Would you feel comfortable to encourage your potential next employer to google you?

They will do that anyways before they invite you to an interview, and chances are that at that point you don’t have much control over what they find. That process has to start much earlier. And yes, do do have some control over these results. Try to google my name (just like on the cards above, search for Karl Heinz Kremer). What you will find is the result of many years of work. Last time I checked, on the first three pages of search results there was only one link that was not about me.

Of course, some of the information about me is not available or easily accessed by just searching for my name, but when you either search for a user name that I use on most social media sites (e.g. Flickr, Twitter, …), or my email address, you’ll find the other “stuff”. You would find these items also by searching for my name, but they would show up a lot further down in the search results.

Having that many “good” links at the top makes sure that anything you find undesirable will show up way down, and people may not have the patience to go that far down in Google’s search results (and no, there is nothing online about me that I would not be proud to share with a potential future employer).

To find out what Google knows about you, google yourself. Don’t just do that once, but setup a Google Alert so that you’ll receive an email whenever new information about you shows up. Also, setup a Google profile for yourself. That will always show up on the first page of search results when somebody searches for you name.

So, how do you get your name up to the top of the Google search results?

• Get involved in online projects (I spent quite some time working on several open source projects)
• Comment on blog posts written by others
• Make sure that you use your full name whenever you engage in anything online (e.g. on Twitter, or when writing comments on blogs)
• Link from the pages you control to other pages about yourself (e.g. from your Twitter or LinkedIn profile page)
• Consider starting to blog yourself

I have to admit that I have it fairly easy: My name is not that common, and somebody with a more common name will have a harder time getting their own information to the top of a Google search result – especially when a celebrity shares that name.

So again, would you feel comfortable when your future boss googles you? If not, do something about it and change how you get your name out…

Who would have thought that a recipe from a yogurt lid could actually be that delicious…

Stonyfield Farm is running a campaign to convince people to replace (unhealthy) ingredients with low fat yogurt. To illustrate that, they include a recipe for “Strawberry Muffins that Melt in Your Mouth”. Sounds good. I had some extra strawberries that were in desperate need for a recipe.

They look and taste delicious.

I usually freeze most of a batch and then have muffins for a few weeks (more like days).

You can find the recipe on their web site too – no need to buy some yogurt (just in case you are making your own), even though their yogurt is the best I’ve found this side of the Atlantic.

Technorati Tags:
baking, cooking, muffin, yogurt, healthy, strawberry

OK, easy enough… Just looking at your profile… Oh, wait a minute… What the heck… No!

Do you want to spare me that experience again? Then please read the following:

Let me explain my “rules” to follow somebody back.

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Have you heard? The Small Show is coming to the High Falls Art Gallery (in Rochester, NY). Here is a link to the flyer (PDF).

If you don’t want to download the flyer, here is the information about the shows:

Art Supply Invitational and a rather large exhibit called Small

High Falls Art Gallery Rochester
60 Browns Race, Rochester NY 14614

Reception Sunday May 24, 3-6pm
Continuing through July 11, 2009

I submitted three pictures, and I’ve been told that because of the large number of submissions, only one image per artist is guaranteed to be in the show. If not all of my pictures will make it into the exhibit, I’ll post the rejected ones here. So stay tuned. And, I hope to see you at the reception.

I’ve been on Twitter for a while now, and over time I used a lot of different tools to make working with the twitterverse a bit easier. This post is not about the tools I’ve written, but the tools I use.

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Remember the Galileoscope that I tried to sell you on a few weeks ago? The organizers of the project just announced that production has started. It will still take a little time for them to start shipping, but that’s a major step.
Can’t wait to get mine.

It’s not too late to place your order. This is a very unique chance to get a great small telescope for less than a the price you would pay for a toy telescope. Support them.

There is only one way to make pizza, and that’s the Italian way…

Pizza is three things: a crust, sauce and toppings. And all these things are pretty easy make – even from scratch. And just to save some time, we’ll skip the homemade mozzarella and use store bought.

Let’s start with the crust, the dough needs to rest for a few hours, that gives us enough time to work on the sauce and the toppings.

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If you’ve seen my resume – or talked to me lately, you know that I create Acrobat plug-ins for a living. When people hear that, they usually think something like “Don’t forget to pick up the dry cleaning” or “I need to bring my cat to the vet for the rabies shot”… Yes, I understand, this may not be the most exciting topic, but probably only because you don’t know enough about what these “plug-ins” are, so let me explain.

