I needed to parse some PDF's yesterday and today and found the PJ library which is seemingly doing a good job. Unfortunately, the docs assume you have some idea of the inner workings of PDF which I don't. Adobe has put the details behind their developer program and this isn't important enough to shell out some money to join.
So, basically, I had to start walking through the parsed page and see if I could find the form variables I needed. It is kind of silly though to have to print out all of the name-value pairs of a Map in order to find the one you are looking for. Hopefully it will be the same across all of the PDF's I need to parse.
So the wife and I watched Cold Case last night after Tivo'ing it from Sunday night. It started off with a repeat of an earlier episode but then 15 minutes into the show, it switched to the new episode which was supposed to be on. Very weird.
Danny Gregory has posted a listing of all his current pens. All drawings were made with the pen described. I will honestly admit that I have a sucker for a new pen so now I have new ones to try and find. It's very cool that all are under $10. [ via ]
So far, I'm happy with my new iBook in all aspects except one, wireless networking. I bought the Extreme card and figured it would work fine with my Snow base station but unfortunately, I couldn't get more than two bars of connection.
After this, I decided to get a new router so I bought one of the wireless broadband routers, hoping it would solve the problem. It has somewhat. I'm able to get a few more bars but I'm not able to go very far away from the router / base station.
I thought the idea was that this latest spec increased the distance of coverage. Unfortunately, I don't see the proof of that.
So I've sent my annual birthday email to Brent and I also found out this morning that we share birthday's with Leonard Nimoy, James Caan and Steven Tyler.
Yesterday, I bought myself a present, a new iBook. w00! Even though work is Windows, I'll be able to be on the Mac at home.
Over the weekend, I read 1916. I've had the book for a bit and started to read it but if I recall correctly, some other books pulled my attention away. At any rate, I decided to give it a try again since my reading lately has focused on the political side of Ireland especially the republican ideals.
A danger of historical fiction is that the story can bog down with the exposition of the facts. Luckily, 1916 moves along at a nice pace and nicely incorporates the history of the Easter Rising within the story. The interaction between the fictional characters and the historical ones is smooth and reminded me of Cryptonomicon.
It seems that the topic du jour of the blogworld has been SixApart's announcement of TypeKey. I had started to write a longer post about various issues regarding it but I think Adam's take is pretty much on the money.
I will say though that an alternative system like Eric Sigler's SimpleID might become more popular if TypeKey becomes to centralized.
Werner is doing some amazing analysis on how his blog is being read. Great charts to go with the data as well.
James Gosling has put together a Java-based RSS reader and aggregator. Something to check out this weekend.
I went 13-3 in my NCAA bracket yesterday. Hopefully I can do the same today. I picked the Manhattan upset but picked Southern Illinois, Dayton and Arizona. I have a feeling that lots of people missed the Arizona one. Luckily, none of those teams were slated to go beyond the next round so my Sweet 16 is still intact.
So, last night after watching the end of the Dayton-Depaul game, I switched the channel and watched The Apprentice. It was a recap show which was good since I hadn't watched it before. I assume I'm not the only one who thinks that working with any of those people would be just awful. Ugh.
Adriaan describes how Ecto is integrating with del.icio.us. I've had similar thoughts for Jericho though the interface I'm thinking of will be a bit different. I'm hoping to include it sometime soon.
Tom Coates has put together a new way of categorizing his friends.
The wonderful thing about both of these classifications systems is how unladen they are with value-judgements. It is possible to consider an elven person to be intellectual and high-concept, or pretentious and useless. It's possible to view a pirate as boorish and crass or as vivacious and life-loving. It is not better to be ninja or pirate - the world needs both. And the creativity generated by the collision of elf and dwarf is far greater than could be achieved by elf or dwarven kind alone. Not only are there no categories that come prejudged inferior or superior, but also people have no problem self-categorising themselves - there's no shame to be felt in any of their self-classifications.
Last night as I watched C.S.I, it struck me how crazy this country is. People are freaking out because of seeing 5 seconds of a breast, yet for 5 minutes, on C.S.I., we are shown parts of a dismembered body. It's absolutely unbelievable how much fear people have in regards to the human body when the person isn't dead.
