Dec 13 2009

The DLD abuse contest

Hello all,

Recently, on deviantART, the literary group known as =DailyLitDeviations (or DLD for short) started a prose contest regarding abuse. I have recently finished my entry for the contest, and posted it on my profile. To get to my profile page, you may click the “deviantART” button in the toolbar to the right. If you’d rather just go directly to this particular piece, I’ve placed a link to it below:

Onlooker: The Spirit of a Broken Boy

Please leave comments on the deviantART page if you have a membership there. If you don’t have a membership there, you should because it is free and will grant you wonderful exposure to masterfully created pieces of art.

|:| Zach |:|

Dec 12 2009

Thunderbird 3.0 in the tree

Four days ago, Mozilla Messaging made an announcement about the release of Thunderbird 3.0. This release has been a very long time in the making, and brings with it a very impressive list of features. Thanks to the work of Jory A. Pratt (anarchy), we Gentoo users have a quality ebuild for mail-client/mozilla-thunderbird-3.0 in the tree (committed the same day as the release itself)! It is, for obvious reasons, only available in the testing (~arch) repositories at this time, but if you would like to try some bright and shiny new software, I urge you to add it to your /etc/portage/package.keywords file. If you were already using Thunderbird 2.x, then I believe the only additional package that will require keywording is >=x11-plugins/enigmail-1.0.

After I have used this new release for some time, I will report back on my experiences. I hope that some of you Thunderbird users will do the same, and file bugs if necessary.

|:| Zach |:|

Dec 02 2009

Combining PDF files

I frequently need to combine several PDF files into one large PDF so I don’t have to send a mess of small files via email. Though I have accomplished this task before without much of a problem by issuing the following command to Ghostscript, I decided that my usual method is inefficient:

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combinedpdf.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf

Later on I found a terminal-based application called PDFtk that allowed for a more easily remembered command:

pdftk PART1.pdf PART2.pdf PART3.pdf cat output COMBINED.pdf

where one simply replaces the capitalised portions with the appropriate names of the input and output PDF files. However, to use that utility within Gentoo, one has to compile sys-devel/gcc with the gcj USE flag enabled. That USE flag builds GCC with support for the Java Programming Language. While this was not necessarily a big dependency, I didn’t feel like recompiling GCC with support for Java in order to use a terminal utility. Instead, I wanted to use a lightweight GTK GUI application that would allow me to do some basic PDF tasks, and I did so with PDFshuffler.

This application is incredibly minimalistic, easy to use, and it accomplishes a few PDF tasks very nicely. Lifted directly from the project’s SF page, “PDF-Shuffler is a small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split pdf documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive graphical interface. It is a frontend for python-pyPdf.” I have not used it to rotate any documents, but I have found that it allows me to take care of the other tasks quite effectively and efficiently. Even better, it really doesn’t have many dependencies not already on my system.

I have filed a stablisation request (STABLEREQ) for this application as well as its two explicitly-listed dependencies (python-poppler and pyPDF) in the Gentoo bugzilla. If you use this application or either of its dependencies, please comment on your experiences, especially regarding runtime stability.

I hope that some of you find this application to be as helpful as I have. 🙂

Take care for now,
Zach