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Often when printing out PDF books, I find that there are often graphics in the margin which would go through ink cartridges very quickly.

If you are using Mac OS X, you can just use the select tool - command-3 - and then choose to crop. Crop is command-K.

Nasty black/red border gone. If the PDF is encrypted you won't be able to save it, but you will be able to print it once on your printer. Buckets of ink saved.

This little hint is important to me as I almost never read long works on the computer screen anymore. I print them out to be read offline and where I can easily make notes on the pages.

There are probably similar techniques which would work with Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader.

The next thing I do is set up my printer to print fast (which uses less ink and is much faster) and to put two vertical pages side by side on a single A4 or 8 1/2 x 11 page. This saves time, ink, paper and storage space. Most ebooks and reports use large enough type that one ends up with material which looks more like a book and is easier to read.

Finally the elephant in the room, that people are reluctant to talk about is the calibre of candidates by age group. Eighty per cent of the employees at IBM Slovakia are under 25. Similar numbers apply to Dell (I was at their autumn party at the Design Factory in Bratislava and saw the phenomenon with my own eyes). I don't have the Siemens numbers.

In my own recruitment project, I had a mixed group of resumés for what ended up being two positions. CV's for the most part came with date of birth. The best candidates were almost invariably younger. I had no bias against hiring someone a little older.

My inclination for a more mature candidate went against the recommendation of my recruitment manager. He recommended hiring young and training up. But I was specifically seeking someone around 30 with good experience who would be ready to work. I'd rather not lose my time in training and we could afford to pay well for someone who can do the work properly straight away.

Amazingly enough the older candidates for the most part were unexceptional. The work they had done in the past was not great. Their salary demands were excessive in line with their talents. They had a bunch of skills next to useless to Foliovision (.net, ASP, Flash, java: what we needed was CSS, PHP, Rails if you're interested).

Their demonstration sites for the most part were atrocious flash catastrophes. In the best case some horrible CMS with some very basic graphics slapped on top of its out of the box layout.

One older candidate (thirty-four) who I interviewed turned out to be a catastrophe with made up stories of employment and perennial conflicts with his boss. A slightly older candidate (just over thirty) whom we took on a short trial didn't turn out well either: competent but very inflexible in her way of doing things with no inclination to learn new things.

In the social scene, I've noticed similar traits as well in the different age groups. The people who are inclined to work hard and learn here are the young. These findings are only in Bratislava. I haven't been to East or South Slovakia yet.

So despite my best intentions of hiring older and more experienced workers, I had to follow George's advice and take on younger individuals. For instance, our new junior programmer is just twenty-one. While he is somewhat less reliable than an older person (he sometimes forgets appointments both in and out of work), he does some very good work and learns very quickly.

Today when out on a beautiful autumn afternoon walk near the castle in Bratislava, I ran into someone else working in the IT sector.

We fell to speaking about international companies coming into Bratislava in the IT sector. IBM has moved 1800 jobs to Slovakia in fulfillment and logistics.

Apparently, IBM employees are free to use IM (instant messenger) as well as personal email during work hours. They are judged on performance. Over at AT&T Slovakia, the network administrators band IM clients full stop period, while using personal email is a punishable offense.

Siemens in Slovakia has something like 7000 employees doing varied things, but also including a customer service section.

IBM pay starts around 30,000 Sk/month (about 810 euros). Siemens pay starts around 18,000 (about 480 euros).

I have a pretty idea of which company is going to get the better talent. I have a pretty idea of which company will provide better service.

Curiously enough my acquaintance at IBM is a graduate of the top commerce university in Slovakia, with a year of study in an international business school in Western Europe.

My acquaintance at Siemens is a trained teacher, with a degree in Geology.

I respect and admire teachers but one has to believe that IBM has set the bar higher here.

This was very useful knowledge. At my company, we want to attract personnel as good or better as those going to work in the major international companies. To do that, we have to provide a congenial work environment. We also have to provide better opportunities and better salaries. From what I can see, we are on track to do so.

But with IBM hiring thousands at a time, the battle for talent will be fierce. We are not really competing for the same personnel as Siemens, so they are less of a factor.

We also talked about motivation for bringing the jobs to Slovakia and Bratislava. The savings in salary for the international company in comparison to personnel costs in Vienna. I imagine people of the same caliber as the IBM crowd would cost about 2000 to 2500 euros per month. The big savings is as much on the social charges as on the salary. The employer in Slovakia will pay about 400 euros in social charges on the Slovakian salary. The employer in Austria will pay 2000 euros in social charges on the Austrian salary.

End cost to IBM of high calibre junior personnel in Slovakia = 1200 euros/month End cost to IBM of high calibre junior personnel in Austria = 4000 euros/month

There's some good advice on styling images in Wordpress over on Pearson's Cutline Theme*.

