Another HTML to PDF conversion tool, this one is written in Python and is licensed under the QT license.

Ryan raves about a new HTML/XML + CSS and SVG to PDF tool from YesLogic. While it’s not cheap, it produces beautiful output compared to the Free tools I’ve used, and is free for non-commercial use. There’s even a Google techtalk about PrinceXML.

Restructured Text to anything, an attractive online tool to convert reStructuredText to PDF and HTML.

Ruport is a Ruby reporting library that can hook into ActiveRecord, CSV, or SQL/DBI. It has a simple formatting language, can produce PDFs and graphs, and even does some code generation to make things easy.

Some slides on Flickr’s architecture. It’s all sensible stuff, with very little magic: Php4, Mysql (innodb), ImageMagick, Perl, Java (for nodes), RHEL, and so on.

A very strange repository of PDF paper templates. Includes graph papers, calendars, story boards, and sodoku boards.

A rant about the newest version of Adobe Acrobat, including hundreds of comments from angry Acrobat users. Acrobat 7 weighs in at 20.3Mb for Windows (43Mb for Linux), just to read PDFs. To contrast, one of the leading Linux PDF readers, Evince, is more than 100 times smaller at 190K for the entire package. Similar, leaner Windows readers are available too: the Foxit Reader, the Brava reader, and Ghostscript for Win32.

A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data PDF (local cache) describes Google’s gargantuan distributed storage system. One of the most amazing aspects of the system’s develompent was the scale that they tested it at:

The tablet servers were configured to use 1 GB of memory and to write to a GFS cell consisting of 1786 machines with two 400 GB IDE hard drives each.

I regularly hear developers complain about how difficult it is to set up realistic tests. I think those developers are just lazy, unskilled, or working for the wrong company.

Please don’t send me Microsoft Word documents, a good summary of how most of us feel about word-processor documents attached to emails. Text, HTML, or PDF only.

A free PDF about XCode and ObjectiveC, Become An Xcoder.