Where Are The Wise Men?

I first heard of Kip from FreeMacWare.com and then ran into it again on a blog cast. Both places described it as ”iPhoto for PDF’s, only easier”.  When I went to Kip’s webpage this weekend and noted that it has been renamed Yep.  That’s okay — it’s still a great system.

It’s easy — tell Yep to import in your PDF file and then you can tag it to your heart’s content. But what it’s a paper your signing?   Well, just scan it in.   Yep has direct support for a scanner, but I have my printer-scanner on a different PC.  I scanned them in and saved them as EPS and JPG files and Yep was able to import them in and save them to a PDF (not as magic as you think, since Preview does it, so this is built into the OS).

Okay, so you have [...]

Jeremy and I are having an interesting discussion on thePolyalphabetic Substitution post.  Before jumping in, though, you better learn/review some ring theory.

I thought I had a cool little class in my original version.  But now I have a cooler function. Oh yeah, TextSnippets is a cool site.

I’ve had the pleasure of playing a little with VMWare Server late last week as well as most of this week.  I’ve only used one virtual machine (Windows 2003) but I have to say that I’m impressed – much nicer than VirtualPC.  And it’s free!!

Setting up a virtual machine is easy but that’s not the coolest part.  The coolest part is that [...]

Two unrelated Mac OSX notes:

Opera and Flash

As I’ve said before, Opera is my new browser of choice.  But I’ve been having problem running Flash in it (no Flash == no YouTube).  At first, I thought it was Adobe’s fault — their Flash 8 player was PowerPC only and I read somewhere that running a Rosetta-powered [...]

A friend of mine just planted a geocache in which you needed to use polyalphabetic substitution to solve it. This was a kind of cipher I wasn’t familiar with and I have to admit — I was intriqued.

Like most lazy computer guys, I wrote a program to encrypt the puzzle instead of solving it [...]

The other day I was installing a CPAN module and I was doing it the normal way:

sudo perl -MCPAN -e “install ModuleName”

And it didn’t install — I got a GPG permission error[1].  It seemed odd.  I tried it a few times and that didn’t work.   So I tried to upgrade CPAN.  And I got the same error!  I was bedudled. So then I downloaded and compiled the latest GnuPG.  But I got the same thing!

And then it hit me.   I was running Perl under sudo.  So when it ran [...]

Some of you may be surprised that I haven’t actually used Struts before.  Because of all the J2EE projects I’ve worked on, Struts was not part of the picture (it’s what our customers used to build their applications with our middleware product).  Well, it’s high-time I start filling in the blanks in my experience.

I started with another [...]

I try very hard not to post anything political here, but I can’t help resposting this post from Bart Compolo.  To quote:

. . .it is high time pro-life evangelicals woke up to the fact that the countless Republicans they have elected over the years have given them practically nothing in return for their votes.

Things are quite because things have been busy. Leah has just turned three and is convincing everyone that she knows how to act like it. Work is getting more, uh, interesting. No Python work, but I have been doing some crazy database things. Oh, and I found a good Struts book — [...]

One of the most important things in testing is keeping track of the defects you find.  That way, everything is in one in place, and you can easily pass issues back and forth.  This week I’ve been evaluating Trac and I have to say that I’m impressed, and I haven’t gotten to all the functionality [...]