I’m glad you asked! Cutline has been constructed so that images that do not have classes applied to them will still be styled. In fact, they’ll receive the same styling as any image that receives the right class, meaning that the image will be right-aligned with a frame. Oh, and text will wrap around the image, just like it does here. See? You don’t even have to go out of your way to be fancy with Cutline, and that’s how we like it.
Update: As of September 28th, 2006, Cutline has been revised so that unstyled images no longer receive default styling. This is a move that I hated to make on many fronts, but I also realize that it’s just really inconvenient to have every image styled by default.

It's not that tough to add a class to an image tag however. I much prefer my system built on wrapping the image in an h5 tag, and styling the h5. Here's an example.

Anne

Why? This way you can add centred captions to your image.

Syntax is h5 > a href > img > close a href > br > text > close h5.

CSS for the above is:

div.entry h5 {font-size: 10px; font-weight: normal;
margin: 0; padding: 0; margin-left: 4px; text-align: center; clear: both;}

h5 img {}

div.entry h5 a, div.entry h5 a:visited, div.entry h5 a:hover
{text-decoration: none; color: black;}

Highly recommended.

*Unlike most people, I actually really dislike this theme and find it quite primitive. I suppose that makes it a better starting point for somebody wishing to build something more sophisticated.

If you've ever tried to save music videos from your browser onto your hard drive, you've run into then name Akamai. Usually the final video, once you've removed all the frames and html and everything surrounding it, is hosted from an Akamai address with a bunch of numbers as the URL.

It turns out Akamai is a very old compamy, originally founded in 1995.

Like other Net infrastructure plays, Akamai got swept up in dot-com fever. Following its 1999 IPO, the stock price soared from $26 in late October to $345 on New Year's Eve. But when the Internet bubble burst, many of Akamai's customers went bust or just disappeared. Then Lewin was killed on September 11 on American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. In 2001, Akamai lost $2.4 billion; a year later, the share price bottomed at just 56¢.

Akamai stock has tripled over the past year to $43.

Lessons to be taken here:

• the value of persistence
• the foolishness of financial markets (i.e. the lemming effect)
• the value over time of good ideas
• the importance of load spreading for speed in web applications (i.e. almost all the big companies including Google, Apple and Microsoft are using Akamai - if there were an easier or cheaper way, they'd be using it)

Internet Boom - Bust - Boom Continues »

I've just lost lots of hours this week trying to rescue my boot firewire drive. It's a notebook sized 2.5" Drive in a sleek little aluminum Firewire 800 case from O'ToStore.

Apparently the drive has been failing for weeks and I just haven't been noticing. Alas SMART does not work on Firewire drives or I probably would have noticed right away.

The cause of the failure? Bad sectors.

I normally backup my boot drive every week or so, but let it slip for a few weeks this time.

When I got around to making the backup using SuperDuper! (free edition, full backup), my backup failed on an I/O error. An I/O error is the equivalent of a bad sector.

Now I was really in trouble. My backup boot disk was shot as well. Strangely enough the original still worked well enough running the OS as long as I wasn't trying to back it up.

Bad Sector - I/O Error in OS X while Backing Up Continues »

For a background on how this review came about and on some of the nuances of using these backup and file synchronisation utilities in stress testing, please see my post on Input/Output Errors in OS X during Back Up.

Backup and File Synchronisation Software for Apple OS X Major Players

SuperDuper! - super when it works. Gets best of breed in a highly technical review of these backup utilities (well worth reading). Priced right at $28. Quality demo (only SmartUpdate not available). Every reason to use and buy. Will not succeed against I/O errors however. Helpful and friendly support. No draconian license policy. Highly recommended.

Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) - Freeware. Extensive documentation. But seen better days as creator Mike Bombich was hired by Apple a couple of years ago and can't spend as much time on it as he used to. At its best with OS 10.2.

ASR (Apple System Restore) - Freeware. Perhaps this is what Mike Bombich has been up to while at Apple. A very good and robust solution that only seems to fail with I/O issues and that it creates only disk images rather than bootable volumes (except as a 2 step, image and then volume). Here are Apple's instructions for use:

For backup quality and speed, it's hard to beat Apple Software Restore (ASR). This is the program used to build software restore CDs on HFS+ volumes. To use ASR, make an image of your disk using Disk Utility (use Create Image From Directory, not Create Image From Device); this backup can then be restored onto other disks, or even the same disk. ASR can restore in place, or by reformatting a disk and copying files onto it. In many cases, the latter usage is much faster, but of course it does remove any existing files.

