Combining pdfs

I'm preparing a  presentation about the a PolyBoRi-driven research project.
While preparing such a presentation - like now - I often come at the point, where I have to combine "god-given" pdfs, i. e. without having the sources, into one file. It's easy using ghostscript:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=newfile.pdf -f file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf

For instance, this is a good resource for pdf-related ghostscript commands. It also shows some examples, how to rotate pdf pages etc. See your favorite distribution for more details about ghostscript.

My best,
   Alexander

At the Singular Point

Today I was asked to become part of the new Singular Blog. Besides being one of the two lead developers of PolyBoRi, I have being a Singular developer, too, for so many years. I immediately agreed, also because I already enjoyed private and scientific blogging (like this blog).

About blogging: first of all, it's fun! We ain't web-based journalists earning money here, not one blog per day (Tried it, failed). Instead, we express our philosophy as well as the emotions behind the software whenever we feel to do so. Software developers are us, and we are amused about sophisticated code snippets and annoyed by weird bugs. Let's spread the message and    hopefully    lead more people to the Singular point.

Trying waf

Some days ago, I learned about waf, another python-based build system. Originally an early fork from scons, now it seems to be mature enough to be considered. Unlike scons is is delivered as a single ~90kb python script, which includes a self-extracting (!) python-library.
The latter contains a complete build system, which obeys the phases of a classical ./configure; make; make install :es steht noch nicht und Du has
waf configure; waf build; waf install . It also obeys environment variables like CXXFLAGS.

Indeed, this is quite useful for those developers which are familiar to autoconf-based configures. Even nicer: there is only one prerequisite, namely python. (Even a shell could be spared.) This could be a good alternative for some packages from Sage, which already need python to be present. For psico it is probably worth trying.

Psico on Bitbucket

Finally, I put the first version of Psico here. it still needs a patched version of Singular to work, see for instance this Sage package.
We still have to work around the problem, that Sage needs to be loaded in the very beginning of Singular. (I need to merge that to the psico branch at Berlios.)

My best,
  Alexander

That's the way the cookie crumbles

Now the Parallel-Singular workshop is over. Indeed, finishing the prototype of the Psico package, we got something done.

Also, we enjoyed Michael Brickenstein's awesome cookies!

My best,
Alexander