Convert PDF to JPEG on OS X

I had a student of mine complain that the .PDF material I’d provided was illegible. I attributed the problem to her ignorance, and to her lack of knowledge of the magnification tool, but the customer is always right, … right? I decided to hard copy the material myself and personally hand it in to her at our next class a week away. In the meantime I wanted to convert the .PDF material to something that she may have been more adept at using, even if in a rastorized format. So, I decided to convert the .PDF to –wait for it– .JPGs! Googling brought me to an article that details a script that converts .PDF to .JPG but –in true mac fashion– it only works with the latest and greatest pay-ware version of OS X, 10.5, while I use 10.4 –leaving murmurers such as myself lost in the wilderness as the faithful continue to the promised land with their glorious and fearless leader, Jobs. Now, my problem is not with converting .PDF to .JPEG. I think this should easily be possible considering both formats are so pervasive. My problem is that it would seem –according to the Machead in the article previously mentioned– to necessitate underlying technology which only works with 10.5 OS X, and if there are other options for 10.4 users, why not mention them? Well, I found out there are other options, two –of which I’m now aware– in fact.

A Canadian Marking with the 7-point Scale

Something that has boggled my mind is the 7-point marking system used in Chile. If you grew up in Canada as I did, you may be used to thinking in a different few systems, metric, and imperial –which in the Canadian experience works out to feet and inches for height, onces and pounds for weight (except when buying groceries when metric is also posted). Moving away from footage and weight, exams and assignments in Canada are always marked in percentages, with 50% normally signaling minimum achievement and working all the way up to 100% for a perfect mark (which is never given). Now, it’s true that these percentages have “always” been converted into some letter based system, but this has always been at the end of the course, semester, or the school year –and so Canadians (as previously mentioned) understand and mainly think along the lines of a percent based marking system.

As can be deduced from above, being asked to mark using this 7-point scale has sometimes been awkward. It doesn’t help that Chilean teachers I’ve spoken with don’t work with percentages at all, some of which mark in what can only be termed qualitatively rather than quantitatively (a huge problem IMHO. Gd, I’ve been asked to be on Chilean “university” evaluative boards where rubrics weren’t required and certainly weren’t standard, but I’m getting off topic). Formulas to which you can input percentages –usually in the way of a spreadsheet– are sometimes provided by institutions. They usually consider more than just a percent to 7-point scale conversion but also provide a curve. Many institutions do not provide spreadsheets with built-in conversion formulas, leaving it up to the teacher.

What in part makes the Chilean point system odd –although it’s a 7-point system– it really isn’t marked as having seven intervals because one can’t give a student a grade below 1, despite his or her performance. It’s thought that if they show up to class, as infrequently as this may be and as uncooperative as they may be, they at least deserve a “1″. In the case that they don’t come to class –depending on how far the institution has commercialized itself– it’s either the teacher’s fault (for not motivating the student, despite the limited influence teachers hold) which disallows giving a failing mark or –if the institute is of an academic standard– the student may be removed from the class roster. Either case demonstrates that a “0″ is never given –but this is getting off topic again. Back to the point at hand, the Chilean system forces one to think in unusual fractions. What’s a 5.6? And how is a 5.6 different from a 5.7? Is this difference significant? And to ultimately come to the point of this article, how does one convert from percent to the 7-point system?

Thoughts on Elive and DeEliving my MacBook Pro

I’ve been looking into installing a Libre OS onto my MacBook Pro 2.6 Intel Core Duo late 2006 model. There are multiple projects working on this. As always, the Gnu-Linuxes are farther along than the BSD ones in hardware support. At the moment BSDs lacks iSight, Airport Extreme, and are iffy on sound. They are also experiencing stability issues (on MacBooks). As for out-of-the-box support, Mac laptops are a doozy to configure. You got to make sure you have have CPU frequencing. And apparently, throttling is not the same as frequencing so you need that too, and you need the latest of these because older versions are deprecated. Then you need keyboard mapping support, back lighting, screen dimming, and other fn-key support; So you have to install and/or configure all these individually. Quite the tedious job.

The Debian install guide for my MacBook Pro reads, download this, patch with this and that, and if you want so and so don’t forget that patch, and you need to use at least such and such version kernel but not that new one because sound doesn’t work on it. Even the Ubuntu guide reads like a shopping list for the rich and famous.

Well, it seems someone has seen the light and taken care of most of it. Even the Marillat repository –with “restricted” multimedia– comes enabled. Here comes eLiveCD Elive_0.9-b9_Macbooks (beta), a live CD that demos the Enlightenment desktop and enables a live CD to hard-drive install. Furthermore, Elive is Debian-like, but more than just based on the popular distro, it’s Debian etch stable –customized. It even uses Debian repositories. Thus, Elive betas “should” be closer to release candidates rather than betas. Any instabilities probably come from the Enlightenment desktop repositories, and maybe the Marillat repository (or MacTel specific kernel patches).

Access Meebo via Bitlbee or a Jabber Client

I have a web-page where I integrated the Meebo plug-in. It’s handy because it allows quick instant messaging with your page’s visitors, rather than asking them to contact you via MSN or some other IM protocol and waiting for requests to be accepted. Despite Meebo’s convenience, I’ve been frustrated that in order to take advantage of this service I have to log into the Meebo page and that I don’t have access via one of my multi-protocol apps –or so I thought.

When I learned that Meebo uses the XMPP (Jabber) protocol, I experimented connecting to Meebo by using the Jabber client called Coccinella, Psi and Bitlbee. I was successful.

Coccinella Instructions
Create a profile, do not use “New Account” as this doesn’t allow you to specify the Meebo username. To so this, at startup select Profile, give it a name such as Meebo, specify the jabber server to meebo.org, input your Meebo username and password, and throw in “Home”as the resource. Select “Less” and “SASL authentification method” under “Use Secure Connection”(under the “Connection” tab). Other than that, the only other selection that should be activated is “Scramble password” under the “Login” tab. Save your preferences when done and log-in.

The only caveats are that you need to delete the Meebo visitor after he surfs off your page, at which point he becomes listed as off-line. The other seems to be a OS X specific issue in which Spotlight is activated evoking a window manifestation when your contact IMs. This happens initially and only once.

Coccinella allows you to log into various protocols, but adding various servers or profiles seems less intuitive if at all supported (I see no “log-in during startup” selection under the profile’s preferences to enable simultaneous multiple server/profile log-ins). To be useful, I need to login to various servers, including Google Talk, and Meebo, which –as far as I see– are not regularly supported with transports (transports or gateways are the “things” on servers that allow connections to various IM protocols). In short, if I connect to a Jabber server called –say– MyJabberServer.org and it does not have a MSN transport, well, this would bar me from connecting to the MSN network for the session (until I logged in again with another server that supports MSN). There are clients that allow multiple server connections. By the way, Psi does, so that you can use the Google Talk talk.google.com server (your Google Talk account, a XMPP protocol based service), the Meebo meebo.org server (another XMPP protocol based service), and just any ordinary Jabber server along with your MSN, AIM, ICQ and Yahoo accounts.

Notes on Getting Meebo Working with Psi
I will not narrate how to get Psi working with Meebo as the above Coccinella example serves as a general guide. In short, you need to specifiy the following.

Host: meebo.org
Port: 5222
Select “Encrypt When Available”
Allow plaintext authentication: “Over encrypted connection or Always”
Do not select “SSL encryption”.
Note: (Doesn’t show subscribed rooms until someone contacts you. As default, a window doesn’t pop-up when contacted either.)

Bitlbee Instructions
Following up on my previous HOWTO on Bitlbee interoperability, I got Meebo working with Bitlbee too but deleting the continuous stream of contacts –as they log-off– might be frustrating. Of course, this depends on the amount of traffic your site receives, but if you’re getting that much congestion you need another service such as email. I added Meebo to Bitlbee the following way, in a one line command,

• account add jabber username@meebo.org/Home yourPassword meebo.org:5222

It was also accepted without the “/Home” bit. Experiment at your own risk, seems my logging in with the Meebo plug-in on my page on SeaMonkey caused a crash. Suffixing “:ssl” disables Bitlbee’s ability to log on; Bitlbee reports “Login error: Unable to connect” and signs off –so don’t request “ssl”. Bitlbee needs a script to automize off-line Meebo contact deletion in real time. The other option would be selectively allow off-line Meebo contacts show presence on the roster. Thus, one could manually delete them as they take off-line status (assuming that Meebo contact names are not recycled in which case rendering deletion unnecessary). This might be manageable if “only Meebo contacts” show as off-line, as enabling off-line visibility for all IM accounts would become unmanageable; This, due to the sheer number of off-line contacts at any given time and the needle in the haystack scenario contact deletion involves (I reported this as a bug). To lighten this quandary, unix commands could help as in, “blist all | grep @hotmail.com” or “blist all | grep hotmail.com”, or “blist all xaccount” to list all (off and on-line) xaccount contacts (I reported this as an enhancement request).

I guess this guide comes close to answering this Meebo user’s wish. Except in the Bitlbee example we replace his desired Jabber server with Bitlbee (specifically, IRC client to Bitlbee server to Meebo server). While there are fewer links with the Jabber client route … we bypass any Jabber server entirely and connect directly to Meebo’s server (Jabber client to Meebo server).

Maurice Cepeda

P.S.
I tried this with Adium’s Google Talk and Jabber plug-ins but these don’t work because they don’t allow Meebo username and password input, and add-in “@gmail.com” or “jabber.org” to your Meebo username –thus, rendering the function useless. Rather than write another plug-in, why not just allow better setting customization as with Psi, with a Meebo check mark option automizing contact deletion? (Adium is more or less Pidgin ported to OS X.)

For developers,
Protocol: XMPP
Domain: meebo.org
Resource: Home
Connect port: 5222
Connect server: meebo.org

As for references, they were useful in clueing me into the XMMP protocol and and port 5222. There is a Pidgin plug-in written that automates contact deletion. Perhaps this can be incorporated into Bitlbee and other “clones”.

http://jrpomeroy.com/pidgin/
http://oshelpdesk.org/?p=256

Misc
Google Talk Notes
Google’s Google Talk guide for third party apps doesn’t help anymore, thus my point form guide:

Google Talk on Psi
Host: talk.google.com
Port: 5223
Allow plaintext authentification: “Over encrypted connection or Always”
“Use SSL encryption” (to server) or the like.

Spark
Meebo works on Spark but Google Talk does not, at least not for me.

This is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License. All brands mentioned are properties of their respective owners. By reading this article, the reader forgoes any accountability of the writer. The reading of this article implies acceptance of the above stipulations. The author requires attribution –by full name and URL– and notification of republications.

Turn ChatZilla into an Universal Instant Messaging Client

Considering shortcomings of various universal IM clients, be they feature or technical (see below), I opted to use a basic client of my choice with the hopes of increasing its interoperability. I was successful.

As people may know, I really like the SeaMonkey suite. I use its Address Book, web-page creator called Composer, Mail and, of course, Navigator –its browser. I’d be using Calendar (rather than Sunbird) if it hadn’t been removed (re-implementation expected at a later release date with suiterunner¹). Of interest to this article, SeaMonkey incorporates an IRC client called ChatZilla (which is also available as a Firefox extension for Firefox users).

I personally like ChatZilla but it only handles IRC. Its a prototype for an IM client (presumably for more than just IRC), but never made it past the IRC protocol. Bitlbee changes this, taking it from its IRC limitations –extending it to MSN, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ, AOL, and Yahoo IM protocol interoperability. Doing so was quite easy, as you’ll see in this HOWTO. Writing this article was much more tedious. (Ignore “” surrounding commands. “” identify commands and GUI buttons).

