I wept

Google have released their chart API. Here’s a few alternatives for Python:

• Matplotlib
• ChartDirector
• jpgraph
• dislin

See also vtk and MayaVi

How to change the number of pages (NumPages) displayed in Word documents. Edit those field codes.

China has published pictures from its first moon orbiter.

Interesting talk by Bryan Cantrill on DTrace. At the beginning he rips into Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg. Scott’s talk at Google is here.

“Print file was not accepted (client-error-document-format-not-supported)!”

Google Apps is a marv thing. And free too. Since looping our email through Google we’ve been getting much less spam. But I’ve noticed the following quirks:

Here’s a page explaining how to make the sasl_passwd.db file used by Postfix when SMTP relaying mail.

We like to print invoices in a variety of currencies. There’s no setting in QuickBooks for this - it takes the system default… Well, most of the time. If you have your Region (International PreferencePane, System Preferences) set to one where the little yellow triangle shows up with the message about Unicode and WorldScript, the currency symbol is ignored. So, say I have China selected for no other reason than say I’m in China and billing in Yuan QuickBooks will use the $ (USD) symbol. I have to set the Region to ‘United States’ (not the Unicode one,…

I’m re-installing the latest in a line of sick iMacs after it has returned to us with new hard disk. I keep getting “perl crashed” messages appearing in the console when doing a software update and when trying to print with cups. The perl crash log tells us why: