Author Archives: Brock Tice

Happy Darwin Day

Remember, that evolution via natural selection occurs is a fact, borne out by the fossil record. The theory is just about the nitty gritty details.

Happy Darwin Day everyone! And don’t forget, intelligent design = religion.

Hearty Friday – BeMyValentine



BeMyValentine

Originally uploaded by Flowermouse Design


Valentine’s Day is a blessing and a curse to Hearty Friday. There are a lot more heart-related photos posted to Flickr, but most of them are uninteresting to me. There’s never really a low volume of heart photos in the first place.

Anyway, I thought this one was pretty cute and visually appealing. Nice sold colors and good depth of field.

Happy Friday! Hope it’s as warm (relatively speaking) where you are as it’s going to be here today.

Extracting text highlighted with Acrobat Pro

As mentioned here and here, I typically do my reading and note-taking-on of academic papers in Acrobat Pro these days. I then typically record my comments in a FreeMind mind map. Until today I’d been creating a content summary in Acrobat, highlighting, and then dragging and dropping each comment individually into the mind map.

Today, while doing this, I noticed that there’s an “Export comments to Data File” option in the Comments menu. “Hmm,” I thought, “I wonder how easy it would be to read this data file?” It turns out that it’s just some ASCII text with a bunch of (to me) useless information, and the highlighted comments in parseable “Contents([highlighted text here])” containers.

I wrote a quick and dirty Perl script that pulls the comments into a text file. I can then just copy and paste that file into FreeMind, and it creates all of the leaves for me. This will save me hours carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing mousing and frustration. The perl script, for your perusal (improvements welcome) is available here: extract_comments.pl.

Kindly Let me know if you get any use out of this, and if you find any parsing bugs. It’s in the public domain.