Skiing | Documentation Creation | April 2023
April 2023
We took the kids on a skiing holiday the first week of April. We stopped in the Alpine village of Samoëns, and while the snow wasn’t great, we did manage to ski most of the week. I took one day off skiing to hiking along the river Le Giffre. It had been four years since the last time we’d been skiing due to covid, and I was impressed by how quickly the kids picked it up again. However, I was less impressed at how my older knees felt ;-)
My wife and I had a lovely afternoon tea at the Daffodil Hotel in Grasmere in the Lake District.
Documentation Creation
It’s less than six weeks until I leave my current job and start a new position.
As part of leaving I need to create a technical handover document, which I’m writing in AsciiDoc. I’m being pushed to deliver and evidence one section of the document early, so I needed a way of extracting the section from the complied PDF document.
ifeval Directive
The staff asking for the extract are non-technical, so I needed to find a way to exclude passwords for the version they got and only include the passwords in the final document. AsciiDoc solves this using the ifeval directive. Within my main.adoc file, I define a variable called showpasswords and set it to zero when I don’t want the passwords included in the document.
:showpasswords: 0
ifeval::[{showpasswords} > 0]
[source,bash]
----
Pa$$w0rd
----
endif::[]
ifeval::[{showpasswords} < 1]
[source,bash]
----
********
----
endif::[]
Extracting pages and sections
To extract the cover image & first three pages, which includes the table of contents and the section in question, which runs from page 23 through to page 26, I used the cat sub-command of the pdftk tool, like:
1pdftk input.pdf cat 1-4 23-26 output dist/output.pdf
Sketching
If you have an RSS reader on your mobile you can subscribe to my art RSS feed to get updates of new pictures I draw.
Banding
We’ve started rehearsing the march which we’ll play at the Saddleworth and Oldham Whit Friday Band Contests which takes place on the 2nd of June. We’re playing Caractacus and here is a video of us playing it in the 2019 contest.
Links
- Cracking the code on digital talent
- Introducing AWS Lambda response streaming
- SQLite Extensions - providing AES-256 encryption & decryption functions
- WebAuthn - A better alternative for securing our sensitive information online
- WebAuthn Basic Web Client/Server
Reading
Finished reading Méridien book 3 in S.H. Jucha’s Silver Ships series.
Started reading The Immune: A Post Apocalyptic Survival Thriller by David Kazzie.
I got recommended a book this month which I’ve purchased and started to read. It’s called War and Peace and It: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age written by Mark Schwartz
Listening
Finished book 9, Valkyrie, and have started listening to book 10, Critical Mass of Craig Alanson’s Expeditionary Force series.
Watching
By writing down what I watch I can review how much TV I consume. It’s shocking, but here is the list for April: