openoffice exports better pdf than word

I generated a pdf file from a word document with word 2007. But the pdf file looks very uncomfortable in my pdf viewer. So I looked it closely to see what makes me feel so. The culprit is the spacing between characters. As shown in the image blow, the spacing between characters within a word varies in the pdf file, though the original word document doesn't exhibit this.
I tried to export the pdf file with openoffice again. To my surprise, the generated file looks very smooth and comfortable. The spacing between characters is perfect, just as they are in doc file. Also, the edge of the font is much more clear.

I usually don't pay much attention to details like fonts and spacing. But the performance between word and openoffice differs so much that it's hard to not to notice them. I just don't get how word deserves its price.

debugging python script in ipython

ipython doesn't work with built-in pdb debugger. While I tried to debug a python script with "run -d script.py" within ipython shell, I got bellow error:

AttributeError: Pdb instance has no attribute 'curframe'

To debug script in ipython, we need to use a different debugger, pydb, for example. There are only three steps to setup and use it.

1. download and install pydb.
2. start ipython with -pydb argument: ipython -pydb
3. start debugging with: run -d script.py

It's mandatory to set HOME environment variable to use pydb. On my windows box, there is no HOME environment variable set by default, and I got bellow error:

KeyError: 'HOME'

It can be solved by adding HOME environment variable.

Because pydb use the same set of commands with gdb, it's fairly straightforward to get start with it if you have done some debugging in gdb. This is one reason why I pick it as my debugger.

Reference:
Introducing the pydb Debugger
Debugging in Python

install ipython and readline on mac

ipython is a powerful interactive shell for python. With it, we can tak advantage of python programming language in our daily works.
One of ipython's power is its tab-completion feature that needs readline to work. On mac system, it lacks this library due to license issue. There is a proprietary version of readline in mac, but it doesn't work with ipython.
To install them on mac system, we can simply use easy_install utility, like this:

sudo easy_install ipython readline