Friday miscellany

Here's a Friday collection of sighted/cited pieces of interest:
Users running Microsoft Office can stump nearly three-fourths of all known attacks targeting the suite by applying just one three-year-old patch, according to recently published data. Almost three-out-of four attacks -- 71% of all those spotted in the first half of 2009 -- exploited a vulnerability in Word that was patched in June 2006, Microsoft said in its bi-annual security intelligence report, released Monday. The flaw was fixed in the MS06-027 security update issued. (~ PC World)
Here is very brief tutorial showing you how to set Firefox to open your bookmarks in a new tab, rather than taking over the existing one. (~ Simple Help)
"With hundreds of daily updates from friends on Facebook and Twitter, do people actually feel closer to each other? It turns out the average American is more socially isolated today than 20 years ago, as measured by the number of self-reported confidants in a person’s life. Yet contrary to popular opinion, usage of cellphones and the Internet is not to blame, according to a new study." Well yes, except that the study also shows that people who use social networks such as Facebook or Linkedin are 30 percent less likely to know their neighbors. (~ New York Times)
If you turn to your MP3 collection when you're stressed out, you're not alone. The American Psychological Association found that a majority of people polled for the last two years running claim music as their number one stress reliever. (~ Lifehacker)

Renewing the news

On Wednesday, I linked to an article by Clay Shirky about the crisis in the news industry. This piece from Naomi Wolf also looks at what's happening, and suggests where news may come out in the near future.

There is no way to disguise the reality: newspaper readers, in the West at least, are getting older; younger readers prefer to get their information online, where readers spend far less time actually reading news than print readers do; and, most agonizingly of all for the industry, people who were willing to pay for newspapers are unwilling to pay for the same content on a screen.
But does this mean the death of news, or its evolution? I think we are witnessing something new being born.

A time of epochal shift

We are living in a time of epochal shift. It's hard to believe that the internet as an essential everyday part of life for almost everybody has effectively only been around for little more than 10 years. I began working life as a cadet journalist on a small-town newspaper (The Marlborough Express, in Blenheim). Journalist courses of any kind did not exist in NZ in those days. Since then I have seen whole industries associated with printing come and go - including hot type, print bureaux and prepress film stripping. In fact, the newspaper industry as a whole as we know it is in serious straits, and could conceivably vanish over the next 20 years. Clay Shirky has written a very thoughtful piece on the underlying reasons, and what might (not) replace it. This could be essential reading in helping to understand the process of technological shift that leads to societal shift.

Creating PDF forms

I've just learned a (relatively) simple way to create a PDF form that can be emailed for others to fill out electronically and return by email. I've been wanting to be able to do this for ages, but was stumped because I thought it required expensive software. (While you can create fillable forms in Word and Excel, the process is clumsy and daunting. It also allows for little design capability, you have to choose "safe" fonts the recipient is guaranteed to have on their computer, and of course the recipient also needs Word and/or Excel installed on their machine.) You can certainly do it with Adobe Acrobat, which is very expensive, but the great discovery that it is easy to do with the public domain program Scribus, a page layout program that comes close to emulating market leaders such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress. What is surprising is that to my knowledge, neither InDesign nor QuarkXpress can do this. Another case where open source software is actually better than a commercial program. By using Scribus, you are not limited in design, so you can let your creativity rip. Click here to see a simple video tutorial on using Scribus to create a fillable PDF form.

Creating smaller PDF files

Among the many advantages of PDF files are that you can open them on any computer and they look just the way they were created - you don't need the original software which created the document, nor the fonts - and generally the file size of the PDF is smaller than the original. But not always. Sometimes, they come out bigger, which can be a frustration. This usually occurs because the document contains multiple images. Here are several tips to get the PDF file size down:
1. Images are often imported into the original larger than needed, and then scaled down. Unfortunately, all the original image information is still retained. So use an image editing program to resize the graphic before importing. Also consider reducing the resolution of the graphic. Any resolution greater than 225 dpi is unnecessarily high, and if the document is only going to be seen on a computer (ie, it won't be printed), then a resolution as low as 72 dpi is probably adequate.
2. Images are often also cropped when they are imported into the document. Crop before importing and you will save a lot.
3. When you export or save the file as a PDF, check the compression. For many purposes, medium or even low compression values will be adequate, making a huge difference in file size.
4. Another way to reduce file sizes is to do a "Save As" of the original document before making the PDF. This purges unneeded information which otherwise keeps getting added to the document but is not deleted. (For instance, all those changes you make while editing the document are actually held in the file, unseen but clogging up the document.)
5. If you're making a PDF for the Web and/or if you're not concerned about printing colors, use the RGB color space. RGB has one less data channel than CMYK, so your files will be that much smaller.
6. Embedded fonts also take up space, so keep the number of fonts to a minimum.
All that being said, you may be saddled with a PDF made by someone else (as happened to me this week), and you want to reduce the file size. There are numerous programs that can edit PDF files, the best-known being Adobe Acrobat. But that's very expensive. PDFill PDF Editor comes out a lot cheaper, but it's still commercial software. Fortunately, from the same stable comes a tool that did the job for me nicely. PDFill Writer is a free print driver that has a lot of options when saving the file. Once it was installed, I opened the over-sized PDF file, hit the Print button, and chose PDFill Writer as the print driver. It gave me a lot of options for recompressing the graphics, and voila! a 25% saving in size. Another free tool at the site is PDFill Tools, which allows you to do interesting things like split PDF documents, and merge several PDF files.

Saving websites

I frequently save websites I come across for reference purposes. Fortunately, there are several ways to do this, depending on your needs. If you need only the text from a site, in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, you can choose File/Save (Page) As, and the option "Web page, html only". Both browsers also have the option to save the whole page, including graphics, as a web archive. In Firefox, choose File/Save Page As/Web archive MHTML, and in IE choose File/Save As/Web archive, single file (*.mht). Additionally, you can save the whole web page, and this downloads all the graphics and other elements such as Cascading Style Sheets to a separate folder. Choose Save As/Web page complete in both browsers.
Yet a further option is to download an entire site. You could be setting yourself up for a VERY big download, depending on the site, but if you really want to go into the depths of a site it will yield a lot of useful data. To do it, you will need a separate piece of software, for instance HTTrack, a free program that will save all the pages within a domain, including images, while maintaining the link structure. It does not save the pages from external links like those in advertising. Guess if I were an industrial spy, a tool like this would be a must-have in my armoury...

Call centre frustration

You're probably getting to be a rare person if you've never had to deal with a supposed "customer service" (note the irony of the quotes) representative in a call centre located a million miles and a cultural galaxy away from you. Some of the most frustrating hours of my life have been spent trying to find someone who actually spoke a modicum of English and who understood my problem. So I identified with David Armstrong in his account of trying to get an online computer supplier to sort out his order. This is an instructive tale of woe. But I can't understand why a computer expert (Armstrong was formerly the computer editor at The Press in Christchurch) would bother to buy online, when he could have got as good a deal by shopping around local suppliers, with on-hand customer support. My experience of shopping around locally has been excellent (admittedly it helps that I speak a bit of Chinese, but it's not the deciding factor).