Lesser Known SeaMonkey Key-bindings

There’s a few key-bindings (short cuts) in SeaMonkey of which I wasn’t aware and wanted to list. I accidentally “discovered” some, this lead to some experimentation and finding others.

On SeaMonkey Dictionaries

Just a few tips on SeaMonkey 1.1.2 regarding dictionaries, mainly their extraction, installation, and the editing of user added words. This HOWTO is geared towards OS X.

Decompress .rar Files on OS X “for Free”

Update (Nov. 2, 2007):
There is now a UI GPL utility for OS X that not only opens .rar files but also those pesky Stuffit files for which you thought you had to go through an intense sign-up (to download Stuffit). It’s called Unarchiver and it’s apparently “completely” Libre, unlike some of the questionably licensed apps mentioned below. Unarchiver will also save you from installing MacPorts or Fink, a little tedious if you’re just installing it for the one app..

I was asked to translate some movie subtitles from English to Spanish. The files came in .rar format contained within emails. I scoured the net for Libre (GPL or the like) .rar decompresser applications, and I didn’t see much.

I messed around with a few applications, but nothing worked. Some back-end command line programs exist, but I can’t –from their web-pages– make out their licenses, as with WinRAR OS X’s version. Other apps with front and back-ends do exist but for the life of me, I can’t make out their licenses either (UnRarX, and MacPAR deLuxe come to mind). I tried both the back-end named p7zip [dead link], made to work with the front-end called ez 7z [dead link] –to no avail on my Intel Tiger (OS X) install.

[You can now get both p7zip and ez 7 at <http://os.cqu.edu.au/macosx/misc/> or at <http://p7zip.sourceforge.net/> and <http://osx.iusethis.com/app/ez7z> consecutively.]

Looking around I found out that MacPorts has unrar. So I installed unrar with,

Backup Gnu-Linux-PPC to OS X

I wanted to make a clean install of Ubuntu-PPC. Rather than burning everything to CDs, and since I have a dual-boot (OS X just for backup purposes), I reasoned that I could copy my Ubuntu account contents straight into OS X, reinstall Ubuntu onto the Ubuntu partitions, then copy my Gnu-Linux account contents back in.

Change Scribus/Aqua Language Setting

Upon installing a new version of my favourite page layout program (some time ago), I kept getting some persistent Nordic language setting (seems it was either Afrikaans or Dutch). Reinstalling an earlier version didn’t help because the setting stuck. Nor could I change this setting via the GUI because I can’t make out Germanic languages (other than English), thus, this low level fix. (I assume that you want English as your default language setting.)

How to Rip CSS from a .html Template

How to Rip CSS from a .html Template

In case you wanted to rip the CSS from a blog template, I’ve written the following.
This assumes that you know how to make a separate CSS work with your newly stripped .html file.

Network a USB Printer with OS X

Considering D-Link’s failure to provide OS X support on networking printers with their DI-534UP router (their manual lacks the info.), I struggled to network a HP PSC 1610 All-In-One with a D-Link DI-524UP router. I’m glad to write that I was successful.

Googling didn’t help, seems there aren’t a lot of articles on how to network a printer with OS X (Tiger [what I'm running] or any other version). Perhaps most OS X users are only too happy to use the Airport Extreme Base Station (an expensive router for dummies), or whatever the almighty Jobs tells them they should buy.

Anyway, I got my set-up working just fine with a little elbow grease. The keys to making it work is knowing the router’s private IP, the printer’s queue name, and using LPD (not IPP, nor HP Jet Direct-Socket). You can do the same in eight easy steps. Do so at your own discretion.

Inconsistent Character Encoding Problems

I’ve been wrecking my head trying to get some web-pages I authored to display tildes (“´”) and “ñ”s. It seems that every mention I googled suggests changing the following line,

  <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#web>
<http://www.interaktonline.com/Products/Dreamweaver-Extensions/MXRSSReader-Writer/Product-Forum/Details/121651/RSS+Reader+spanish+char+encoding+problem.html>

where UTF-8 supports Spanish characters. The problem is that it didn’t for me on OS X (Tiger) and Firefox 2 or SeaMonkey 1.1.1, although the same document renders with IE on Windows (XP?). On the other hand, ISO-Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) and ISO-8859-3 (southern European) works for my OS X setup but does not render well with IE on Windows.

