Pseudointellectual Appendification

My school sent home a set of 3 CD's with circa Glencoe StudentWorks software from 2007. This software consists of a flash application that launches Adobe Acrobat version 7 to display PDF the PDF content of the California Mathematics Grade 4 workbooks. Children are expected to complete homework assignments using this software. My primary operating system is Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard, the application "Student Works OSX" is a PowerPC application and would require Rosetta to be installed to run.

Thankfully, the PDFs are on the CD and you do not need to run the application to see the content, just navigate to /Volumes/CA Math 4/support/PDF/docs and you will find the PDF for each individual chapter.
On Mac or Windows, there is no need to install or run any application from the disc, If you are running Windows, download the latest Acrobat, don't install the antiquated version on the disc.

Printing is another matter, you can't. The chapters are password print protected. I'm not a lawyer but I read the standard shrink wrap licensing agreement that came with the software and here is what I found:

COPIES. Copies can be made only as authorized above in machine readable form. Print copies of Software code are not authorized. All copyright and trademark notices must remain on all copies. All copies must be faithful reproductions. You are solely responsible for the content, quality and operation of all Software copies. Certain Software programs may be "copy protected" by special encryption coding that prevents copying or printing-out content

And

You may also make one (1) back- up copy of the Software for archival purpose

Great, I choose to backup the PDF portions of the "software" by printing on paper. Here is my "backup" program, you just need GhostScript from macports.

    #!/bin/bash -x
    for i in "$@"; do
        NAME=`basename "$i"`
        gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile="$NAME" -c .setpdfwrite -f "$i"
        lpd -d "SCX_4500" "$NAME"
        rm $NAME
    done

If you live in San Mateo County you can use your Peninsula Library System Card to access Safari Books Online.

If you manage to find link on the plsinfo.org website you will find that the proxy url is incorrect.
Here is the correct link Safari Books Online, you need your library card.

Read away.

You can also see a list of all the resources you can access via your library card.

A friend just launched his website, SocialCurrent. The idea brings the Tao Te Ching to mind.

All things spring up and there is not one which declines to show itself.
They grow and there is no claim made for their ownership.
The go through their processes and there no expectation of a reward for their results.
The work is accomplished, and there is no resting in it as an achievement.
The work is done, but how no one can see. 'Tis this that makes the power not cease to be.

Everyday we do things in our daily life that we perceive as socially responsible, yet our actions sometimes invisible. These invisible things add up and the actions of one person can truly make a difference.

Running Apple Mac OSX, and your system.log is filling up with

mdworker[473]: Unable to use font: no glyphs present.

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework /Frameworks/ATS.framework/Support/ATSServer[474]: Serious problems were found in font data while activating it.

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework /Frameworks/ATS.framework/Support/ATSServer[474]: You may encounter drawing or printing problems.

Well, it could be Spotlight trying to index a bad PDF file. To find the offending file with use lsof and the process id of the mdworker process

  lsof -p 473

In my case it was a PDF from the hadoop 20.0 release

Cascading looks quite interesting. Here is a python program that does something similar to the Technical Overview seen main in the python program.

    #!/usr/bin/env python
    # encoding: utf-8
    import sys

    def input(theFile, pipe):
        """
        pushes a file a line at a time to a coroutine pipe
        """
        for line in theFile:
            pipe.send(line)
        pipe.close()

    @coroutine
    def extract(expression, pipe, group = 0):
        """
        extract the group from a regex
        """
        import re
        r = re.compile(expression)
        while True:
            line = (yield)
            match = r.search(line)
            if match:
                pipe.send(match.group(0))

    @coroutine
    def sort(pipe):
        """
        sort the input on a pipe
        """
        import heapq
        heap = []
        try:
            while True:
                line = (yield)
                heapq.heappush(heap, line)
        except GeneratorExit:
            while heap:
                pipe.send(heapq.heappop(heap))

    @coroutine
    def group(groupPipe, pipe):
        """
        sends consectutive matching lines from pipe to groupPipe
        """
        cur = None
        g = None
        while True:
            line = (yield)
            if cur is None:
                g = groupPipe(pipe)
            elif cur != line:
                g.close()
                g = groupPipe(pipe)

            g.send(line)
            cur = line

    @coroutine
    def uniq(pipe):
        """
        implements uniq -c
        """
        lines = 0
        try:
            while True:
                line = (yield)
                lines += 1
        except GeneratorExit:
            pipe.send('%s\t%s' % (lines, line))

    @coroutine
    def output(theFile):
        while True:
            line = (yield)
            theFile.write(line + '\n')

    def main():
        input(sys.stdin,
            extract( r'^([^ ]+)',
                sort(
                    group( uniq,
                        output(sys.stdout)
                    )
                )
            )
        )

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        main()

You can achieve the same results with the unix command line:

cat  access.log | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | sort | uniq -c

Reading http://www.dabeaz.com/coroutines/ and thought this was a natural for a twitter client. Here is a pretty simple version that just prints the public timeline every 60 seconds. Next, up removing the time.sleep and scheduling the followStatus function as a task so I can follow more than one stream at a time.

    #!/usr/bin/env python
    # encoding: utf-8
    import time
    import twitter

    def coroutine(func):
        """
        A decorator function that takes care of starting a coroutine
        automatically on call.

        see: http://www.dabeaz.com/coroutines/
        """
        def start(*args,**kwargs):
            cr = func(*args,**kwargs)
            cr.next()
            return cr
        return start

    @coroutine
    def statusPrinter():
        """
        Just prints twitter status messages to the screen
        """
        while True:
             status = (yield)
             print status.id, status.user.name, status.text

    def followStatus(twitterGetter, target, timeout = 60):
        """
        Follows a twitter status message that takes a since_id
        """
        since_id = None
        while True:
            statuses = twitterGetter(since_id=since_id)
            if statuses:
                # pretty sure these are always in order
                since_id = statuses[0]
                for status in statuses:
                    target.send(status)
            # twitter caches for 60 seconds anyway
            time.sleep(timeout)

    def main():
        api = twitter.Api()
        followStatus(api.GetPublicTimeline, statusPrinter())

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        main()