I’ll join the bandwagon. ZFS is the best thing since sliced bread. After seeing a presentation on it at USENIX `07 in San Jose back in June, I must admit. I’m impressed. It seems that Sun is on to something here. Even better, due to the CDDL it’s been included in FreeBSD & Mac OS X. That means that you can expect to see it being deployed more widely here soon once people learn to use it and realize exactly whats up. Here at Logjamming / Alticon we’re going to be rolling out a new backup system based on FreeBSD / ZFS here before the end of the year. The effect? Better backups and more space for them. Yay!

So by all accounts, i’m most assuredly the most obstinate of us over here at logjamming. Sometimes it’s my choice of disks in servers (seagate all the way. after dealing with another maxtor failure today i vow… never again) or the fact that i am vehement in my use of linux for my desktop, in the end, i’m just that brand of pain in the ass.

Which brings me to my rant of the day…. open source imaging.

For quite some time this has been a sore spot. Some times it’s josh & his “there’s no pantone in GiMP rant”. Other times it’s the annoyance of needing to convert file types. Well, today i found my holy grail for the latter.

pstoedit

This utility rules hard. Recently one of the designers we work with passed me files in eps and illustrator format. The tricky part, is that illustrator didn’t close some of the strokes properly and i was left with a version of “mr log” with half his mouth chopped off every time i rendered it to bitmap. Pstoedit to the rescue. Fixing this was as simple as typing the following command:

pstoedit -f plot-svg text_logo.ai text_logo2.svg

That did the job quite nicely, except that the g’s o’s and a’s looked jacked up. It didn’t do the knockouts in the center of the letters. This was easily fixed by adding the “-ssp” flag to the command leaving me with:

pstoedit -f plot-svg -ssp text_logo.ai text_logo2.svg

Try it out. Works like a charm.