Chris McCormick

A few weeks ago I made a little book of advice for my daughter in a what-if-i-die-in-a-plane-crash frenzy before taking an international flight. The content comes mostly from a blog post I wrote during the week after her birth. Here is the book on Archive.org if you are interested. It is Creative Commons licensed so go nuts. This is a technical blog post about getting the book ready for the JIT printing process.

I used several free software tools in the process:

• vim (gvim specifically) is my editor of choice.
• Inkscape - vector graphics, layout.
• Ghostscript - PDF formatting.
• PDFtk - PDF manipulation.

I used blurb.com to print the book.

The following makefile converts the source SVG files for each page and the cover into separate PDF files, then assembles them into a single document, and then transforms the document into the PDF-X3 format that blurb.com requires.

SVGS=$(shell ls pages/*.svg)
PDFS=$(SVGS:.svg=.pdf)
PDFS_BLANK=$(foreach pdf,$(PDFS),$(pdf) page-blank.pdf)

all: we-can-do-this-cover_x3.pdf pages_x3.pdf

%.pdf: %.svg
    inkscape --without-gui --file=$< --export-pdf=$@ #--export-text-to-path

pages.pdf: $(PDFS) page-blank.pdf
    pdftk $(PDFS_BLANK) cat output pages.pdf

%_x3.pdf: %.pdf
    gs -dPDFX -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOOUTERSAVE -dUseCIEColor -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK -sOutputFile=$(<:.pdf=_x3.pdf) -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress ./PDFX_def_wecandothis.ps $<

clean:
    rm -f pages/*.pdf
    rm -f *.pdf
    rm -f _x3.pdf

To get these programs issue sudo apt-get install inkscape make pdftk ghostscript on Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu. You can get the complete source files for the book on GitHub so that you can use this as a template to make your own book. The SVG images for the pages are in the pages subdirectory and the cover is we-can-do-this-cover.svg. The makefile builds a "Small Square" (7 × 7 in / 18 × 18 cm) book but you should be able to change the source SVG sizes to make a different sized book.

The font is my own handwriting. The original TTF is here.

Snug.

Deviator, the show I worked on with PVI Collective and friends, is playing in Sydney, Australia starting tomorrow night. Get in there, tickets sell fast!

These days I am using Bitbucket for the git repository hosting and task management on my commercial projects. One thing I often need to do is fetch a list of current tasks so that I can update a client with what is on our current agenda for them, get feedback about priorities etc. Here's a short Python script I hacked together to do that based on some other public domain scripts I found out there:

import base64
import cookielib
import urllib2
import json

class API:
    api_url = 'http://api.bitbucket.org/1.0/'

    def __init__(self, username, password, proxy=None):
        encodedstring = base64.encodestring("%s:%s" % (username, password))[:-1]
        self._auth = "Basic %s" % encodedstring
        self._opener = self._create_opener(proxy)

    def _create_opener(self, proxy=None):
        cj = cookielib.LWPCookieJar()
        cookie_handler = urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj)
        if proxy:
            proxy_handler = urllib2.ProxyHandler(proxy)
            opener = urllib2.build_opener(cookie_handler, proxy_handler)
        else:
            opener = urllib2.build_opener(cookie_handler)
        return opener

    def get_issues(self, username, repository, arguments):
        query_url = self.api_url + 'repositories/%s/%s/issues/' % (username, repository)
        if arguments:
            query_url += "?" + "&".join(["=".join(a) for a in arguments])
        try:
            req = urllib2.Request(query_url, None, {"Authorization": self._auth})
            handler = self._opener.open(req)
        except urllib2.HTTPError, e:
            print e.headers
            raise e
        return json.load(handler)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import sys
    if len(sys.argv) < 5:
        print "Usage: %s username password baseuser repository" % (sys.argv[0],)
    else:
        result = API(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2]).get_issues(sys.argv[3], sys.argv[4], (("status", "new"), ("status", "open"), ("limit", "50")))
        for p in result["issues"]:
            print " *%s %s" % (p.has_key("responsible") and "**" or "", p["title"])
            #print p["content"]
            print

Run it to get a usage message.

I secretly wish that bzr had won the distributed version control wars because of its superior user interface, but these days I am resigned to using git because pretty much everybody I have to inter-operate with is using it. It's not that bad.