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7 May 2009

The Galileoscope is in Production

Posted by khk. No Comments

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.

27 Apr 2009

Homemade Pizza

Posted by khk. 3 Comments

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.

pizza-013

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

14 Apr 2009

Acrobat Plug-Ins

Posted by khk. 7 Comments

Update:

Please visit the same post on my business site. The comments are closed here, so if you want to comment, you have to head over to http://khkonsulting.com/2009/04/acrobat-plug-ins/

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.

 

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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).

 

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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.

12 Apr 2009

Have You Ordered Your Galileoscope Yet?

Posted by khk. 2 Comments

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

8 Apr 2009

Gutting a PDF

Posted by khk. No Comments

[ Due to a huge amount of comment spam, comments on this post are now disabled ]

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…

He's Dead, Jim!

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.

[more after the jump] Read the rest of this entry »

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7 Apr 2009

Tons of Free Music from Amazon.com

Posted by khk. No Comments

Amazon.com has a bunch of indie music samplers available for free (’til the end of the month). There is good music, there is fantastic music, and there is one song that’s just so out of this world (The Conchord’s Hurt Feelings – if you love he show, you need that song 🙂

Just click on the add below:

30 Mar 2009

Splitting PDF Pages

Posted by khk. 32 Comments

Update:

Please visit the same post on my business site. The comments are closed here, so if you want to comment, you have to head over to http://khkonsulting.com/2009/03/splitting-pdf-pages/

No, this is not about my patent pending idea of a sheet splitter that turns duplex documents into simplex documents… This post is about a problem that comes up every now and then: When you scan a book or a magazine, chances are that you end up with two physical pages on your scanned image, and your document looks something like this:

JoinedPages.png

Pages one and two are on the same scan, three and four are, and five and six and so on. How can we split such a combined page into it’s two parts? There are of course different solutions to this problem, some more complicated than others, some producing better results than others. The most straight forward approach would be to write an Acrobat plug-in or a standalone application (e.g. using the iText library) that takes the source page, determines what needs to be copied to the new page that should represent the left half of the original page, and then just copy those page elements. With a scanned source document, this would potentially mean that the scanned image needs to be cropped and placed on the target page. Sounds complicated, and it is complicated. Is there an easier way to accomplish the same results? [More after the jump] Read the rest of this entry »

29 Mar 2009

My Moo Business Cards

Posted by khk. 5 Comments

I needed business cards. The usual recommendation is to go with one of the free offers (e.g. VistaPrint or HP), but that’s not me…

I wanted cards that would not only show off some of my more creative side, but also cards that would stick out – figuratively and literally.

In the past, I’ve had the Moo mini cards, but they don’t make for good business cards because of the restricted space on them. I needed to fit more information on a card. Moo also makes business cards so I started to collect a few images that I wanted on the backs of my cards, and worked on the design.

When I received the cards in the mail, I was impressed with the print, but also the paper quality. The cards stick out for two reasons: They look great, and they are of a different size than the regular US business cards: They are a little wider, but not as tall (I use them in portrait orientation).

Take a look:

Moo Business Cards

Moo Business Cards

Because I don’t want late night calls from people I don’t know, I’ve removed part of my phone numbers, and my street address. The actual cards of course do contain that information.

Moo Business Cards

All the images that I’ve used are in my Moo set on Flickr.

28 Mar 2009

Digging Deep into History – My First Tweet

Posted by khk. 1 Comment

I’ve been using Twitter more over the last few weeks – this is pretty obvious when you take a look at the graph from TwitterCounter.com:

TwitterCounter.png

Once I started to tweet more, my follower count went up.

While playing around with different Twitter tools, I came across MyTweet16.com, which allows you to display the first 16 tweets of any Twitter user. I of course was curious about what I had to say when I first signed up for my account.

What I found was pretty interesting: For my very first tweet, I did not use any of the “normal” ways to use Twitter: It was not the web interface or any of the established Twitter clients – instead, I used a program that I wrote myself. I completely forgot about that. Who else can say that they tweeted first with something they created (besides Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, the founders of Twitter)?

I used the book Creating Mashups with Adobe Flex and AIR (Friends of Ed Abobe Learning Library) to get some exposure to Flex, and the first few examples in the book are about using the Twitter API.

So, without any further ado, here is my first tweet (copy&pasted from MyTweet16.com:

Playing with Flex for the first time (that's how I twittered this). 12:33 PM Jun 3rd 2008

I actually singed up for Twitter just to use these examples.

Please follow me on Twitter.

23 Mar 2009

More PDF Tools

Posted by khk. 1 Comment

As promised, here are some PDF related tools that I don’t use, but either have used, have played with, or just know about how good they are. These are the tools that I recommend when somebody asks me “what would you use to do XYZ?”.

PrimoPDF

The best free PDF generator. Just see my previous blog post. If you need a PDF generator, download that program.

NitroPDF

From the friendly people who bring you PrimoPDF. This is a package that competes with Acrobat. It can edit PDFs, create forms, fill forms, create PDFs, … And it’s cheaper than Acrobat. There is a free eval version available. Download it, play with it and see if it covers all your PDF needs. If not, there is always Acrobat. An upcoming release will have OCR support (after release 6).

PDF Enhancer

The PDF Enhancer is a very powerful tool to “enhance” PDFs. Enhancement in this case can mean a lot of different things: Make them smaller, fix common PDF problems, embed fonts, add or modify color management information, … There are different versions available, even a server version. Apago also has a free eval version that you can download to see if it fits your needs.

Enfocus PitStop Professional

PitStop is a preflight tool that I used in my previous job. In addition to preflight capabilities, it also implements the Enfocus Certified PDF Workflow that allows a PDF file to contain an audit trail of all operations that were performed on it. In addition to PitStop Professional, Enfocus also offers the PitStop server, which can do anything Pitstop Professional can do in an automated fashion.

Quite Imposing Plus

This is simply the best imposition tool for PDFs. If you need to impose a PDF, Quite Imposing Plus can do it. It is not the easiest tool to work with. One of the best features of it is that you can create sample PDF files with page numbers to figure out how exactly an imposition scheme needs to be set up. Once you’ve figured that out, you can just re-run the same process again on your real document.

PDFLib

PDFLib is a great tool to programatically create PDF files. I’ve used an older version a few years ago. I’ve followed the development of the library over the years, and I still can recommend it as an alternative to iText.