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What I acutally ended up doing was borrowing a co-worker's cube and messing with a bunch. Once you solve it a few dozen times, the action gets a lot smoother and it's faster to handle. I know the solutions I was doing were a lot more then 30 moves, but they were very simple to memorize, so I was able to do them quickly. I think I memorized a total of about 8 patterns, this is the site I used. http://peter.stillhq.com/jasmine/rubikscubesolution.html There are a few cases where I have to do the same pattern multiple times, but they are simple, so I learned to do them quickly without much delay.

And the least time in which I could solve the cube was 20 minutes.

Using a few simple, easy-to-learn algorithms, and with a few weeks practice it is possible for pretty much anyone to solve the 3D cube in just 2 or 3 minutes. Using a layer-by-layer method you can solve each piece one at a time in the first two layers, then learn 4 algorithms to fix the last layer (not necessarily in this order):

1) Rotate edges
2) Rotate corners
3) Permute corners
4) Permute edges

Sometimes you will have to use an algorithm twice. Each algorithm takes about 10 moves, and at a slow speed of one move per second and a bit of luck you can solve the last layer in under a minute. Here's a beginner's guide:

http://peter.stillhq.com/jasmine/rubikscubesolutio n.html

If you want to get faster you need to learn more algorithms so that you can complete two steps at once.

A popular method which can be used to get very fast times is the Fridrich method, but it requires a lot of memorisation and lots and lots of practice:

http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/cube.html

Personally I managed to get times of under 1 minute by practising the cube every day in the bus to and from work.

Not making another Twinkle Tux, thankyou. Coal, I find, is far too crunchy.

Not making another Twinkle Tux, thankyou. Coal, I find, is far too crunchy.

See here

Another miracle of the chistmas season! As of 1:11 AM PST, that site is not slashdotted! Woot, Halleluiah, Amen, and what not.

PDFLib lite
This is the open-source version. It requires you to use and OSI-approved license on your app. PHP uses a version of PDFLib. We use the commercial version of PDFlib to produce reports like this sample report.

Panda
Panda is GPLed. I haven't tried it.

These libraries should give you total control over your output. I'm not sure if you want that degree of power, considering you have to do a lot of work yourself. Note also the total lack of support for importing vector images in both (this is available in commercial versions of PDFlib by importing sections of external PDF documents).

That wouldn't be that hard to code. There is very similar code in PandaEdit which you're welcome to borrow. Look at the fax.cpp, fax.h, and faketiff.h...

IBM DeveloperWorks also has articles on coding for TIFF (Intro, and Advanced) which might be of use. There are also many open source PDF APIs out there, including Panda.

Actually, no. As well as Star/Open office ps/pdf support, there is Panda - A GPL'ed PDF generation library.

BePDF is also gpl.

I'm not convinced that that even small-time criminals will be forced to downgrade. I can pick up source code for twofish at the local library or on the web and just about any library capable of DES can produce 3DES. As such the cost of developing a strong encryption program is trivial. A quick google search found an example of how to use OpenSSL to produce DES-encrypted code. I find it doubtful that DES will disappear in the new future, because it appears to be the lowest denominator for regulation.

Which points to the fundamental futility of regulating cryptographic code. Source code for AES, Blowfish, Twofish, and DES has been published widely as part of public review processes. Developing a new cipher is tough but using an existing cipher is relatively easy. Weak ciphers such as DES can be made stronger by using multiple rounds of encryption. The materials required for producing a cryptographic program are free.