Synchronize! Pro X - $100 - can do folder synchronization, incremental backups and will not fail against bad sectors and I/O errors. Any drive reporting bad sectors and I/O errors should be retired from service anyway, not repaired. Original license policy very reasonable - personal license for personal comptuers. Ridiculous license policy implemented around version 3.4 driving many users from the product: license valid for a single computer. Subsequently modified to allow a full version on one computer (with scheduling) and occasional use from a secondary computer. Unfortunately developer is aggressive and snarky. On the telephone he asks questions like "Do you even know how to read?" If he would fix his attitude and his license policy, the product is utilitarian and excellent. Reading through the entire VersionTracker section, alas it seems unlikely that Qdea's Mr. Sontag will ever be a nice friendly man. To some people, this issue may be unimportant. There is also some risk with a one man operation in such a specialilsed sphere with a comparatively expensive product that Mr. Sontag may leave the software business (by inclination, by illness, by death). Or he wouldn't like your questions and decide to cut off support and rescind your license (I believe he's done that at least once). Of course for a single copy that is less of an issue but with a site license, I would be concerned.

InTech QuickBack. Part of a whole suite with a reasonable overall cost of $90. InTech Speed Utilities come in an non-upgradeable version with lots of hard drives (where I discovered it). I haven't successfully used the QuickBack part of the suite but based on MediaScanner and Quickbench performance, I have no reason to doubt that it is as effective as any other bootable backup utility apart from SuperDuper who have their own and superior engine.

LaCie SilverKeeper. Free. Not very attractive but very effective. Reasonably quick. Maintained regularly (current version 1.1.4 updated for 10.4). Highly recommended alternative low cost solution. It is a backup utility not a file sync utility unfortunately.

Unison. Free. Open source. A pain to setup. You need to create sets, you cannot just work on the fly. Very good tracking of changes though. A true industrial sync solution. Programmers and command line junkies should look no further.

Recommended arsenal for backup:

Backup and File Synchronisation Software for Apple OS X Continues »

Photo orientation is the way your photos look coming out of the camera - there are two alternatives Landscape (horizontal) and Portrait (vertical).

Landscape Orientation

Portrait Orientation

Many modern cameras digital include a sensor which tells the camera if it is in Portrait or Landscape mode. This includes most modern Canon and Nikon cameras, as well as those of other manufacturers but not including, notably for me, Pentax DSLR up to the *ist DS.

How does it work? The camera leaves a comment on the EXIF file for image software to rotate the camera the same way it was held at the time the picture was taken. Technically this is done with an orientation tag embedded into the picture.

Many image software applications handle these rotations automatically in their most recent versions. In principle, automated photo orientation based on EXIF tags should be a very good thing, saving the user time and trouble. In fact, EXIF based photo orientation is a mixed lot for the end user.

Image software packages handle EXIF orientation in various and complex ways. At a basic level, some software ignores the tag altogether. It's when the software acts on EXIF orientation things get complicated.

In Mac OS X 10.3.9, Apple's built-in image and PDF browser preview ignores this tag (Preview version 2.1). Apparently in Mac OS 10.4, Preview recognises the tag and performs the rotation automatically.

iView MediaPro recognises the orientation tag as well (version 3.1.1 and I believe has done so from version 2.6 and up). iPhoto does as well (from version 5 and up but somebody else will have to test this as I won't run iPhoto on my computer - a friend lost half of her European pictures to its vagaries).

When it comes time to opening your pictures in Photoshop or Elements, you're also covered. The image will show up correctly orientated. When you save a copy out of Photoshop it will stay that way.

All well and good.

But in the end, the automatic rotation won't save you when it's game time and its time to post your images...

As soon as you you try to upload your automatically oriented pictures, a rude surprise awaits. Your images are all sideways!

Auto Rotated Image Online - Oops

EXIF Photo Orientation and OS X Continues »

I had been using ecto and the ectoize bookmarklet for a long time to log useful info off the web.

What ectoize does is it copies any text you have selected on a webpage and copies it into a new entry along with the page title enclosed in an hyperlink to the original page. At that point, you can either just log the quotation or if you want to post about it, you can quickly write around the core of the entry. It automates creating a weblog entry and then handcopying the URL and the text and pasting them into the new entry.

One day I managed to disable ectoize in Firefox by pressing enter while the 'Remember this choice for all future instances' box was ticked.

I was unable to reenable the ectoize bookmarklet - once fully disabled, clicking on the bookmarklet does nothing. Nowhere in the Firefox preferences can you fix this. It's not listed under Application Helpers.

I have it working again now, but the solution is very hard to find. It's buried in a forum entry over in the Kula support forum which doesn't appear to be indexed by Google. So here is the solution where everybody can find it.

Trouble with ectoize bookmarklet and Firefox? Continues »

Among the Wikipedia community, who call themselves Wikipedians, Mr. Pulsifer is held up as the gold standard -- the international benchmark against which they measure themselves, said Wayne Saewyc, spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation.

I'm not paid for the work I do for Wikipedia. It doesn't matter to me that I do it on a voluntary basis. I enjoy it. It's important that people around the world have access to free, accurate and unbiased information. Wikipedia tries to do that, and it's a very honourable and admirable goal.