Hacking at 0300

I definitely like my iPod Touch better than my old Windows Mobile 6 phone, and I had hoped that the time zone/daylight savings misery I had on Windows would be behind me. No such luck. When I went to New York for Pesach this year, I dutifully changed the time zone (Settings->General->Date & Time->Time Zone) to New York, then changed it back to St. Louis on my return. The iPod, trying to be helpful, moved all my appointments forward an hour, even though it had not moved them backward when I went east. Now everything was an hour off!

I briefly pulled my hair out, then Googled Binged "ipod calendar 1 hour off" and it turns out there are two settings for the time zone: the one under General->Date & Time for the iPod's clock and Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calendars->Time Zone Support->Time Zone for the time to display for events. Setting both to "St. Louis" fixed the problem.

This makes no sense to me; how often would anyone want to see appointments in something other than their local time? And why would it show up only after my return trip? But at least the problem was quickly solved.

And on an almost completely unrelated note, Bing doesn't lend itself to being used a verb the way Google does. Binged sounds like I drowned my computer problems in a fifth of Scotch. Bing'd? Bing-ed? BingisnotGoogled?

Looking at FPDF and at my PDF tutorial, it is clear that there are a few things that PDF's can do that aren't part of the API of FPDF. However, FPDF is easily extensible to include everything I might find useful, so I put together a package of those routines.

See the code.

See the sample output.

See the code that produced the sample output.

Now we need to add text. That's the most useful part of a PDF, and the easiest. Also the hardest. Sometimes life is like that.

See the code.

Now that we can draw in our PDF, we want to add images. There are two kinds of images, bitmapped and vector. In PDF, images are called XObjects (The X stands for external, meaning defined outside the page). Vector images are easier, since they are just packages of PDF drawing commands, a sort of macro. PDF calls them Forms, since they were originally used to draw the boxes on a printed form.

See the code.