Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Converting PDFs to SWF

Update: This doesn’t work for Adobe Connect. I uploaded the converted SWF to Connect only to lose the keyboard input necessary for changing pages. I ended up using the old Macromedia FlashPaper on Windows to create a usable SWF. A basic SWFTools viewer with several mouse buttons for navigation would be a nice solution, but I haven’t found one just yet.

We’ve been using Adobe Connect in the lab recently, but, ironically, our version of Adobe Connect did not support PDFs (I suppose this is a remnant of the old Macromedia buyout). In any case, a nice solution is to convert the PDF to a SWF. Lucky for us, there is an OSS tool just for that. Enter, SWFTools. The suite contains the tool, pdf2swf designed just the purpose. The default settings for the tool progress through the pages in the PDF like a slideshow; definately not what we want for a presentation. We can, however, specify a viewer to use. SWFTools ship with a keyboard viewer that work great for presentations. Execute this command (on Arch Linux, change the location of keyboard_viewer.swf for other distributions accordingly) to convert a PDF:

pdf2swf -B /usr/share/swftools/swfs/keyboard_viewer.swf doc.pdf

Fixing Skype lag with Pulseaudio 0.9.21

I had some trouble with my audio output lagging for a couple seconds when using my USB headset with Pulseaudio 0.9.21 on Arch Linux. It turned out to be a problem with the Pulseaudio suspending the USB headset when it was idle. Commenting out module-suspend-on-idle in /etc/pulse/system.pa and /etc/pulse/default.pa is a quick fix, but it removes support to USB suspend.

It turns out that there was a bug in Pulseaudio that’s fixed in git upstream, but not yet released. Apply the patch to 0.9.21 and re-compile to fix the problem.

Goodbye Leipzig and Linz

In Linz

Arrived in Linz yesterday night by train. Getting from tram station to the hotel was difficult since the wheel’s didn’t really work with all the snow on the group. I had completely overlooked the fact that there might be snow when packing in Toronto. This shot was taken during the lunch break at the Vamos workshop today. The pond must have been deep since it was definitely below zero yet the water wasn’t frozen over.

The Monument of the Battle of Nations

Thorsten and Maria brought me to the Monument of the Battle of Nations today. I went with the expectation of seeing a statue, only to find this monolithic structure overlooking a frozen-over lake. It looked as if it could have been out of the Lord of the Rings.

In Leipzig

Learning Photography

I’ve been getting into photography lately, and it’s been quite an interesting process so far. It’s incredible how a photograph can capture all the little details that you just didn’t notice when you were there in person. I’m only at the start of this journey (or addiction)… it’ll be interesting to see where I end up a year from now.

Migrating to WordPress 2.9

I haven’t spent much time on this blog lately and now I’ve run into the classic migration problem. I’ll be slowly updating in the next couple days.

Installing Confluence using Apache Tomcat 6 and Ubuntu

Here’s a short guide for installing Confluence on a shared Tomcat server instance on Ubuntu 8.10. Apache Tomcat 6 can be installed using a simple apt-get command:

sudo apt-get install tomcat6

Next, we’ll need to raise the Tomcat heap size for confluence. Edit /etc/default/tomcat6 and add the line:

JAVA_OPTS="-Xms128m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m $JAVA_OPTS -Djava.awt.headless=true"

Now, we’ll need to grant security permissions to the Confluence webapp. To do this, create a file /etc/tomcat6/policy.d/05confluence.policy and place the following text in it:

grant codeBase "file:${catalina.home}/webapps/confluence/-" {
permission java.security.AllPermission;
};

grant {
permission java.lang.RuntimePermission "accessDeclaredMembers";
permission java.lang.reflect.ReflectPermission "suppressAccessChecks";
permission java.lang.RuntimePermission "defineCGLIBClassInJavaPackage";
};

Finally, we can restart Tomcat using the command:

/etc/init.d/tomcat6 restart

References

Phone Obsession

I think some of you can relate. I know I can, but which character? Maybe all three!

Dilbert.com