Paris - day 1

The last weekend we've been in Paris, so here are some pictures and experiences :)

We were flying 6:30 in the morning, so we had to woke up really soon. The flight was fast and calm. At Orly we have lost a lot of time finding out how to get to the hotel in Montmartre in the fastest way and first of all the cheapest, but nothing less then 19,20 Eur for two by public transport.

The Gare du Nord station made us think again how to find metro 4. At Barbes station I was a bit scared, it did not look really friendly. After a few minutes with a map in my hands a man asked if he could help with the destination, and he helped :) The hotel personnel was helpful, they were great. After this we went to find Sacre Coeur as we knew it is very close.





Be careful with the black people trying to force you to buy some strings for too much money, don't give your hand :)

Next we looked for the square of painters, a small idyllic place, fortunately there were not too much tourists. The place is nice but the tourism and business kills the art feeling.



Next we went to see Moulin Rouge, to tell the truth, it's in the end of a redlight street and it's really nothing special. As it was still light and we wanted to see it in dark, we visited a cemetery at the corner.

Creating PDF for free from any program with printer support

This is a short manual how to replace any commercial and/or closed source PDF distilling product. What you need:

• Adobe Universal Postscript Driver
• PPD Printer Driver (get one from prev link or create one for yourself)
• Ghostscript

Why would you need that?
There were many reasons we decided to replace Adobe Distiller and Acrobat:

• Programmatic control of these programs!
• Incompatibility of different versions of Framemaker/Distiller/Acrobat!!!
• Adobe bugs!!!
  
• Price!
• Page size limits*
  
• Different page sizes in one document*
• Page inserting/removing bugs
• Language/Font problems*

How to print?
First, install the postscript driver (PPD). Change the PPD file for your needs, we changed limits for maximum paper size (maps). The printer should print into file. When printer is installed, you can print from any program with printing support, just choose this printer and the output will be saved as postscript (ps). Converting postscript to PDF is easy with Ghostscript:

gswin32c.exe -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

We suggest to set embedding of fonts into postscript/pdf as ghostscript fonts can be buggy.
The same process can be done very easily even programmatically, just use google/msdn how to set printer to use.

Vista refused to play my DVD movie

Probably the first DVD I bought is encrypted to prevent copying and Vista refuses to play it. Thank you copy protection, thank you Vista, hail to p2p! Stolen movies make no problem, but if you are fair, it makes problems.

Hate Vista and hate copy protection.

Only hope that Luc Besson's idea about movie distribution will come true.