Felx inscapist

Create PDF files from Markdown sources in OSX

When [Markdown][markdown] appeared more than 10 years ago, it aimed to make it easier to express ideas in an easy-to-write plain text format. It offers a simple syntax that takes the writer focus away from the formatting, thus giving her time to focus on the actual content.

The market abunds of editors to be used for help with markdown. After a few attempts, I settled to Sublime and its browser preview plugin, which work great for me and have a small memory footprint to accomplish that. To pass the results around to other people, less technical, a markdown file and a bunch of images is not the best approach, so converting it to a more robust format like PDF seems like a much better choice.

[Pandoc][pandoc] is the swiss-army knife of converting documents between various formats. While being able to deal with heavy-weight formats like docx and epub, we will need it for the more lightweight markdown. To be able to generate PDF files, we need LaTeX. On OSX, the s

Add inbound firewall rule for TCP 2222

Windows 10 has 2 new services, SSH Server Proxy and SSH Server Broker which will already be bound to port 22
Do not allow public connection on this rule, WSL is not proven safe

ConEmu

Add as cmd startup with bash.exe --login

Install the SSH server and some Rails essentials libraries in bash

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y

This can reduce files to ~15% of their size (2.3M to 345K, in one case) with no obvious degradation of quality.

ghostscript -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

Other options for PDFSETTINGS:

/screen selects low-resolution output similar to the Acrobat Distiller "Screen Optimized" setting.
/ebook selects medium-resolution output similar to the Acrobat Distiller "eBook" setting.
/printer selects output similar to the Acrobat Distiller "Print Optimized" setting.
/prepress selects output similar to Acrobat Distiller "Prepress Optimized" setting.

My efforts to port http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6kdp27TYZs to Clojure.

A boring function (6:22)

func boring(msg string) {
  for i := 0; ; i++ {
    fmt.Println(msg, i)
    time.Sleep(time.Second)
 }

Ubuntu 12.10 setup (rbenv/RVM, Janus, PostgreSQL)

Basic pre-requisites

Some utilities:

sudo apt-get install vim tmux git curl

Copy/paste from the command line:

	#!/bin/bash

	bucket=$1

	set -e

	echo "Removing all versions from $bucket"

	versions=`aws s3api list-object-versions --bucket $bucket \|jq '.Versions'`
	markers=`aws s3api list-object-versions --bucket $bucket \|jq '.DeleteMarkers'`

	#!/bin/bash

	## cf from http://programster.blogspot.com/2014/05/ubuntu-14-desktop-install-fira-sans-and.html

	cd /tmp

	# install unzip just in case the user doesn't already have it.
	if [[ `uname` = Linux ]]; then
	sudo apt-get install unzip -y
	wget "http://www.carrois.com/downloads/fira_4_1/FiraFonts4106.zip"

	#!/bin/sh

	##
	## Usage: ./ovpn-writer.sh SERVER CA_CERT CLIENT_CERT CLIENT_KEY SHARED_SECRET > client.ovpn
	##

	server=${1?"The server address is required"}
	cacert=${2?"The path to the ca certificate file is required"}
	client_cert=${3?"The path to the client certificate file is required"}
	client_key=${4?"The path to the client private key file is required"}

	/*
	This is an extension of the famo.us Surface type. It behaves the exact same except that the content
	property holds a ProxyConstructor object (the type that gets returned by any of the React component
	functions such as those in React.DOM or created by React.createClass) instead of a string or Node.
	One thing to note is that the component fed in to content will get an extra prop, _surface, which
	is the surface object that holds it

	example usage

	var TestComponent = React.createClass({

	;;
	;; NS CHEATSHEET
	;;
	;; * :require makes functions available with a namespace prefix.
	;;
	;; * :use makes functions available without a namespace prefix
	;; (i.e., refers functions to the current namespace).
	;;
	;; * :import refers Java classes to the current namespace.
	;;