Coolest Picture of a Praying mantis

Mantis
Originally uploaded by Lawraa.

This picture just makes me laugh.

TAA DAAAAAA!

iTextsharp is cool

I've been working on a project that takes various database content and mixes it with existing PDF files to create a new combined PDF file with new front cover and section tabs etc.

In the past I had used various 3rd party commercial components or even used various parts of Crystal Reports to generate PDF files. This time, however, I have been using the iTextsharp library, and it's very good indeed. At the basic level you can create a PDF file, create the content under program control and then save the file to the server, which you can then redirect to. It does get very hairy very quickly though, with lots of repetitive code (paragraphs, chunks, cells etc.), so I need to start breaking the code down a bit.

To help me, I've just ordered IText in Action: Creating and Manipulating PDF from Amazon. It's mainly focused on iText itself (which is a Java based library - iTextsharp is the .Net version), but should help out greatly.

Saying that, there is a lot of info out on the web, with the Nabble forum being a useful resource.

When the project is live, I'll post a link here. It will be very useful to the people it's aimed at...

ZX Spectrum 25 Years Old!

For those of us of a certain age, the ZX Spectrum was a huge influence on our youth. Hours spent playing games lile manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, waiting for the latest Ultimate or Imagine game, typing listings in and trying to grapple with Z80 assembler.

The world of computing has changed unbelievably since then, but the spirit of the Speccy remains. There are a huge number of emulators for different systems, there are regular remakes of old retro classics and even some technical masterpieces like Jet Set Willy Online!!

So everyone who remembers colour clash, crap sound tracks, slow loading times and keyboards that squidge, raise a glass in Clive Sinclair's direction.