Archive for the 'Tech Tips' Category

Tagged PDF

Saturday, June 16th, 2007

Alfresco uses Open Office to convert documents to PDF but by default it doesn’t generate tagged PDF. This note describes how to configure Alfresco so that it does produce tagged PDF.
So what is a tagged PDF? Well, it’s a PDF that contains structural information about the content, e.g reading order, the presence of tables etc. […]

Converting to PDF with Alfresco

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Brief note that explains how to set-up Alfreso to transform various document formats to PDF. I am writing this because I didn’t find it particularly easy to track down how to do it; it involves a lot of digging around in the wiki. Hopefully, this note will make it easier to set-up.
By default Alfresco will […]

Emacs on Ubuntu

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

TRAMP is supposed to come installed with Emacs as default from version 21.4.x onwards - well, something like that. Having installed Emacs on Ubuntu using apt-get I couldn’t for the life of me figure why TRAMP wasn’t working! When I tried to open a remote file it kept trying to use FTP and always complained […]

Wrist problems

Monday, October 9th, 2006

For the last month or so I have been having real problems with pain in my wrists and forearms. I have had days where I have had to stop typing because it has just been too painful. I have had this problem before but usually it disappears after a few days. It’s strange because I […]

Recording network traffic

Monday, July 24th, 2006

I am writing this primarily as a reminder for myself but maybe it will be of use to you too if you ever need to see what data is being sent/received from your computer to a remote server; I keep writing the incantation down in my trusty notebook but for some reason I never seem […]

How to log SQL queries (again)

Sunday, June 25th, 2006

Same task as before, different database. I have been doing some development over the last few days with Rails and MySQL. To cut a long story short I wanted to have a look at what queries were being sent to the database. This post describes one way of turning on logging for MySQL. I did […]

Being news reader friendly

Wednesday, May 24th, 2006

Andrew Grumet makes an interesting point about using CSS in blog posts. I often find myself make style declarations inline when I want to position images etc in my blog posts. I like his idea.
On a related theme, I often see broken images when viewing RSS feeds in news readers — once upon a time […]

Preventing email spoofing

Thursday, January 19th, 2006

What’s the best way of determining if an email address has been spoofed?
Here’s a solution I came up with: use the IP address of the originating server the mail came from and do a reverse DNS lookup to get the domain name. Compare the domain name from the lookup with the domain the email […]

Full screen mode for Safari

Friday, January 13th, 2006

Here’s a useful tip for making Safari take up the whole of the screen. I found it in a comment somebody had posted on this article about Saft, a plugin that adds a lot of funky features to Safari.
Add the following Javascript in the URL field at the top of the browser and then bookmark […]

Logging SQL queries

Tuesday, December 20th, 2005

A note to myself about how to log SQL queries when using PostgreSQL. In postgresql.conf set the following parameters:
log_statement = true
syslog = 2
syslog_facility = ‘LOCAL0′
syslog_ident = ‘postgres’

The database will need to be restarted in order for the changes to have any effect. To view the SQL queries that are being executed, log in as root […]