Raible Designs

Aqua Text - How to Scale Down.

I sent an e-mail to the author (Rick Yaeger) of the aqua-text tutorial last night asking how to scale down my text and reduce the fuzziness (or as Lance called it, "the gel toothpaste look"). Here is Rick's response:

There is an easy way to scale the effects of the style in Photoshop 7. In fact, that's what the command is called "Scale Effects..." and it is found under the Layers menu under the Layer Style submenu. Select the layer that has the effects you wish to scale and use this command to adjust those effects on a percentage scale with preview.

Another method is to create your type at 72pt and then flatten the image and scale it down 25%.

So I tried this, and it definitely helped. Here is the old one, and the new one. I've noticed that I do lack one thing as a Blogger - and that is following up on my previous posts, so here goes...

PDF Searching. Thanks to Vince Mastrantoni (no blog) and Greg Klebus for their e-mails. These will help me find my solution I'm sure. Thanks Guys.

The obvious answer would be Adobe Acrobat. But, this is not open source and if you have many files to search through, would be cumbersome. I tried to do a batch search using it, but was unable to. It appears as though this may not be supported or an option.

Another alternative is the Lucene search engine available at:

http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/index.html

Now, this by itself doesn't search PDFs. However, you can add a plug-in to do this. See here:

http://www.i2a.com/websearch/

Other stuff that might help is here:

http://www.etymon.com/

Also, the Google internet search engine searches and indexes PDFs and allows them to be displayed in text format. I'm not sure how or if this might help but I wanted to point this out to you.

Lastly, there is a PDF filter that Adobe provides that can be plugged into IIS index server. Tried looking for it but couldn't find it. Maybe you'll have better luck.

Vince

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Found that filter. Gave up too soon:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1&platform=Windows

Vince

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Raible, (I seem to have read your explanation about the name :)

pdftotext (forgot the source, you need to google it yourself). The name says it all -- convert your PDF to text and do the search.

It's a default viewer under Midnight Commander on my linux box, so I can view PDF's as text easily.

Open source, and probably cross-platform.

You can also try Ghostscript, it probably has something similar (but it's big, and you'd need to go through Postscript files anyway).

I hope I could help.

Regards,
-Greg

Also, I mentioned a while back that I didn't use Mail for OS X, but instead I use Entourage. Truth is, I've started using Mail (over Entourage) for a very simple reason, it's faster. When I click on the icon, it opens faster. I'm easy that way.

To follow up on my iSync post, I can't wait for the actual release. When I import all my vCards from Outlook XP, it changes the "mobile" phone number to "main" in my Address Book. Because of this, my contacts' mobile numbers never make it to my phone - doh! This same import works fine in Entourage. Also, I can't seem to 1) sync with .Mac or 2) publish my iCal to my webdav-enabled Tomcat server. Not that I really need to, but I like to experiment and see if it's possible. Manually changing my contacts' numbers from "main" to "mobile" in Address Book fixes the problem, but what a pain. And my phone seems to end up with a bunch of contacts I never put in there - iSync definitely has room for improvement. I'm looking forward to this update.

Last, but certainly not least, to follow up on where is Russ - it's great to have you back Russ, you were missed. You update your blog more frequently than any others I read - thanks.

In other news, I can see Phoenix being my default browser very soon. It's Mozilla without the extra stuff (i.e. Mail) that I don't use.

Aqua Text.

I figured out how to make Aqua-style text this evening via this tutorial. Pretty cool stuff, but the Photoshop style that you download with the tutorial is designed for huge text and that's why my title on the aqua theme looks a little faded. It really looks excellent at 72pt font!

You might wonder why I've been working on this site and Roller so much lately? I've recently finished a 1.0 release of the software I've been working on the for the past 9 months. My client is now making a big push to sell it and I'm moving into maintenance mode for the next couple months (10-15 hours per week). A good idea on their part - to see what people like and don't like before adding new features. So I'm looking to pick up another 15-20 hours per week if anyone knows of anything.

