Computing

Sadly, everyone's favorite search engine and web application provider, Google, has decided to discontinue development of its Notebook utility. I discovered this when I finally decided to upgrade my Inspiron from Ubuntu's Jaunty Jackalope to Karmic Koala 1, and found that no Notebook extension exists for Firefox 3.5. While the developers at Google don't offer any explanation as to why they decided to discontinue development, the advice they offer seems to suggest that they consider much of its functionality redundant with other services that they offer. Once I learned that Notebook would be retired, I began researching the alternatives discussed below.

1. 1. Despite my faith in the Ubuntu development team, the issues I encountered when going from Hardy to Intrepid have turned me into something of a late adopter when it comes to the latest releases. Much of this hesitation stems from the knowledge that my computer has reached the technological equivalent to middle age.

I run a Drupal and a WordPress site off of a single remote server hosted by Site5. To simplify the process of decompressing and installing modules (Drupal), plugins (WordPress) and themes (both), I wrote a simple bash script using the getopts utility to allow me to decompress and send packages in one line. I am excited about this utility because it marks the first time I've successfully used getopts.

I wrote this script a while ago to simplify the conversion process when working with LaTeX documents. It's a very simple script (the actual conversion only uses four lines) that uses the pdflatex package and various LaTeX commands. It could also be incorporated into a "for" loop for batch operation, if the last line, which opens a PDF viewer and calls the pdf document, is commented out.

Update (23 October, 2007): A colleague, Jonah, has pointed me to a C program that accomplishes this much more efficiently than the below script. The source code and binaries of flip for different platforms are available at http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/~craig/utility/flip/.