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Messages - Edvard [ switch to compact view ]

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227
I thought of that, but its not exactly intuitive, and he would need to be able to clearly lay out all the steps.

if it was laid out in a text file I suppose you could read that into a batch...hmmm...

Lots of folks have made GUIs for PDFTK, more or less useful.  PDFLabs has one bundled with the download, but others are:
- GUIPDFTK
http://www.paehl.de/pdf/gui_pdftk.html
- PDFTK4All
http://pdftk4all.sourceforge.net/
- PDFTKBuilder
http://www.angusj.co...pdftkb/#pdftkbuilder

IIRC, I even came up with a GUI for it written in AHK that did a few trivial operations; it's really not too difficult once you get the hang of what you want done and how to interact between the GUI interface and the command line options. I also have a small batch script I wrote for my wife for bundling numbered PDFs in a folder to a single multi-page PDF.  In other words, I found PDFTK's learning curve challenging but not insurmountable.

228
One word: PDFTK
https://www.pdflabs....ftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
Screenshot_2015-12-29_18-44-37.png

Seriously, don't let the lackluster description fool you.  PDFTK is a powerful program with lots of options for splitting and combining, plus a ton of other functions.  If you can't swing the price of Adobe Acrobat XI  :-* , then PDFTK is your best bet.


P.S. - I hate MS Word.  As in, passionately.  At least, in the context of working in a print shop.  If a customer gives me a Word file, I hand it right back and tell him to make me a PDF.
Just sayin'...

Also, about the XI love...
I've also always felt PDFs to be a pain in the rear end to deal with after creating, and they still are, but I can personally attest that Acrobat XI is one sweet piece of gear for dealing with that.  I work in printing also, so I have it because where I work has a contract/subscription/whatever and I use it every day.  If only it wasn't prohibitively expensive for home users, I'd straight up have a copy even though I don't use Windows anymore.  Everything up to Acrobat X was useful, but not amazing.  XI is.


229
Hilarious read, instructive in the ways of software testing, and a great thought experiment along the lines of shooting yourself in the foot using programming languages.
This is 'edge case' testing; posting values to a system that really don't belong there.
[hilarity ensues]
And that's kind of the crux of it. Making your testing as real world as possible is an important part of QA. Don't let those tell you otherwise. Be it unit testing, integration, QA or pentesting, assuring that all tests push the edges of what happens in the real world will make your software better.



from an IRC discussion

230
Developer's Corner / Re: Why Does Programming Suck?
« on: December 22, 2015, 02:05 PM »
I am still trying to figure out why Pascal had nested procedure/function definitions.  It was pretty weird to define a function only visible inside the current function/procedure, that you are only going to call one time, in most cases, during the run of the outer procedure/function.  Some kind of Lambda expression would probably have made more sense.
...

Not a problem here, though I consider myself a Pascal tinkerer.  Pascal isn't the only culprit either; Lisp, Javascript, Actionscript, Wolfram, D, MATLAB... even the 'Big Four' scripting languages (Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl) more or less. Yes, things like this can be abused, like nesting to ridiculous levels (which is almost never done unless you're masochistic), or the Funarg problemw, which isn't the end of the world.  There are advantages of nesting as well, like avoiding global variables or namespace pollution.  See Nested_functionw, and this post: Re: Nesting functions- Why?
Either way, nested functions in an object-oriented language aren't really needed, and most modern dialects of Pascal (Delphi, Freepascal, GNUPascal) have object capabilities built-in, so the point is a little more moot now. 

231
Living Room / Re: Movies you've seen lately
« on: December 20, 2015, 06:49 PM »
...

"In charge" and "shock" ???  I have to cast my volt against that.  :)

Meh. To each their own. Some people get really amped up about it.

But we all know resistance is futile.  :)


But capacitance has potential!

232
Developer's Corner / Why Does Programming Suck?
« on: December 20, 2015, 02:48 PM »
Not quite sure I agree with everything this guy wrote but it's a very interesting read nonetheless.
I’m a software developer and since the very beginning I’ve always had mixed feelings about programming. On one hand, you can accomplish so much with it. On the other, it’s a completely frustrating tool to use––not only is the experience horrible, the worst part is feeling that much more could be accomplished if programming didn’t suck.
...
And so, misusing a machine built to do math, that was prematurely optimized, built without simplicity in mind, inspired by the textile industry, backed by no underlying fundamental laws, with no way for us to understand it, that could generate more complexity than we could possibly embrace and armed with zero experience and a completely backwards approach towards problem-solving, we started the business of dealing with accidental complexity in the name of shipping features––known today as programming…

…and a shit-ton of wonderful things popped from the other end. Damn it.



from CodeProject News

233
Whether you're cool with Sourceforge or not these days, this looks interesting at the very least...
Pay What You Want: White Hat Hacker Bundle
Master Penetration Testing with 7 Courses (60+ Hours) on Hacking Node.js Apps, Windows OS, Wi-Fi Devices & More
A whole bundle of penetration testing and general hacker stuff aimed at self-training for white hat hacking.
Looks like 'Pay what you want' only gets you two: Node.js Security and Cross-site Scripting.  But beat the average price (currently $12.32) and you get all 7 books on offer ($765 worth).

whitehathackerbundle.png

https://deals.source...te-hat-hacker-bundle




234
General Software Discussion / Re: Chocolatey...opinions? portable?
« on: November 21, 2015, 10:12 PM »
More info: Gow is a shell, not a package manager.  It's an alternative for windows to Cygwin.  But it was a welcome find for other reasons, even so.  I'd stopped using Cygwin because it was so huge.  Gow is apparently small.

Looking at Gow now.  Looks nice, glad to hear of it. 
Also, if all you need are the tools, not the environment, look at GNUWin32:
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/

235
Aaaaaand it crashes.  This time it doesn't even get past signing in.   :-\

I've put in my bug reports, but I'm beginning to think Unity just isn't going to work for me, at least in this iteration.
Maybe next time :shrug:

236
Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!
« on: November 19, 2015, 09:15 PM »
Interesting Israeli band by the name of Project RnL.
...

Very nice.  I'm not big on prog-rock (Rush, Yes, and ELO just about encompass all I care about the genre, to be honest) but this was enjoyable.  The keyboard guy obviously enjoys his role very much, and has the chops to back it up.  The only thing that bugged me was though the vocalist was very good, I kept getting the feeling that he was 'holding back'... that there's much more power to his voice than he lets through, as though he doesn't want to overpower the other musicians, when in fact a little more chutzpah with the pipes would have fit right in.  Just my 0.02, bravos all 'round otherwise.

Speaking of keyboards, it seems that most groups in my chosen favorite genre (metal) have relegated the keyboard to special effects, washy intros, or gated into offshoot genres like 'Prog-metal' or 'Industrial'.  It would be refreshing to see a rippin' ivory tickler up there with the buzz and rumble.
So far, I haven't seen much of that, so here's my favorite blast from the past:



I hated it when my friends would say they sounded like Deep Purple, though I admit it's kinda inevitable given the sound they were after (and they even riffed the theme on the slipcover of one of their albums, reprinting magazine article headlines comparing the two).  I've always preferred the Heep for some reason, though I couldn't put my finger on exactly why; I just liked 'em. 
Their first five albums are classics in my mind, the rest going from 'slow clap while rocking out' to 'escuse me, wut r u doin?' territory, so I can't recommend much beyond that.

237
Well... damn.  :(

239
...
Solipcism is actually more common than most people realise.

Most people today believe in portions of it.

But... can't talk about that because it gets into religion.

The best example I can think of solipcism is the book "One" by Richard Bach (he of 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull' fame).  The plot involves the author and his wife running into some sort of quantum rift while flying their little recreational plane, and ending up coming to a startling realization that pretty much the entire human race throughout history is just quantum manifestations of one of them throughout space-time. 

So, not quite straight-up solipcist, but heady stuff for 17-year-old me to happen upon...
Which lasted until whatever high I was on wore off.   :-\ ;D

241
@Deozaan: I've found that in many cases, Wine runs Windows games better than Virtualbox.  With Wine, at least you have access to the GPU (not perfect all the time, but it's mostly there).  I can run Trackmania Nations Forever at good-to-acceptable frame rates, where doing the same on a VirtualBox instance of XP was just short of painful.  If that's all you're looking for, give it a go, but for most mundane 'This-is-a-job-for-Windows' tasks, VirtualBox has served me just fine.  I've also tried Qemu, and it works quite well, but you really have to be a bit of a wizard with the command-line options to get the best performance out of it.

242
Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"
« on: October 28, 2015, 10:00 PM »
[ Invalid Attachment ]

A newly discovered router virus actually fights off malware  The Verge

Pity it's not up on GitHub for download, I'd hit that...

EDIT: Oh wait, they did:

Creators of the Benevolent Linux.Wifatch Malware Reveal Themselves
http://news.softpedi...mselves-493938.shtml
Two days ago, the hackers behind Linux.Wifatch open sourced the malware's source code on GitLab, and posted some clarifications about their intentions inside the project's README file.

*Ahem*: https://gitlab.com/r...v7teif/linux.wifatch

243
Living Room / Re: How to make a sandwich from scratch
« on: September 27, 2015, 10:33 PM »
Jimmy John's is actually pretty good.  I'd take them over Subway any day, and I used to really like Subway.  Depending on your opinion of Subway, that may not be saying a whole lot. YMMV.

245
OK, so I've been able to install and play with this, and I can say it works very well.  However, there's a few bugs that I'm not sure are just me or Unity, because other folks haven't reported the same errors.  I'll wait for the next release to try again...

246
High heels suck.
...

I agree that those ridiculous "hooker hooves" (as a female acquaintance affectionately christened them) do suck.  Can't you just hear tendons snapping?  Sensible heels and a little practice works wonders, if you go for heels at all.  And for pete's sake, the substrate they're walking on are NOT where you wear heels.  Red carpets, catwalks, and smooth club floors, sure.  Boardwalks on the beach?  Not so much.  You're just asking for dual ankle braces to go with those platforms, kid. 
 :o

247
P.S. I'm still looking for a monospace Comic Sans-like in bitmap font format.  To code in.   

http://www.comicbook...Constant-p/cl343.htm -- I'm sure it could be bitmap-ified!



Ulp!... Not for 39 bucks!!  :o
Nice lookin' font though...

I did find one good candidate amongst some other very nice free programming fonts: PointFree
https://code.google....i3project/wiki/Fonts

si9ws1b.png

 :Thmbsup:

248
Living Room / Re: Programming/Coder humor
« on: September 12, 2015, 02:05 PM »

249
Well, if my new PC hadn't croaked before I could really play with this, I would have posted a report.  I can say it did install successfully, and started right up on first run.  I don't run the proprietary video drivers, but it didn't complain.  At that point, I apparently offended my hard drive or SATA controller or something, because it immediately locked up the interface, and I couldn't Ctrl-Alt-Fn to a terminal.  After a hard reboot, a bunch of disk errors and all the system utilities throwing segfaults, I knew something deeper was happening, so I had to return the thing and order a new one.
 :(
As soon as I get the new one in and settled and Unity installed, I'll post more.   :Thmbsup:

250
Living Room / Re: How do you resist buying ever more powerful PCs?
« on: September 07, 2015, 03:55 PM »
I finally splurged on a new PC.  A brand spankin-refurbished Intel Core 2 Duo machine with 4 gigs RAM, 1TB hard drive and a Radeon HD6450 video card; all from Walmart.com for under 200 bucks! (well, it was an overtime paycheck, so we bought 3 of them) 
Oh, she was a beaut... I say "was" because out of the 3 machines we got, mine was the one that went toes-up (I returned it and ordered a replacement as soon as I figured out it was actually broken, and not a fault of the OS).  To be expected, it being a refurb and all, but it IS an upgrade from what I had.  So... NO I didn't resist the temptation, but I DID upgrade to what I could afford.
 :Thmbsup:

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