Today was one of those times that I needed to merge two PDF documents so I’ve looked around and found PDF-Shuffler which is a small python-gtk application, which helps you to merge or split PDF documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive GUI. It is a frontend for python-pyPdf.

You only need to import your PDF documents, the documents pages will appear on the main screen, then you are able to rearrange it’s order by dragging them with your mouse, or delete the ones you don’t need.

You can also watch the video below which is self-explanatory.

For a long time now I have been looking for something like this to help me to keep track on the blogs that I like to read often. Since I’ve got back on blogging I’ve found it to be the right moment to search for a similar tool.

Although I’m only using it for a couple of days, Liferea seems a nice piece of software, it’s incredibly simple, fast and it also has some nice features.

You should definitely give it a try.

Although I’m a big fan of Fedora I wasn’t very happy with the lack of speed while running a few applications, then I’ve decided to try a different Linux distribution.

The first one that I thought it would be a good alternative was Ubuntu, but after reading a couple of threads, I’ve finally decided to get Xubuntu.

Xubuntu is an official derivative of the Ubuntu operating system and it uses the Xfce desktop environment.

My laptop is running Xubuntu since last Friday and it’s very stable, one of the things that made me very happy, considering that I have an ATI Graphics Card (9200 series), was 3D support being enabled out of the box.

I’m also loving Xfce, I thought it would be minimalistic but it has great potential.

Another thing that I really appreciate is the speed of Synaptic while listing/installing new packages.

When I was using Fedora that was one of the turn offs because Pirut was slow and most of the times it didn’t allowed me to see the package installation process because it used to freeze all the time.

If you can’t waste much time in instalation processes and your system is getting old.. this is the right distribution for you!

The only tool that I knew that could do this kind of work (on Linux) was Dia. Although it has a lot of features it seems (I’m not sure, since I’ve only used it once) that there aren’t much sheets available to download, and I don’t like the ones provided by default.

Later I’ve decided to look for another program, and I’ve found Kivio an easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application integrated in The KOffice Project.

Kivio provides by default a couple of nice sheets, so let’s hope it works as expected.

Actually I’m not a games guy, but from time to time I like to play some classic games (they’re my favorites), and this one fits in this category, it is a very simple game with good story and good graphics.

At this time I finished the “Tutorial Island” (you’ll know what that is after you play the game) and unfortunately that is the end of the game.

Suddenly I got the feeling “Only this? No more levels? I want more…”, and I did a couple of searches and found some how to add new levels to the game.

Follow the steps below:

1. Download the “pingus level hacks” file.

$ wget http://blog.joaomorais.com/public/pingus.tar.gz

2. Uncompress it.

$ tar xvf pingus.tar.gz

3. Open it with your text editor.

$ gedit pingus

4. Replace PINGUS_DIR with your default Pingus levels folder.

5. Edit your Applications>Games menu and edit the game shortcut properties and change it’s path to the one you placed your file.

$ sh /path/to/your/pingus/file;

When you launch this file from your games menu, you will be given a directory listing of all the additional levels in your computer. You should select one to play it, or hit “Cancel” to start the game normally.

Note: This great tips were taken from ubuntuforums.org.

If anyone has some informations on it tell me something, it’s a Lifetech FlexCam 760MP.

In the meanwhile last Friday I went to Évora and turned my laptop off.

Yesterday I got back, turned my laptop on, and for my surprise Gnome was gone too.. maybe he decided to take the weekend off.

It seems that something got screwed up while I was trying to enable my webcam and I didn’t noticed it till then.

Yesterday I’ve downloaded it and burned it into a DVD. A couple of minutes ago I tried to install it with no success, since it kept giving me kernel panic when booting:

VFS: Cannot open root device “<NULL>” or unknown-block(253,0)
Please append a correct “root=” boot option.

Since I haven’t much time to spend on this at the moment, I decided to re-install Fedora 8. For my surprise it kept crashing on /sbin/loader while booting from DVD.

Am I lucky or what?

After reading a couple of posts at Fedora Forum I found a solution for this problem.

When booting, press:

<tab>

Then write:

linux acpi=off apm=off pci=noacpi

And that will solve the problem, it won’t hang up on /sbin/loader any more.

In conclusion… ain’t got Fedora 9 installed yet, but I will when I have time to spend on it.

One thing that made me change was the annoying “titles”. If you are listing your contacts by group it will slow down your client, this only happends in 0.97 version, in older versions I didn’t noticed this reaction.

About emesene I’m happy with it, it has the regular features that an MSN client should have and a couple of new ones. I can say that it is a Windows MSN clone without the crappy features.

It’s also written in Python, and that means it is portable.

The truth is that I already talked about this subject a couple of posts ago, when I wrote about “Pingus – A journey into the unknown…”, one of the games I found while searching for games developed with this great SDK.

ClanLib is the same library that me and my colleagues will use to develop our Multimedia Contents Production (MCP) project. I didn’t knew about this library until Filipe Vieira told me about it, he mentioned that we should bet on it for this project development, because it’s a very complete and clean library with lots of cool features.

ClanLib is a cross platform C++ library that offers a series of functionalities. It’s primary focus is on games, although not limited for that usage only.

Because I’m not very familiar with C++ I’ll have to start learning from scratch, but from what I’ve seen it has a lot of similarities with Java, since it is OOP too. So this will be another challenge, but hey.. who doesn’t like challenges?

At this time ClanLib is up and running at my laptop again.

You can take a look at the following tutorials:

C++ Language Tutorial very nice tutorials with lots of examples.
How to install ClanLib from svn! written by Tiago Santos.
How to use g++ g++ usage explanations.

If you are running Linux and don’t have Microsoft Windows installed, or you have it but you don’t want to switch to it just for testing your application in Internet Explorer.

Happily you can use IEs4Linux to test your application, currently supported versions are 5, 5.5, 6 and 7 (beta).

You may read the installation instructions here.

An alternative to this is, if you have Microsoft Windows installed, it’s partition mounted and wine installed you may run the Internet Explorer that you have installed there.