People born today age four times slower.

In other completely random news:

• School’s out for a week!
• Konvert2Ogg, the KDE project I’m working on, has a new mission statement and code and GUI design. I am especially satisfied with the way the singleton / object factory (as taught by Alexandrescu) has turned out. With the factory and the base classes in place, adding support for Oggenc took only a few minutes.
  
  Wait for version 0.2 sometime in the next few weeks.

Despre Identitate

Ca şi religia, identitatea de orice fel este unul dintre subiectele pe care le poţi discuta cu cineva ziua întreagă fără să ajungi la vreun compromis, pentru că orice “adevăr” depinde prea mult de context. Dacă eram albanez în Kosovo vroiam independenţă. Dacă eram sârb în Belgrad vroiam indivizibilitate.

Catch-22

Tonight

This
is my favorite time:
when the sun is down,
and the heat is gone,
and the night is young
and velvety.

Under the street lamps,
sharper are the shadows,
greener the leaves,
closer every sound.

Lights,
like blobs on an ancient film,
remind me
of what I forgot
when my age had a single digit.
Then,
all I had to do was
want
to move my hand,
and it would move.
What I want,
what I think,
I have.
I wish I could remember that.

Shadows
curl
at the edge of my vision.
They call to me,
but in full view
I find them still.
I wish I could relive that magic.

The green
is of a different kind
at night.
It’s alive
and hard
and raw.
Like I used to be
before I forgot who I was.
I wish I could remember that.

The city sleeps
and I can hear a leaf
turning to watch me —
an intruder on her silence.
I wish I hadn’t woken you up.

But the shadows are sharper,
and the green is greener,
and the sound is closer.
I am awake
in this collage
with layered colors,
clumsy lines
and muffled sounds.
And I have but shadows
and green
and sound
to show tonight to.

Rescaling a PDF File

I had a PDF file which I wanted to print with multiple pages per sheet. But the margins were so big that a lot of paper would have gone to waste.

I couldn’t just select the text, copy it and format it to my liking. The file is not scanned, so it’s still a mystery to me why the extracted text turns out garbled.

The solution I found was the pdfrescale script (via here). It uses some kind of latex magic to scale the entire PDF by whatever factor you want. All the needed dependencies should by installed by

sudo aptitude install pdftk pdfjam

If you know of an easier solution, I’d be interested to hear about it!