Plantagenet Penguinista

I’m currently amidst solving problems with a PERL script designed to send PDF-containing emails as faxes. Apparently, the command it invokes uses pdftk (which is a C wrapper around a Java library named iText ) to translate each PDF into an image (or images) to send. Pre-processing the PDFs with figjam , another set of PERL scripts working through LaTeX, reduced the damage in that the PDFs are correctly oriented so that pdftk only elides a little over a cm about 1 / 3 of the way along each page. Up to that point, most of the page would be blank. The simplest way to send flawless PDFs seems to be disassembling the email into PDF components, then butcheing the PERL script to use ImageMagick’s convert command to turn each PDF into a set of TIFFs, then send those unaltered through HylaFax’s sendfax module (HylaFax is a set of C++ modules). I really appreciate the “software Lego™”approach of Unix (in this case Linux), in that all of the pieces are included, so replacing one chunk

Despite being a member of a group which reckons that the ideal situation is to own nothing yet to control everything , the financial adviser to a certain member of royalty is the second-wealthiest individual in the world. Their personal nett worth is four hundred trillion (4E14) dollars. If you spent that all on brass pins (as used in pin-up boards) at one pin for a dollar, the mass of your collection would roughly equal 2½ million of RMS Queen Mary 2, the world’s largest ocean liner. You wouldn’t deposit that in a bank, you would buy several countries with it (banks included). You (or I) cannot even comprehend that large a number, let alone how much money it represents, let alone spend it (if an average Australian citizen spent $150,000.00 every second , 24x7, from the instant they were born, they would not be able to spend it all in their lifetime). Inequality? Just a little... yet getting angry about it would be the very last thing you would do, as that would make you