Arkadian.eu

This is a post that I will edit from time to time, adding more links as I find them.

1. This company has free and commercial icons: dryicons.com. I like the iconika icons (available in red, blue, green, grey – here is a sample in blue: http://dryicons.com/icon/iconika-blue-icons). One thing I really appreciated from this site, is that you get the option to download the icons at the size you need. This saved me a lot of time messing around with image resizing…

2. Fotolia.com is a good site (the only site I have personally paid so far to buy photos and vectors). Not as cheap as it used to be, but still good value, considering the amount of material that’s posted there.

3. Vector Stock sells vectors from various creators: www.vectorstock.com
I like the concept of the hand-drawn icons from this artist: Azzzya. This is a great place to pick up nice designs for presentation backgrounds and office reports.

4. Another interesting site is Wikimedia. You can use whatever you need, but you may have to search a lot to find something you need/like. Definitely worth looking into, if you have the time.

From your command line type

tasklist

to see all the tasks that are running.

If you want to kill the instance of notepad++ which happened to crash (…), type:

Taskkill /IM notepad++.exe /F

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import ImageGrab
img = ImageGrab.grab()
img.save('arkadian.png','PNG')

A quick and easy way to take a snapshot of your current window.
You can always use JPG, but the quality is better in PNG.

Works in Windows and requires PIL.

Here is a very simple python script that marges two pdf files, using the pyPDF library.

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import os.path
import pyPdf
 
pdfOne = "C:\\a.pdf"
pdfTwo = "C:\\b.pdf"
 
merged = "C:\\c.pdf"
 
if os.path.exists(pdfOne) and os.path.exists(pdfTwo): 
 
	output = pyPdf.PdfFileWriter()
 
	pdfOne = pyPdf.PdfFileReader(open(pdfOne, "rb"))
	for page in range(pdfOne.getNumPages()):
		output.addPage(pdfOne.getPage(page))
 
	pdfTwo = pyPdf.PdfFileReader(open(pdfTwo, "rb"))
	for page in range(pdfTwo.getNumPages()):
		output.addPage(pdfTwo.getPage(page))
 
	outputStream = open(merged, "wb")
	output.write(outputStream)
	outputStream.close()

Niklas Roy has put together a fun project that combines Processing, AVR and a camera.

http://www.niklasroy.com/project/88/my-little-piece-of-privacy

Definitely worth watching! An amazing piece of work!

With the arrival of the iPads, we’ve been changing many of our processes in order to put information on the fingertips of our senior mgmt team. Our key app right now is Dropbox and we convert most of the files to pdf.

Dropbox is a great little tool, as it enables us to update files on the fly. As it stands right now though, it is not suitable for wide corporate use for 3 reasons.

The first reason is that it doesn’t have a central admin point. For example, I can share folders with my contacts, and my contacts can share folders with others. Ideally, you need a service where access management is controlled centrally. If an employee leaves, we don’t want him/her to be able to access confidential data.

The second reason is that you cannot save the dropbox folder on the company network. To bypass the access mgmt control issue, my original plan was to set up a pc with dropbox and save the dropbox folder in one of our network drives. That would allow our colleagues to save files directly in specific folders (within the dropbox folder, saved in our network). This problem was solved by writing a simple sync script in python that synchronises various folders and files from our network with the dropbox folder which is located on a single machine. This solution turned up to be a better solution in the end as I managed to pick up a lot of files from their original network locations and sync them with the local dropbox folder, meaning that most of my colleagues kept saving their files as normal and minutes later these files would appear on the various ipads. A simple python script allowed us to avoid installing dropbox on every pc and creating an administrative nightmare for ourselves!

The third reason is that, due to the way dropbox saves files in a remote cloud, we don’t quite control our files. This can be addressed with a corporate company-owned dropbox server.

By having a single pc with drobox installed and a python script that syncs the files every couple of minutes, we created a practical configuration that allows our senior mgmt team to access the files they need on their ipads, without having to install dropbox on various machines, create accounts, share folders and create an admin nightmare for ourselves.