It seems that the New York Post have decided to block all access to their site from iPads, telling users to download their (subscription only) app instead. As Scripting News said…

I wonder how Apple feels about this? I can’t imagine they like it. I can see the ads now. ‘Get an Android tablet to read the web.’ Hmmm… I wonder how long said app will remain in the store after pulling a trick like this?

This quote has been doing the rounds lately, at least I’ve seen it on two or three different blogs, most recently here…

> Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
> Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by
> definition, not smart enough to debug it.

I rather like that.

It’s easy using pdftops, part of the Poppler suite of programs. First make sure it’s installed, or install it (using Homebrew on OS X):

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$ brew update
$ brew install poppler

Then the command pdftops infile.pdf outfile.ps can be scripted as per usual, something like this:

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for page in pages/*.pdf
do
  pdftops $page postscript/`basename -s .pdf $page`.ps
done

Recorded in the interest of helping Google organise my brain.

Q: What’s the difference between Ant and Maven?

A: The creator of Ant has apologised.

Just a quick reminder on the steps I needed to take to build Clojure and install it in my local repository:

1. download the Maven Ant tasks, version 2.1.0 at the time of writing;
2. move them to $ANT_HOME/lib (this is /usr/share/ant/lib on Mac OS X);
3. cd to my Clojure download folder, run git pull if needed;
4. run ant -Dsnapshot.repo.dir=~/.m2/repository clean nightly-build, this will perform a clean build and install it into the supplied repo; this can be anywhere, the default though is /var/www/maven-snapshot-repository which is probably no good;
5. to also install clojure-contrib just change to it’s download directory and run mvn install.

Is simples!