Setting Xmms & Usb Sound

Get started with XMMS (audio player) and use an USB sound device (the Xitel MD-PORT AN1 digital to analogue converter). I use it to send digitalized music, via USB, either to my head-phones or a minidisc recorder. This results in better quality audio. This set-up has worked for me on Sarge Debian-PPC, and Warty/hoary Ubuntu-PPC.

Sync Palm with Evolution

I was unsatisfied with the official Ubuntu wiki on Palm sync’ing as it resulted in a error. Thus, here is my HowTo.

Ubuntu Hoary/Warty Sound Errors

I have noticed a two sound errors with Ubuntu. First there is a problem with Rhythmbox. It reports, “Could not pause playback”.The First Problem
The solution seems to be either:

Scribus/Aqua Templates

June 17, 2006
I promised a friend to help her with a pamphlet for her grandfather’s restaurant. I noticed that the default Scribus/Aqua came with few templates, but I found two template files searching through the Scribus site. One is called scribus-temp-all-1.2.1.tar.bz2 and the other, scribus-temp-all-1.2.tar.bz2. [Tiger's de-compressor (BOMArchiveHelper) doesn't open the file. Use OpenUp.]

Printer Trouble-Shooting

I’ve noticed some people have problems printing. Rather than resorting to changing permissions, or other ‘drastic’ acts, I thought I’d share my trouble shooting techniques (which I’ve previously posted on a forum). This article assumes you can configure a printer in gnome-cups-manager or kprint.

Manually Open Compressed Files

Update (Nov. 4, 2007):
From another post of mine, “There is now a UI GPL utility for OS X that not only opens .rar files but also those pesky Stuffit files for which you thought you had to go through an intense sign-up (to download Stuffit). It’s called Unarchiver¹ and it’s apparently “completely” Libre”.
<http://mauroandres.wordpress.com/2007/07/19/decompress-rar-files-on-os-x-for-free/²>

The following instructions work for various extensions such as ¨.tgz¨ and I believe ¨.tar.gz¨.

Mount OS X on the Fly

While OS X is mounted, you’ll be able to drag files from Ubuntu to Panther (OS X) and vice versa to the ‘Shared’ OS X folder (/home/USER/macOSX/Users/Shared). Other recommendations have you mount OS X under /mnt/ (in gnu-linux), but I find permissions problems with this that do not even allow access to the Shared folder.

Minimal Ubuntu Install

I wanted to do a minimal install with Ubuntu as I used to do with Debian. I found out I could from http://www.binonabiso.com/en/Ubuntu-miniRAM-HOWTO.html¹⁴. This site only served as a prompt as I have been doing minimal installs with Debian for some time prior that web-site. As Ubuntu is based on Debian, I thought I could use my Debian base insall experience to install a base Ubuntu (and write it up).

Get yourself a very fast system, faster than the default Ubuntu install. I did so on my 400mhz iMac DV.

Buss Cards with GPL Apps

May 25, 2006.
This set of instructions are from an early set attempting to use OO and even Mozilla’s Composer to create ready to print business card images in the .pdf format. Eventually I settled for Scribus to compensate Inkscape’s limitations (which I like very much anyway).

NetBSD-MacPPC Install

This guide details a NetBSD MacPPC version 2 install onto a 400 MHz iMac.

• Partitioning with OS 9’s Drive Setup
• Boot from NetBSD macppc CD
• Formatting and Initializing NetBSD Partitions
• Installing Apple OS X
  
• Booting into Single User Mode
• First Multiuser Boot
• Setting Up X Windows
• Internet Connection
• Firewall
• Booting

I wrote this in the hopes that mac users –many of which are disappointed in OS X, Apple’s business policies (such as the closing off of Darwin, and the withholding of Airport Extreme driver and associated spec information) and who are perhaps seeking something other than Gnu-Linux-PPC– would follow me into the world of BSD. (I have no axe to grind with Gnu/Linux, or the GPL).

