Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in business we often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:

• Buying a stronger whip.
• Changing riders.
• Say things like, "This is the way we have always ridden this horse."
• Appointing a committee to study the horse.
• Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
• Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
• Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
• Creating a training session to increase our riding ability.
• Comparing the state of dead horses in todays environment.
• Change the requirements declaring that "This horse is not dead."
• Hire contractors to ride the dead horse.
• Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
• Declaring that "No horse is too dead to beat."
• Providing additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
• Do a Cost Analysis study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
• Purchase a product to make dead horses run faster.
• Declare the horse is "better, faster and cheaper" dead.
• Form a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
• Revisit the performance requirements for horses.
• Say this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
• Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Nice thread int he extremeprogramming-ML

You can get the entire book at Projet Gutenberg for free.

 hdiutil burn image.iso

 $ hdiutil  burn  KNOPPIX_V5.1.1CD-2007-01-04-EN.iso
 Preparing data for burn
 Opening session
 Opening track
 Writing track
 ..............................................................................
 Closing track
 ..............................................................................
 Closing session
 ..............................................................................
 Finishing burn
 Verifying burn...
 Verifying
 ...............................................................................
 Burn completed successfully
 ...............................................................................
 hdiutil: burn: completed

Good old trusted linux does it with cdrecord :-)

 cdrecord  speed=2 dev=0,1,0 -data sol-9-install-sparc.iso

 Hi all,

 Long time since I announced my last project....

 With RubyJS you can transform a subset of Ruby into Javascript code.

 What works?
 * Classes, modules, inheritance
 * Instance methods, class methods
 * Exceptions (rescue/ensure)
 * Meta-programming stuff like 'attr_reader'
 (any meta-programming stuff works that does not appear inside methods)
 * Iterators, yield
 * "require" (with platform-specific extension ala Google Webtoolkit)
 * Inline Javascript code
 * Some kind of compile-time method lookup  ;-)
 * Numbers, String, Array, Hash, Proc (a lot of functionallity is missing!)
 * Testing with Rhino-JS
 * A lot more  :)

 There is a lots of room for optimizations and improvement  :)

 DOWNLOAD
 http://ntecs.de/hg-projects/rubyjs/

 Best use Mercurial (www.selenic.com/mercurial) to check it out:
 hg clone static-http://ntecs.de/hg-projects/rubyjs/

• Merge PDF Documents
• Split PDF Pages into a New Document
• Rotate PDF Pages or Documents
• Decrypt Input as Necessary (Password Required)
• Encrypt Output as Desired
• Fill PDF Forms with FDF Data or XFDF Data and/or Flatten Forms
• Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages
• ..

The nice thing is that one can use it all from the commandline :-).

• Examples Merge Two or More PDFs into a New Document

 pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output 123.pdf

• Split Select Pages from Multiple PDFs into a New Document

 pdftk A=one.pdf B=two.pdf cat A1-7 B1-5 A8 output combined.pdf

• Burst a Single PDF Document into Single Pages and Report its Data to doc_data.txt pdftk mydoc.pdf burst.

It’s a jewel one should have in its tool-shop.