On June 18, 2009 · Comments Off
<Note: thanks to Buffy Miller for giving me a much slicker solution here>
Often I want to post a PDF on a web page, but would like the cover of the PDF to be the clickable element. This just makes things look slicker. This can easily be done with the imagemagick set of commands. Using imagemagick, you can select the page you want to convert out of the pdf (using the [] annotation), get the right size (using -resize) and format (based on file extension). The following command does the conversion in a single go:
convert -resize 150 inputfile.pdf[0] outputfile.png
One of these days I’ll get around to making a mediawiki extension that does that by default for pdf media attachments.
Via rc3.org I came across this blog post:
FAIL is over. Fail is dead.
Because it marks a lack of human empathy, and signifies an absence of
intellectual curiosity, it is an unacceptable response to creative
efforts in our culture. “Fail!” is the cry of someone who doesn’t
create, doesn’t ship, doesn’t launch, who doesn’t make things.
And because these people don’t make things, they don’t understand the
context of those who do. They can’t understand that nobody is more
self-critical or more aware of the shortcomings of a creation than the
person or people who made it.
I really like the take. It’s way easier to be a critic than a creator, and people have found a winning strategy on the internet to just hate things, loudly, and cleverly. It’s a pretty easy pattern to use to get fame, but at the end of the day it often just discourages new creation.
If you think something is a fail, look harder. Maybe it wasn’t ever trying to do what you thought. Maybe the things that make it interesting are values and capabilities you don’t understand or even knew existed. Maybe it has some real warts, but real gems as well. An open mind and the benefit of the doubt leads to much more interesting discovery of information.
