I think it’s interesting that Russia seems to have the most severe deviation of any place on earth. Obviously, Russia is a large area of land, but why isn’t there a similar hot to cold to hot deviation in the western hemisphere?

.. oh, and I saw an albino squirrel today (not a joke).

[Link] to gmaps route.

That’s 19.0 miles, fixed gear @ 44×16 and 32c tire in front, 28c in rear (need to up the size on that rear to smooth out the pavement).
Here is me and my whip on top of an old rusted rail bridge on St. Anthony Parkway:

> svn switch --relocate [OLD-SERVER-PATH] [NEW-SERVER-PATH]


I’ve been processing various scanned papers, books, and notes for easy reading on a (certain un-named) eBook reading “device” I recently acquired and which I nightly curl up with before bedtime. Said device reads PDFs really well, but not other formats, in particular it has trouble with the DjVu format. A DjVu reader exists for said device, but it’s slow, featureless, and junky (e.g. no text search).

The DjVu format is nice, it’s provides high fidelity scanned images packaged with searchable text. I want PDF files though, so here’s what I’m doing to batch-convert my .djvu files to optimized, searchable (OCR’d) PDFs.

1. Convert a folder full of .djvu files to postscipt: here’s a Bash shell script which calls the djvups program which comes with the Mac OSX packaged version of djview (and djviewlibre).

   #!/bin/sh
   for file in *.djvu
   do
       name=`echo $file | sed 's/\(.*\)\.djvu/\1/'`
       djvups "${name}.djvu" "${name}.ps"
       echo
   done

2. Convert postscript .ps files to PDF files (I’m using Adobe Distiller because I have access to a machine that has it installed, as well as Acrobat Pro), but you can use the free and open source ‘ps2pdf‘ command (along with a modified version of the script above) that is included when you install TeXLive or any modern LaTeX distribution.
3. Batch optimize the PDF files, OCR them and embed the text. I’m using Adobe Acrobat Pro which is slick, but definitely not free. I’d like to figure out a free / open source solution to this part.

@interact
def _(s=slider(-10,-0.1,0.1,default=-2,label='slope')):
    print "Try to minimize the area of the triangle whose hypotenuse\npasses through (2,3):"
    G=line([(0,-2*s+3), (-3/s+2,0)]) #s*(x-2)+3,(x,-1,6))
    G += polygon( [ (0,0), (0,-2*s+3), (-3/s+2,0) ], rgbcolor=hue(0.75))
    G += point([(0,-2*s+3),(-3/s+2,0),(2,3),(0,0)],rgbcolor=hue(0.95),pointsize=25)
    G.show(ymin=-1, ymax=10, xmin=-1, xmax=6, figsize=3)
    print "Area = %f" % (1/2*(-2*s+3)*(-3/s+2))

Here is a screenshot (since I couldn’t yet figure out how to get the example published and working on the public Sage server).

The (calculus) solution is to find the minimum (positive) value of the function which occurs at .

There are lots of great examples of the interact module on the Sage wiki: Examples.

Today I found Offlickr.py, a python script that uses the python flickrapi module and libxml2 to do exactly what I want. Getting all this to work on Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) took some searching and compiling so I wanted to record what I did here.

Steps:

1. Download Offlickr.py and libxml2 source, put them in directory [DIR] (I downloaded ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/libxml2-2.7.6.tar.gz
2. Compile libxml2: untar the libxml archive and enter it’s directory:

   tar xvzf libxml2-2.7.6.tar.gz; cd libxml2-2.7.6
   and compile:

   ./configure; make; sudo make install

3. Before you run Offlickr.py you’ll have to make sure Python knows where to find the libxml2 module. Mine got installed in /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages so I put this directory in my python path:

   export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages

4. Go back to [DIR]: cd ..
5. Before running Offlickr.py you may need to make a modification. I had to do this to avoid getting the error:

   UnboundLocalError: local variable 'isPrivateFailure' referenced before assignment
   What I did (following this Google code issue) is modify line 390, by inserting the line:

       isPrivateFailure = False
   

   make sure the line is properly indented so that Python doesn’t complain.

6. Now we’re ready to rock and roll. Find your flickr ID (e.g. mine is 97495157@N00) and run:

   mkdir BACKUP
   ./Offlickr.py -i 97495157@N00 -d BACKUP -p
   

   See the Offlickr.py page above for more commandline options.

Now I have a nice DVD backup of my 2250 flickr photos, complete with metadata! Awesome.

The layout and arrows in the diagram are handled by the XY package (xymatrix) in latex whereas the tableaux are drawn by a complicated latex macro, borrowed from my collaborators and extended in a few ways to produce the figures needed.

By the way, tableau is a French diminutive for “table” and tableaux is it’s plural.