Frank Hofmann

Articles: 33

Joined: Sep 27, 2017

IT developer, trainer, and author. Coauthor of the Debian Package Management Book (http://www.dpmb.org/).

Recently published

Article

Working with PDFs in Python: Inserting, Deleting, and Reordering Pages

This article is the third in a series on working with PDFs in Python: Reading and Splitting Pages Adding Images and Watermarks Inserting, Deleting, and Reordering Pages (you are here) This article is part three of a little series on working with PDFs in Python. In the previous articles we...

Frank Hofmann

Jun 05, 2019·7 min read

Article

Working with PDFs in Python: Adding Images and Watermarks

This article is the second in a series on working with PDFs in Python: Reading and Splitting Pages Adding Images and Watermarks (you are here) Inserting, Deleting, and Reordering Pages Today, a world without the Portable Document Format (PDF) seems to be unthinkable. It has become one of the most...

Frank Hofmann

May 14, 2019·10 min read

Article

Working with PDFs in Python: Reading and Splitting Pages

This article is the first in a series on working with PDFs in Python: Reading and Splitting Pages (you are here) Adding Images and Watermarks Inserting, Deleting, and Reordering Pages Today, the Portable Document Format (PDF) belongs to the most commonly used data formats. In 1990, the structure of a...

Frank Hofmann

Apr 24, 2019·15 min read

Article

Commenting Python Code

Programming reflects your way of thinking in order to describe the single steps that you took to solve a problem using a computer. Commenting your code helps explain your thought process, and helps you and others to understand later on the intention of your code. This allows you to more...

Frank Hofmann

Mar 26, 2019·9 min read

Article

Running SQL on CSV Data: Data Conversion and Extraction

A lot of tools output data as comma-separated values (CSV). It is a simple but common tabular data format of plain text that can easily be processed. Each line of the file represents a single record. A record consists of the same number of fields, or columns. Usually, the delimiter...

Frank Hofmann

Jan 31, 2019·10 min read

Article

Automating Version Control Commits

In the previous article I explained how to monitor your data and how to detect changes using tools like Integrit, which is a Host-based Intrusion Detection System (HIDS). Discovering the changes in files is already quite nice, but keeping track of the content and its changes over time is much...

Frank Hofmann

Jan 28, 2019·9 min read

Article

Handling Unix Signals in Python

UNIX/Linux systems offer special mechanisms to communicate between each individual process. One of these mechanisms are signals, and belong to the different methods of communication between processes (Inter Process Communication, abbreviated with IPC). In short, signals are software interrupts that are sent to the program (or the process) to...

Frank Hofmann

Nov 30, 2018·8 min read

Article

Vim for Python Development

Vim is a powerful text editor that belongs to one of the default components on every Linux distribution, as well as Mac OS X. Vim follows its own concept of usage, causing the community to divide into strong supporters and vehement opponents that are in favor of other editors like...

Frank Hofmann

Oct 22, 2018·15 min read

Article

Introduction to the Python Coding Style

Python as a scripting language is quite simple and compact. Compared to other languages, you only have a relatively low number of keywords to internalize in order to write proper Python code. Furthermore, both simplicity as well as readability of the code are preferred, which is what Python prides itself...

Frank Hofmann

May 29, 2018·14 min read