In other site-enhancement news, I found that my contact form was not working to send me e-mail. So I fixed the JSP to work properly and added a sweet (I think) enhancement to the Contact page. Now when you submit the form, it submits it to an iframe that is 25px high and you never leave the page - you just get a success message. Try it, you might like it. BTW, for the JSP that sends e-mail, I use the mailer tag library - which makes it really easy.

What's your largest attachment?

This story over at The FuzzyBlog! reminds of a story from a couple of years ago. A friend of mine, who lived and worked in San Francisco at the time, was writing an e-mail engine. He called it "the spam engine" but it was probably just used to send out mass e-mails to customers. Anyway, he decided to test it on me, so I received something like 1000 e-mails from him in one day. You can imagine my annoyance - and I thought to myself "that bastard - I'll get him!" So I zipped up a bunch of large files on my hard drive - including a JDK (40MB) and some other stuff. The final size of the zip was ~79MB. I attached and hit send. You can imagine how tickled I was when he called me to say, "What the hell did you send me? My Outlook froze up and it crashed my computer!" Needless to say, he quit testing his spam engine out on me ;-)

Tomcat 4.0.6 - another security release.

So the folks that develop tomcat have released another version - and it seems to be for the same reasons they released the last one. It's only been two weeks! I know the feeling when you think you've fixed a bug, you release, and you find it's still there. I just hope Tomcat doesn't start getting a bad reputation with all of these vulnerabilities.

Gen Xers are setup for failure.

Found via The FuzzyBlog!:

A few years later the core of Generation X--the 40 million Americans born between 1966 and 1975--found themselves riding the wildest economic bull ever. Salesclerks became programmers; coffee slingers morphed into experts in Java (computerese, that is)--all flush with stock options and eye-popping salaries. Now that the thrill ride is over, Gen X's plight seems particularly bruising. No generation since the Depression has been set up for failure like this. Everything the dot-com boom delivered has been taken away--and then some. Real wages are falling, wealth continues to shift from younger to older, and education costs are surging. Worse yet, for some Gen Xers, their peak earning years are behind them. Buried in college and credit card debt, a lot of them won't be able to catch up as they approach their prime spending years.

(Scott added the bold). This very much rings true for many folks I know. My wife and I (as Gen Xers) have gotten lucky since we've maintained employment, for the most part, through the last couple of years. I did have a couple months last year without a client, but I used this time to get my MCSE/MCDBA 2000, SCWCD and WebLogic certifications - so it was probably better than having a client.

How did I get started in this wacky industry? I'm glad you asked. I graduated from DU--with three degrees (Russian, International Business and Finance)--had created many web pages in college, and found that there weren't many jobs in my degree's industries. So I audited some computer classes my senior year - and whalla - got a job with MCI Systemhouse. That's where I met my wife and the rest is history. To peak your interest for my next background story - didja know I grew up in a log cabin in Montana with no electricity and no running water? For the first 16 years of my life...

Looks like Russell's almost back.

From http://www.beattie.info/notebook/:

Calling the blog-support Hotline.

I have a bunch of PDF's that I need to search for text values. Does anyone know of a package or set of utilities that will do this? Preferably open-source and cross-platform. However, I will accept any and all suggestions.

New Roller Client. I found that BlogApp works to post to Roller. Very cool! The software seems to support titles - meaning you can specify html to go around the title, but it doesn't post it to the "title" field in the roller database.

Sun is spewing knowledge again.

For those that aren't up to speed on JSTL, here's a new tutorial: Faster Development with JavaServer Pages^TM Standard Tag Library (JSTL 1.0). Also, this Tuesday, Craig McClanahan and Amy Fowler, Spec leads of JSF, will host a live chat on JSF. The bad part, it's at 8:00 AM Eastern time which means that I'll have to get up at 6:00 to catch it. I'm a pretty good morning person, so shouldn't be too hard. I've been practicing for the little one lately by going to bed between midnight and 2:00 AM and then waking up again at 6:00 AM. Hope it works.

Ant 1.5.1 Released!

It doesn't appear like there are too many changes, but there's a new version nevertheless. As most of you open source developers know, it's much easier to keep up with the lastest version (or nightly builds) than to try to migrate when a new version comes out. If you don't, you mind end up with a XDoclet nightmare similar to the one I'm having with Roller.