The blog of Steve Root

  • IBM need help with statistics

    Look at this infographic

    The way I read this, before and after were the same.
    The way I read this, before and after were the same.

    So,”Stockholm convinced the skeptics to pay for a faster commute.”?

    I’m assuming that means pay for an IBM traffic management system as I’m not exactly sure what was being paid for.  I’m don’t I agree the skeptics were convinced though from reading their infographic. The two key bits of data to prove their point are: “Before: Over 50% say no.  After: Over 50% say yes”

    Now, I’m not a statistical genius, but I don’t imagine they’re doing too much rounding on these numbers.  If 60% said no, I’m sure they’d have told us. If 55% said no, I’m sure they’d have told us.  We don’t know how accurate their data is either, did they ask everyone or try for a representative survey?  They may be out by 10% anyway (let’s hope not).  To keep it clearly written,  let’s replace the word “Over” with “About”. Does that sound reasonable? Well it does to me so let’s do it.

    Now let’s put the ‘after’ into the same context as the ‘before’. As “Over 50% said yes”, that’s the equivalent of “Under 50% said no”, or replacing Over/Under with About, that’s the equivalent of “About 50% said no”  Let’s rewrite their phrase:

    Before: About 50% say no.  After: About 50% say no.

    At least, that’s how I read it, but maybe it’s me that needs the help with statistics.

  • Gandi said thanks 🙂

    gandi_tshirtWhat a lovely surprise! A T-shirt arrived in the post from the folks at Gandi.net

    Gandi are the company that provide all my domain names and server hosting for work and play, including the hardware behind this blog.  I’ve been using them since 2009 and they’ve always super.  If you need domain names or hosting, I can recommend them with confidence.

    They are always improving things and the side effect is small errors on the web site admin interface. Mostly, that means they’ve forgotten to translate a French word into English (eg, it displays Serveur instead of Server).  One of the recent improvements to their web site was to allow a table of information to show how much memory each of my servers was allocated, but it was showing the maximum amount that could be allocated.  A small error, but as always I sent an email with the details.  Not only did they fix it and say thanks, they sent me a Gandi T-shirt in the post.  Nice 🙂

    Speaking of Gandi, they are always improving things.  Today, I’ve just been switched to their new IaaS platform (Infrastructure as a Service).  The previous platform style was to have VPS (Virtual Private Server) shares.  So my one rackspace dedicated server back in 2009 became 8 Shares of their VPS platform (actually, the VPS had more power, but could be scaled up and down on demand).  Over time they’ve increased the power. Couple that with some software improvements to my web sites and yesterday I was running on 2 VPS shares (which I had set as two servers) with a little extra memory as an extra and a ‘SimpleHost’ instance. Hosting is a lot cheaper today then I when I first moved to Gandi.

    The new IaaS allows a more fine grained control of the resources allocated to my virtual servers. On the old platform if I needed more than one processor it would have to come with more disk space. Now I can just allocate more processors, or more memory, or more disk, all independently. The change also means they’ll be charging me less for the same resource as before.  So it’s still a virtual server, it just costs less.

    The other new feature is a ‘web accelerator’. I haven’t played with this yet, but I think it will work like a Varnish Cache in front of my servers so that pages can be delivered faster with no alteration to the servers themselves. That will also mean I can reduce the power of the server and save more money.

    This blog is hosted on the ‘SimpleHost’ platform they offer and has been since November last year. Essentially that’s a virtual server that they set up and control and has a lot of restrictions on what software will run on it, which version, and so on.  Its other restriction is that it can only process two simultaneous requests at a time (on the cheapest package that I have) but that really isn’t a problem. As the pages don’t change very often, the built in varnish cache has probably delivered the page your reading so the server never even got the request, and there’s no limit or delay in responses from the cache. Here’s a quick fact: In the last hour 73% of the requests that reached the server were robots or spammers trying to post. Even then, there are nowhere near enough of these to block both processes to real users.  I have other web sites on the simplehost server as well as this blog (just like you would a virtual server) and for the simple sites simplehost is great.

     

  • Extracting images from PDF (free, using command line)

    This is a day when I love computers. I have a multipage PDF and I need to extract the images from it.

    Option 1: Open the PDF on screen, capture each section, save each file.
    No thanks, that’ll take far too long and lose quality (which already isn’t too great)

    Option 2: Open the PDF using Adobe Illustrator. select each image, copy/crop/save as, etc.
    No thanks, almost as bad as option 1

    Option 3: Google for an answer to “Extract images from PDF”. Discover all the top results are for paid applications.
    No thanks. I don’t mind paying for applications but this is a (probably) one off job and I feel sure someone would have written a script to extract all the images from a PDF.

    Option 4: Try PDFtk, a PDF toolkit that takes instructions by command line.
    Almost there. It can do all sorts of things to PDFs, but extract the image objects appears not to be one of them.

    Option 5: Re-discover The Unarchiver
    I    t works! It really was so simple. The Unarchiver views PDF files as if they were a compressed file. Select the PDF, tell it to extract all.  Voila! 652 tiff images from 44 pages of PDF.  20 minutes to find the solution. Maybe 2 seconds for unarchiver to run (oh, and I already had it on my Mac, probably from having to extract a less common file archive format).

    One last note. It maybe that ghostscript could also do this task, that would have been my option 6…

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