What? Which Continent is that?

I picked up a DVD titled, “Animal Passport” from Redbox the other day to watch with my kids. It is a documentary profiling various animals in different continents. With the discussion about continent we have opened a can of worms. There is a lot of confusion about what makes a continent. There are currently five models (as per Wikipedia) to describe continents. The following is a list of models from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent. While none of this discusses the sixth model which names Oceania to hold the countries of Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea and the other sundry islands or the seventh one which substitutes Australasia for Oceania which includes  Australia (as we know it) and New Zealand (Note: Asia is not included in Australasia even though the name contains asia).

 

Models
Color-coded map showing the various continents. Similar shades exhibit areas that may be consolidated or subdivided.
7 continents [13][14][15][16][17][18]	North America	South America	Antarctica	Africa	Europe	Asia	Australia
6 continents [14][19]	North America	South America	Antarctica	Africa	Eurasia		Australia
6 continents [20][21]	America		Antarctica	Africa	Europe	Asia	Australia
5 continents [19][20][21]	America		Antarctica	Africa	Eurasia		Australia
4 continents [19][20][21]	America		Antarctica	Afro-Eurasia			Australia

Australia – the continent that started this whole discussion seems to hold only Australia by itself if you go by Model 1 (7 continents) – the model I learnt growing up and one which is based on the logic of dividing continents by continental shelf. So the logical question is what happens to New Zealand? It turns out that this belongs to the continent of Zealandia (because it is in a different continental shelf). But, wait a second, where is Zealandia?, you ask. Unfortunately, Zealandia is a submerged continent, so you cannot see it. Convenient, eh!

So it appears the concept of continent is different depending on which continent you are from

“The seven-continent model is usually taught in Western Europe, Northern Europe, Central Europe, Southeastern Europe, China and most English-speaking countries. The six-continent combined-Eurasia model is preferred by the geographic community, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Japan. The six-continent combined-America model is taught in Latin America, and some parts of Europe including Greece, Portugal and Spain. This model may be taught to include only the five inhabited continents (excluding Antarctica)”

If that was fun, I will let you look up the idea behind Super Continent which now only has one member, “Eurasia”.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_(continent), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent

Converting PDF to Word Format for Editing

In an earlier post, I described how to use cups-pdf to print documents directly to PDF in Ubuntu 9.04. While playing around with cups-pdf, I discovered kword. This nifty piece of editor software allows you to convert PDF files to a format that could be edited. You can then convert it to PDF format again by ‘printing’ it to PDF using cups-pdf.

To get started, you have to install kword using the following:

sudo apt-get install kword

Now you invoke it using:

Applications -> Office -> kword

Here, use the File -> Import feature to import any PDF file into it. Happy editing!

Note: If the PDF is password protected, kword allows you to enter the password to decrypt it.

Printing to PDF using cups-pdf

Recently at work I discovered PDFCreator with which any document can be printed into PDF. Alas, it is a Windows program and a LINUX port is not available. Fortunately, I found cups-pdf for Ubuntu.

Note: You can print to a Post Script file directly in LINUX, and then use  ps2pdf13 to convert the .ps file to .pdf.

To install cups-pdf, type the following at the terminal or use Synaptic Package Manager:

sudo apt-get install cups-pdf

Now, Ubuntu 9.04 installs a ‘PDF’ pritner automatically – in earlier versions you have to manually install a PDF printer as described here http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-create-pdf-documents-in-ubuntu.html.

Check your installation by going to:

System -> Administration -> Printing

You should see a printer with name PDF installed.

Now create a  directory named PDF in your home directory and you are all set to print directly to PDF.

You can change the name of the default directory from PDF to anything of your choice by changing the configuration file which is located at:

/etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf

Installing True Type Fonts (TTF) in Ubuntu

The easiest way I found to install new fonts is to create a .fonts directory in your home directory and copy the xxxx.ttf font file to this directory.

You can then use tools like Specimen Font Previewer or Waterfall to preview the fonts.

Waterfall - A Font Previewer

Where is the trash stored in Ubuntu?

I use GNOME in Ubuntu for windows management. A few days back I deleted a directory and it got stuck in the trash can. I mean literally. I could not permanently remove it from trash. It was one of those directories which had files whose permissions did not allow me to remove it.

I  was then looking to see where the trash is stored and finally found it lurking in my home directory under

 ./.local/share/Trash

I used the following find command to find it:

find . -name Trash -print

The actual trashed files/directories are located under

 ./local/share/Trash/files.

Once, I found this out, I was able to remove it permanently with:

sudo rm -r <dir-to-be-removed-permanently>

Opening UIF image files in Ubuntu

The other day I downloaded a CD image which came with an UIF extension. UIF is MagicISO image file. To open it in Ubuntu, you have to convert it into an ISO version.

Fortunately, there is a uif2iso converter. You can find it at http://aluigi.org/mytoolz/uif2iso.zip.

Download this zip file and extract it to a directory, say uif2isoSrc. You will find a windows version of uif2iso.exe in the root here. You can use wine to run it as follows:

wine uif2iso input.uif output.iso

or better still go to the src directory and run make here. Now, you will have an native executable uif2iso generated here. You can now add it to your bin directory and run it as:

uif2iso input.uif output.iso

NOTE: Once you have an iso file you can mount it as a virtual cdrom using gmount-iso.

Screenshot of Gmount-iso GUI

Determining Ubuntu Version

There are couple of ways to determine the Ubuntu version your machine is running.

• cat /etc/lsb-release
• cat /etc/issue

Out of this the lsb-release seems to be the most comprehensive.

$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=intrepid
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION=”Ubuntu 8.10″

and the /etc/issue the most terse.

$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 8.10 \n \l

The uname command provides the version of Linux distribution.

$ uname -r
2.6.27-11-generic

The uname -m option will help you determine if you are running the 32-bit version or 64-bit version of Ubuntu.

$ uname -m
i686

Apparently if you are running a 64-bit version (on a 64-bit machine), you should get something like x86_64 as the result.