olpa, OSS developer

I like not to read from screen, but to print and read texts offline. Today I tried to print an usenet discussion from the Google groups interface. Unfortunately, there is no printer-friendly version, and copy-paste to OpenOffice is very ugly. Finally, I made copy-paste of text content of each message. Very frustrating.

I sometimes need to convert a lot of files from one format to another. When the task is a one-time task, it’s better to use the “for” loop in shell, but when the task is repeating, it’s better to use a make file. Here is one of such make files.

(more…)

Screen Captures (pdf)

This document is about making screen captures for technical writers working primarily in a Microsoft Windows environment. The tools targeted include Adobe FrameMaker, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, along with Techsmith’s SnagIt, Adobe Photoshop, and Ulead’s PhotoImpact 4.2.

Certainly, the thoughts and techniques mentioned herein can be applied to other professions, other operating systems, and other tools.

Adobe Illustrators seems to be a very good tool, even although I’ve never used it. Unfortunately, I have problems with AI results exported as SVG and EPS.

(more…)

The utility psnup puts multiple logical PostScript pages onto each physical sheet of paper. Unfortunately, I’ve found that I don’t like result. I’ve got a better result after playing with pstops:

cat ~/print.ps | \\
pstops '2:0L@.6(19.5cm,1cm)+1L@.6(19.5cm,14cm)' -pa4 >out.ps

I wanted to play video on my Siemens M75. After some research, I found that the format is 3gp. Video files can be converted to this format using the Linux utility “ffmpeg“.

(more…)

There is rumour that sometimes people start to speak in a foreign language, even if they have never learnt or heard it. That could be assigned to the overworld mind. But I think the things are simplier.

Today I visited a German hospital. Unexpectedly, I alone had to entertain a 7-month German baby. So I recited Russian poetry for 2 hours. A seed for new wonder has been sowed.

I’d like to enhance an Adobe tool, so some retrospective is useful.

(more…)

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000668.php

A funny quote from frameusers mailing list:

Creating XSL-FO is easy - I just tell a programmer what I want.

DU350PS is a SATA Hard Drive Mobile Rack with USB 2.0 interface. It seems working under my Linux. No special setup required.

(more…)

Just a note to myself what to do before “apt-get dist-upgrade”:

apt-get clean
apt-get check
apt-get update
apt-get install gnupg bzlib apt rpm

I’ve decided to try XML support in browsers. Half hour later I crashed Mozilla 1.7.2 using expression:
document('authors.xml',document(''))//author[@id=current()/@idref]
Back to xsltproc.

Notebook “Aspire 1610″ has an internal modem which identified by lspci as “Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) AC’97 Modem Controller (rev 02)”. It took much time to make it working under Linux.

(more…)

A small Lisp vs Python article: “Python for Lisp Programmers“. The title is very untraditional, one expects Python and Lisp swapped.

After two-month rest, I recently got modem Internet connection. Expecting upgrade to DSL in the new year.

I tired of MovableType spam. More and more spam sites. Finally, I’ve added mask “.*” to the filter.

I generated an HTML version of a product catalogue and found that the result was very bad due to poor PNG images. To get good PNG images, I had to write some code. Here it is: convertor from eps to other formats.

(more…)

I’ve prepared a mini-bio for a possible DDJ article:

Oleg Paraschenko is a PhD student in the Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia, and a freelance developer in the area of technical documentation. His main research interests are XML technologies and generative programming. In spare time he supports xmlhack.ru, a server for Russian-speaking XML community.

From a letter to the libxml mailing list. Probably it’s well known, but I’d like to share useful gdb settings. From my ~/.gdbinit:

(more…)