Fax on a 400 MHz iMac DV

I used to fax a lot with Apple’s OSes, so this was an important feature to duplicate if I were to use Gnu-Linux. I’m happy to say that I have been successful. I knew that this should be possible because my modem is a hardware modem, as opposed to a ‘winmodem’ (or is the correct term ‘macmodem’?). How did I know it was a hard modem? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because I recalled related old models have hard modems, and my iMac DV is old.

On Hoary, this is what I did to install the app:

DVD Setup for GNU-Linux

The following script installs css on ppc:

Debian PUB_KEY Problems

Jan 8-06
Having problems updating because you’re missing authentication keys on Debian? I “cracked my head” over this because I couldn’t find unbroken clear step by step instructions on the net, or even on the mailing lists. Read the following account on how I encountered this problem and solved it, or just skip ahead to the solution.

Burn Bootable CD

This guide applies to the OS X port of X-CD-Roast (as well any ported to Gnu-Linux. Burning CDs with GNOME’s built in burning facility is easy (nautilus-cd-burner). (But it’s missing a few features with the release of Hoary, burning music being the most obvious.)

What prompted me to write this is that the Panther 10.3.9 Disk Utility still has problems making bootable CDs; It chokes with Ubuntu-PPC .isos. I sent off a bug report to Apple (as I’m sure I have on other occasions too) but I gather they’re too busy fighting off Tiger bugs at the moment, and are probably not interested in enabling their software to burn Gnu-Linux installer CDs. (UPDATE: Tiger was released seemingly months ago and Disk Utility still crashes.)

For those of you who don’t want to pay for Tiger only to get a fix that Apple should have fixed long ago in Panther, considering you expect to get fully operational utilities with OS X, you’ll benefit from X-CD-Roast. This is an intro into powerful software that is just as great as payware app, and it’ll decrease your dependency on proprietary apps and their pushers.

Although, I find it terse, and the manual confusing for burning bootables, it seems a fully fledged counter-point to Toast payware (last time I checked) or the Roxio’s “windoze” equivalent. Just ripping music and making back-ups seems more straight forward, so I’ll not touch that subject. This document concerns itself with burning bootable isos. Technically X-CD-Roast is alpha, but I have never had problems of any sort, nor have I read of any. It seems the developers have very high standards.

Hot Rodding Firefox & Other Mozilla Based Browsers

UPDATE: Some settings were again updated (on Aug. 21, 09). They turned out to be too conservative and changing them has proved to be fruitful.

ie.,
network.http.max-connections-per-server
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
network.http.max-connections

I also threw in network.http.request.max-start-delay and a “Further Fine Tuning Front-end Behaviour” section.

This is really my (updated, as in now organized!) personal check list and guide to fine tuning the Firefox, Flock, & Iceweasel browsers for speed and a pleasurable surfing experience. [It could still use some editing to make it
readable by the public, but that wasn't its purpose. It was meant as a personal check-list, and if others can make sense of it ... well that would be all good but secondary. By secondary I mean computer geeks. Non-computer geeks are on
their own.] If you’re looking for a hold-your-hand guide, read Serdar Yegulalp’s well written article titled Hacking Firefox: The secrets of about:config [1] [1] [1]¹¹¹.

Yes, now there’s an extension (somewhere) that does this sort of thing but I doubt it does it all. Plus, you lose control and, some might say, responsibility over your own “hacking” (ie., What if the installed extension doesn’t work? [and --worse-- you don't notice]). You would also miss out on the fun of hacking things on your own.

This list might be extensive –but you do not need to implement it all –depending on your needs and/or likes. I hope others find this helpful, as I have.

I’ve taken care to quote and give credit to sources.

Personal comments are done within “[]” brackets and are somewhat anecdotal.

So without further adieu, here is my compiled list of Firefox/IceWeasel/Flock tweaks.