 

Adobe Acrobat is a very powerful tool, more powerful that most users actually realize. I wont go into any details about how powerful exactly – at least not today. Lets just say that it has something for everybody. However, you may need something in addition to what Adobe provides, something that still is in the general area of PDF. Adobe may not have considered your needs because either the target market for “your” feature is too small, or to far out there… Or you are so far ahead of everybody else that they have not even thought about that feature yet.

Adobe did however do a very interesting thing: They created an interface that allows 3rd party developers to create solutions based on Adobe Acrobat – using plug-ins. It is a very powerful interface, and hence not something that you can pick up in an afternoon. There are several thousand pages of API documentation that one needs to understand before a plug-in should be written.

A plug-in is – from a technical point of view – a module or library that gets loaded dynamically at runtime. Acrobat will scan it’s plug-ins directory and will load any modules it finds. Once loaded, such a plug-in can extend Acrobat by e.g. adding menu items, toolbuttons, or event handlers (e.g. a function that gets executed whenever a documents gets loaded).

 

Interestingly enough, the plug-ins directory of a fresh Adobe Acrobat installation is not empty… A lot of Acrobat’s functionality is actually implemented as plug-ins. You can verify that on a Windows system by temporarily disabling all plug-ins by holding down the Shift key when bringing up Acrobat. That will load the application without any plug-ins. When you compare the toolbar or the menu bar with a fully loaded application, you’ll see what portion of the Acrobat core functionality is actually implemented in plug-ins.

The plug-in interface has different abstraction levels (COS, PDE, AV, …). If there is enough interest, I will provide information about how to navigate that API, and how to structure a plug-in.

The Acrobat SDK is available for free from Adobe’s Acrobat Development Center.

Here are a few examples of commercially available plug-ins that I’ve used:

• Enfocus PitStop Professional:
  This is a preflight tool.
• Quite Imposing Plus:
  The best PDF based imposition tool that I am aware of.
• Enfocus Browser:
  Allows to review and change the internal structure of a PDF file.

This post is different from my other posts, even though it may look like an ad, I consider it to be a public service announcement. When was the last time you looked at the stars, enjoyed details on the moons surface, or were just in awe about Jupiter’s moons?
In case you didn’t know, 2009 is the official International Year of Astronomy. Here is some more information about the Galileoscope:

The Galileoscope is a high-quality, low-cost telescope kit developed as a
Cornerstone Project of the International Year of Astronomy 2009
(www.astronomy2009.org). For just $15 plus shipping, you get a 50-mm f/10
refractor that can be put together in less than 5 minutes and gives great
views of the celestial wonders that Galileo first glimpsed 400 years ago
and that still delight stargazers today, including lunar craters and
mountains, Jupiter’s moons, the phases of Venus, Saturn’s rings, and the
Pleiades and Beehive star clusters. The Galileoscope comes with a 25x
eyepiece and 2x Barlow lens and incorporates features such as achromatic
optics, stray-light rejection, and a 1.25-inch eyepiece holde so it can
accommodate standard sized eyepieces. It has a symmetrical plossl
eyepiece normally found only on telescopes costing at least 10 times
more. It attaches to any standard photo tripod (not included).

Accompanying the kit are educational materials based on active inquiry,
cooperative learning, testing of ideas and predictions, and hands-on
experimentation. You can download these free activity guides, and order
small numbers of Galileoscopes with payment by credit card or PayPal, at
www.galileoscope.org. Museums, schools, astronomy clubs, and other
institutions wishing to place orders of 100 or more can get a discounted
price of $12.50 per kit and save on shipping.

To initiate a large order of 100+ kits, simply fill out the Request for
Quotation form at:
https://www.galileoscope.org/gs/sites/galileoscope.org.gs/files/Galileoscope-RFQ.doc

OK, I have to admit, the title is just for show I don’t really want to gut a PDF – that would mean to kill it, and PDFs are pretty useful, so we should treat them well…

What I’m after is to extract arbitrary information from a PDF file – information that may not be accessible in any other way. Some 3rd party Acrobat plug-ins save information in a PDF file so that once the document is opened again, the plug-in “knows” that the current file was already processed, or that a user interface window can be populated with the previously saved settings, or … There are many reasons why that could come in handy.

If you take a look at the PDF Reference document, you can find all the information necessary to understand how data can be saved in a PDF file. Adobe does allow 3rd party developers to store information in a PDF file as long as it is clear that the data is private. The developer can make sure that nobody else reads that information by accident by using a four letter developer prefix for all such data.

I’ve mentioned before that there are tools that allow us to look at the structure of a PDF file (e.g. the Enfocus Browser, or with Acrobat’s own Preflight tool). For now let’s assume that the data we are interested in is actually saved in the PDF’s metadata stream – if you don’t know what that means, please go back to the PDF Reference document.

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