Hiding the tricky PDF data

Sometimes, you don’t want people reading the fine detail on a PDF document. Especially if you’re lying about when the document was created.

Can you image the conversation?

“Hey, Jeff – I got your report on the bug monsters.”

“No worries, Dave. Just annoying when the email goes missing like that.”

“Er, yeah. By the way – I checked the document summary and it said you only created it an hour ago.”

“Ummmmmmmmmmmm…”

Well, fear not! Help is here! After spending about an hour searching for a useful open source tool, jPDFtweak came to the rescue!

To us this very effective tool, simply download onto your computer and unzip the files. Once done, you can run the application with the following command:

<code>java -jar jpdftweak.jar</code>

Once loaded, you can open a PDF on the import tab

Now,

  • Click the Document Info tab
  • Tick the Change Document Info box
  • Click Load from Document

All the document data that is in the file is now loaded into jPDFtweak. Just double-click on the bits of data that you want to change, and type in the new data.

Once done, click on the Output tab, give your new PDF a name and then click Run.

Yeah, baby!

Troubleshooting Software Deployment

Deploying Java across a network was a little touch-and-go today. I had a point where Windows XP hung during the Installing Managed Software phase.

After waiting for about 20 minutes, I decided that the installation had failed. After removing the package from software deployment section of Group Policy, I rebooted the PC and ran the ‘Last Known Good Configuration’ startup option.

Thankfully, the next boot brought up the removing managed software dialog and Windows started normally.