Eric Sigler has implemented an interesting new identity system called SimpleID. Basically it will allow you to use whatever identity sytem you want but puts a simple wrapper around it so any site can see who you are when commenting. [via]
I found this comparison between the Emerging Technology conference from last month and the current DARPATech conference very interesting.
Bryan Boyer won the ID magazine competition to design a global identity card. His idea is to forget about the the normal ways of checking identity; names, faces and address. Instead, he views identity as this:
Identity is not defined by a set of factors that specify an individual's physical manifestation but the influences which determine their mindset.What does an ID card mean for those without enough money to buy a car or have a credit card?
Do you really exist in this world if you don't participate in the great global finance machine?
The latter questions are ones which have to be thought through in this time of globalization.
Greg Knauss' latest project is The American People. It basically searches through a list of RSS feeds for the phrase the American People and lists those that said it. It's an interesting way to see what politicians and others are saying about us.
The other cool part is that with a little work, anyone could do this or search for other phrases. That is the beauty of open standards in syndication whether RSS or Atom. In the long run, I really don't think it matters as long as the formats remain open. [via]
Jason gives us a peek inside his ideas file, vaporwarez. I really like the deaddrop idea and I'm definitely thinking of setting something like it up.
Basically, it's a process which waits for a response from some human. It could be as simple as an email which gets sent out every couple of days but if there isn't a response within a set amount of time, the email frequency increases until finally, the email process will send out pertinent system information.
name: deaddrop
description: a simple web/email based app that waits for a user defined [daily or weekly] response to a web interface. sort of an internet dead man's switch, if you will. if no response is recieved, it will send a final warning via email or sms and wait 24 hours. if there is still no response after 24 hours, deaddrop would mail out a blowfish encrypted file [or set of files] to a predetermined party.as it stands, i already have a script that waits for a weekly ping on one of my servers. if it doesn't hear from in a week it will send me a text message every 6 hours for 24 hours reminding me to check-in. if i don't respond, it's set to e-mail a copy of my will and a master password list to a few trusted third parties. i rigged it up after a friend of mine died and left all of his vital information behind on an encrypted drive that no one could figure out the password to.
Matt posts some good reasons for keeping SOAP support in Atom. Personally, using SOAP to create a quick demo wouldn't make sense because of my lack of use of it but it seems it would be right up Matt's alley.
During lunch, I read Malcom Gladwell's recent New Yorker article on SUV's. It was definitely interesting especially in regards to the perception of most SUV owners that they are safer because their vehicle is higher and bigger.
Jettas are safe because they make their drivers feel unsafe. S.U.V.s are unsafe because they make their drivers feel safe. That feeling of safety isn't the solution; it's the problem.
The idea that bigger is better can be traced back to (and probably beyond that) the Old Testament story of David and Goliath. Of course most people know how that turned out.
Scoble wants to base a trust network off of his RSS reader. That seems like an interesting idea though I would rather the network be a bit more exclusive than just RSS feeds I read since that doesn't necessarily mean I trust the author.
This is what's missing from "social software" like Google's Orkut or Linked In. Now, if someone figures out how to use the trust network I've built in my RSS News Reader (I only subscribe to people and companies I trust and want to have a long-term relationship with) along with some of the fun contact methods of Linked In, Friendster, or Orkut, then we'd have something really interesting.
A blogroll on the other hand could be a good middleground for something like this. I would generally only add people that I trust to it and it (generally) won't have a large amount of entries. That definitely could be something ponder especially based on this project based on FOAF files.
I've been looking for a RSS aggregator for my Linux box at home. I'm using RSS Bandit at work but haven't found anything yet for home. I couldn't get Straw or NewsMonster to work so I was actually toying with the idea of writing my own.
Luckily, I found Liferea last night. I was easily able to add various feeds and all was well.
Here in SoCal, we've been dealing with a grocery strike for over five months. Finally, over the weekend, the union voted to accept the new deal. It's definitely not what they wanted but I don't think they had much choice left.
I honestly think that unless the strikers get what they want within two weeks, management / ownership will wear them down eventually.