Atlas Shrugged is a 1957 novel by Ayn Rand that has had far more influence than its critics would like to admit. It is also a very long and quite abstract novel; some would wonder whether such a book can be made into a movie successfully. However, all I've seen indicates that they have in fact done so. I haven't seen the movie yet as it has not yet made an appearance in any of the small cities near me nor in Toronto, but there are several trailers on the movie site, and several people I respect have reviewed it favorably. And it is - in spite of no help from mainline Hollywood - selling well. If you are a fan of the original book, do not expect it to mesh exactly with your imagination's vision of the scenery, as it is set in our near future (2016, when the current rising oil price moves people back to railroads from less fuel-efficient vehicles), rather than in Rand's near-future post-1957. People in the movie have cell phones, drive modern-looking cars, and the John Galt Line train bears a remarkable resemblence to the modern Bombardier/Alstom Acela trains, rather than the FP-9 locomotive I imagined when I read the novel. But setting a movie in the present does not detract from its watchability. The first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, written in 1953, was released as a movie in 2006, vaguely set in our present despite the fact that its story arc lays the groundwork for Bond's character in all the "later" Bond films made from the 1960s to the present. You have to suspend some disbelief to watch any movie (with the possible, and I emphasize that word, exception of documentaries). Relax, watch and enjoy - then consider.

OpenOffice has this great bug that's been there since before 1.0 requesting this feature, but nothing's ever come of it, even after 3.3. And the community fork LibreOffice is still building (it takes many hours to compile, even on modern hardware). So I needed something in the interim.

My first try was to save the whole document as PDF, and use pdftk to split it.

pdftk 01_About.pdf burst

Did the split, creating 35 nice one-page PDF's so fast I had to check that they existed.
Then copy them over to the next workstation, only to find that the software there doesn't accept PDF's. PDFTK: Success; receiving software: FAIL!

Take II. GhostScript. After a couple of tries due to my own typing errors, this worked:

gs -sDEVICE=jpeg -r100x100 -sOutputFile=01/slides/slide%02d.jpg 01_About.pdf

Bingo! 35 JPEG files of about the right size. Veektory...

Lest anyone doubt Apple's committment to working with Oracle on the OpenJDK project, Apple just emailed me back on a bug that I filed against the Mac implementation of Java... way back... in... 2003?!? Yup. Apple BugID #3179542 has finally been closed, a just about eight years to the day after I filed it.

"Engineering believes that this issue has been resolved.  Java 7 for Mac OS X as provided by Oracle will offer the directory structure that you seek."

I'd actually moved on from OS X on my desktop many of those years ago, and had utterly forgotten sending this report, but it's good to see them finally taking Java seriously, or at least making an effort.

Happy {New,Gnu,Blue,Pneu} Year Everybody! As usual there may be less than 10 items.

1. Sheldon Richman's Why WikiLeaks Matters
2. Fred Branfman on WikiLeaks' Most Terrifying Revelation: Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us
3. CBS news on How WikiLeaks Enlightened Us in 2010
4. Martha Rosenberg with some interesting (but unsubstantiated) claims that US government agencies kill millions (literally) of blackbirds, 1000 times more than the 1000 that died in Arkansas
5. John McWhorter on Getting Darnell Off The Corners: Why America Should Ride The Anti-Drug Wave (alternate title: Why Legalizing Drugs—All Of Them—Is The Only Path To A New Black America)
6. Cambridge University refuses to bend over to the "house of cards" and censor a students research into pin-chip card insecurity. Professor Ross Anderson's response is a delight.
7. Eliezer Yudkowsky on Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate (where "our kinds" is defined as computer geeks, libertarians, rationalists, etc.)
8. Kyung Hee Kim on the precipitous decline of productivity among American schoolchildren
9. Bradford Schmidt on expected sub-$100 Android smartphones (no-contract price). Maybe this will be the death knell of smartphone subsidies; why lock into a 3-year contract at $60/month when you can buy the phone for $100 and get service at $10 or $20/month?

We've officially opened the site for Android developers to help build the world's best Android how-to site, If you've written any Android apps, please share what you've learned with your fellow developers, at androidcookbook.oreilly.com  Sorry for the long name; if you're typing it longhand use androidcookbook.net or androidcookbook.com, whichever  strikes your fancy.  If you haven't written anything for Android yet but you know Java, or are any kind of developer, head on over, read some recipes, and submit comments to improve or clarify them!