Category Archives: management and design

the study or use of systems (esp. computers and telecommunications) for storing, retrieving, and sending information.

Managing Powerpoint Presentation File Sizes

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Lots of people have to do this all the time. You want to send your slides, or maybe even slide notes to a class or group, but when you look at the file size it is just to large. There is one other confounding variable here, often you want to convert your slides to pdfs, but even with that first step done, you end up with a pdf file that is as large (or sometimes larger) than the original slides.

Let’s look at the steps involved, there are not really that many, but I am going to make some assumptions about the software you have and the platforms that you might be using. There are lots of ways to do this, but I will only cover two. Generally the steps ar the same no mater what OS platform you are on:

  1. Generate the pdf file that you want
  2. shrink that file size down to something more manageable.

Lets start with the file. I made a simple pptx file, that weighs in at 8.3 MB. To do this I just loaded up on the graphics files, which are always the killers. You can grab a copy of that file here: Large PowerPoint.

Using the printer dialog in Mac OS X or PDFMaker under Windows you can quickly create high quality (read large file size) pdf files from your presentations. You may want a high quality version, but you also want a smaller version for sharing with colleagues or students. The smaller version will speed up printing as well. I did that, and here is my same pptx converted to a pdf notes file: PowerPoint_Size_Big.

Mac OS X:

Open your pdf up in the Preview application and using “Export As…” option under file, Save the PDF using the “Reduce File Size”option.

Save the PDF using the "Reduce File Size" option

Windows or Mac OS X:

Adobe Acrobat has a similar function that can be used to reduce pdf file size. Chose the “Reduce File Size…” option under the Document Menu.

Using Adobe Acrobat to reduce a pdf file size

In both cases the file sizes were under 400KB, just using the presets, 342KB and 184KB using the Preview.app and Adobe Acrobat respectively. There are lots of other ways to do this, from within the printing menus and also from within the adobe acrobat application itself. But just using the preset “shrinking” options will often get you exactly what you want.

Share A SNiPiTRON Project With An Entire Group

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We have been use SNiPiTRON for project sharing. It has a few quirks, here is one of them.

MG 11/20/08 9:55:52 AM

1) Click on “My Homepage”

2) Click on “My Projects”

3) Click On your Project names to select it.

4) Click on “FILE”

5) Select “Project Permissions”

6) Under “Access List”

7) Choose your network (in this case “VMI”)

8) Select “All [network name] members” (in this case “All VMI members”)

9) Choose “Add”

10) Choose “Save”

openSUSE filling in for Mac OS X Leopard

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openSUSE logo

I have always been a Red Hat guy, and then subsequently a Fedora Core guy. So when my MacBook broke down and I needed a replacement machine I got to thinking what I could use. St. John’s is a windows environment and it is a very integrated windows world. We have a number of machines that are integrated into our Mac OS Server environement as well as the Universities environment, and when we needed a unix machine to handle a number of server side things we had reformatted a T60 ThinkPad for this task. Now I grabbed this ThinkPad and decided to try something different.

openSUSE…

So far so good. The install was smooth, despite a reliance on the DVD for installation of extras (only because it is annoying to constanly have to run down that DVD and stick it back in) all has been very, very smooth.

I haven’t sorted out the windows integration, Open Directory binding is beyond me for the moment.

More to follow.

Create a “private” wiki using mediawiki

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Using mediawiki one can create an elegant collection of resources for a user community. These pages can be open to all, or only available to those logged in, but there is not an easy road to take if you want something in between.

The short solution is to split a wiki with private internal parts and public parts into two wikis. If you are currently creating a wiki that will house pages only for internal use that outside users should not see it would be best to set up two interlinked wikis now, before content gets added.

To create a private wiki that only allows anonymous users to see the main page and login pages add the following to your LocalSettings.php file.

#do not allow anonymous users create an account
$wgGroupPermissions[‘*’][‘createaccount’] = false;

# require that users log in to edit
$wgGroupPermissions[‘*’][‘edit’] = false;

# allow these pages for anonymous users (Main Page and login)
$wgWhitelistRead = array( “Main Page”, “Special:Userlogin”, “-”, “MediaWiki:Monobook.css” );

# remove the link to the talk page for non-logged in users
$wgShowIPinHeader = false;

# require that users log in to read
$wgGroupPermissions[‘*’][‘read’] = false;

Weather in the menu

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One of my favorite Gnome features was the weather menu item. When I started using Macs and PCs I was baffled that such an item was not included on all computers. As I worked away, in some dusty, fluorescent tinged office I longed to know the weather outside, if only to be mildly connected to nature by a thin stream of electrons. For a number of years now the simplest solution to this has been the Meteorologist program.

Freely downloadable, available here.

And voila! Weather in the menu…

How to change a user password on MediaWiki

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This took me forever to find and now I need a spot to keep this clip

These instructions are for MySQL.

Variables used:

* dbname
* User
* 37
* newpassword

Select database to use. First figure out the name of the appropiate database:

mysql> show databases;
+—————————————–+
| Database |
+—————————————–+
|dbname |
+—————————————–+
1 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> Select database;

mysql> use dbname;

Database changed

Find the user_id for the user.

mysql> SELECT user_id, user_name from user WHERE user_name=”User”;

+———+—————+
| user_id | user_name |
+———+—————+
| 37 | User |
+———+—————+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Change the user’s pasword:

mysql> UPDATE user SET user_password = md5(CONCAT(’37-‘,md5(‘newpassword’))) WHERE user_id=37;

Query OK, 1 row affected (0.02 sec)
Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0