2: Website Scripting :
    #13 RSS Parsing -> meta feeds
  • Chapter 3: Li(U)nix System Administration
  • Chapter 4: Picture Utilities
  • Chapter 5: Games and Learning Tools
  • Chapter 6: String Utilities
  • Chapter 7: Servers and Scrapers
  • Chapter 8: Arguments and Documentation: very nice examples on command line processing and inline documentation à la RDoc suitable for nice usage messages
  • Chapter 9: Sorting Algorithms
  • Chapter 10: Writing a Metasploit 3.1 Module with Ruby

RSS-2-HTML, Atom-2-HTML

I need to display a few syndication feeds as HTML, and I am seeking software in Ruby or Perl (i.e. neither PHP, nor anything heavy at all): "rss2html", "atom2html".
$ perlbrew switch perl-5.12.1
$ cpanm XML::RSS

Friday, May 13, 2011

Blogger Buzz: Blogger is back

Blogger Buzz: Blogger is back

Mac OS X: Showing and hiding filename extensions

Mac OS X 10.6 Help: Showing and hiding filename extensions

Rosetta (software) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rosetta (software) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia :
Rosetta is a lightweight dynamic translator for Mac OS X distributed by Apple. It enables applications compiled for the PowerPC family of processors to run on Apple systems that use Intel processors. Rosetta is based on Transitive Corporation's QuickTransit technology,[1] and is a key part of Apple's strategy for the transition of their Macintosh line from PowerPC to Intel processors as it enables pre-existing Mac OS X software to run on the new platform without modification. …

Rosetta is part of the Mac OS X for Intel operating system. It translates G3, G4, and AltiVec instructions; however, it does not translate G5 instructions. Therefore, applications that rely on G5-specific instruction sets must be modified by their developers to work on Intel-based Macs. According to Apple, applications with heavy user interaction but low computational needs (such as word processors) are well suited to translation via Rosetta, while applications with high computational needs (such as raytracers or Adobe Photoshop) are not.  …
So in like 2005/2006 they thought, Intel Macs would not be sufficiently fast to execute software with "high computational needs" through Rosetta, but >2010 Intel Macs are powerful enough to do even that. Somebody told, his old PPC Mac Photoshop runs nicely on his 2010 Snow Leopard MacBook Pro, and he was very delighted about that.

Friday, May 6, 2011

Europe Earthquake Information

Europe Earthquake Information

Paul Krugman: Education's not the answer, after all | Viewpoints, Outlook | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Paul Krugman: Education's not the answer, after all | Viewpoints, Outlook | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Tulipa Ruiz - Só Sei Dançar com Você

Tulipa Ruiz - Da Menina

Tulipa Ruiz - "Às Vezes"

Tulipa Ruiz - Aqui

Tulipa Ruiz - "Brocal Dourado"

Tulipa Ruiz - Sushi

Tulipa Ruiz - "A ordem das árvores"

Tulipa Ruiz - Pedrinho

Tulipa Ruiz - Do Amor

Tulipa Ruiz - Pontual

Tulipa Ruiz - Efêmera

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

n-up several images

I need to compare like 100 pairs of images. I started by looking at them immediately one after the other. I don't feel comfortable with that. I want to see both of them together. I will create auxiliary images using ImageMagick and making use of this recipe:
convert -append input1.jpg input2.jpg input3.jpg -border 5 output.jpg
If I try doing this using GraphicsMagic, I don't see the border.

Now I am going to create the auxiliary images in a shell script…

Q: another task might be this: how do I also reduce the size of every single image, so that they all fit on one "page"?
That's not really relevant, as the usual image viewers are able to display image in just the right size on your screen.