Martello

I’ve had reason to capture rather a lot of screen shots in recent weeks and find the following Mac keyboard shortcuts very useful:

There are lots of other variations on the above, which are described nicely  here.

This one’s been bugging me for several weeks so finally got around to finding a proper solution. Basically, if someone sends you a PDF file with some photos in it, the chances are they didn’t think of reducing the picture quality (in the original document) before creating the PDF. As a result, the PDF file can end up being enormous, for no obvious reason to the reader.

While I managed to find out how to tackle the problem from inside the likes of Microsoft Word (better options in Office 2011), I am often without the original document, so what to do there (on a Mac)?

Well, as it happens, Mac Preview does have a way of doing this which I found out about here, and while it worked well for me (PDF files were mostly text with 2-3 pictures anyway), I have seen comments on the above article questioning the quality of the resulting file. Still, it may work for you too.

If you’re around the Waterford area on Wednesday, 14 December 2011, why not come along to the annual Food & Wine Tasting Evening at the Grand Hotel and sample a wide variety of beers, wine and local food – all for just €8.

This is a fundraiser in aid of two local schools (Gaelscoil Philib Barún and Holy Cross National School) and is sponsored by Hickson’s Centra, Tramore.

Remember: Grand Hotel, Tramore – Wednesday, 14 December 2011 – 7:30pm – 10pm – €8 per person

Hope to see you there.

My first job in the IT sector was as Technical Support Engineer at Eurologic Systems, an Irish-owned data storage company, back in 1992. I can still recall working with a SEAGATE ST512N (a 5.25″ hard disk with a whopping 12MB capacity) and later on taking delivery of our very first 3.5″ 1GB hard disk (the now famous SEAGATE Barracuda).

However, I also recall some of the former Mentec/DEC guys lamenting about how they used to clean some 300MB DEC drives (one platter at a time) that took up most of the room (way before my time of course).

And so earlier this week, almost 20 years later, I read with interest about Oracle and Sun’s new third-generation storage appliance (based on their 128-bit ZFS file system) which once again takes the form of a huge cabinet-like disk drive that looks like it would easily take up an entire room (ok, the rooms are much bigger now too but you get the point).

Of course the 20-year time gap isn’t the only difference as the new Sun ZFS Storage 7420 Appliance boasts a staggering raw capacity of 1.15PB (that’s 1,234,799,616 MB) along with a host of other equally impressive numbers.

This enormous growth in storage capacity easily trumps Moore’s Law (CPU capacity doubles every 18 months) and is more like a three-fold increase every 12 months. Nice ….. very nice!

FeedHenry is hiring again, with 5 open positions still available.

The type of stuff we’re into includes Cloud Computing, AWS, Node.js, Java, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Chef, and all sorts of scripting languages and other exciting stuff.

Have a look at our Careers page for more details and why not drop us a copy of your CV.