Nathan VanHoudnos

I did eventually get git to give me back my repository. My steps are posted over on Stack Overflow in case it ever happens again. (Which is won’t because I’ll have a backup that isn’t Ubuntu One!)

Ubuntu is great, but making it play nice with latex is a bit of a pain. There are three parts to this:

1. Ubuntu comes with APT, a really nice package management system that lets you easily install, update, and remove software that has been helpfully packaged by both Canonical and the wider Debian community.
2. Tex Live, the official release of latex, comes with tlmgr, an equally great package manager for managing the all of the latex packages on CTAN.
3. Ubuntu’s distribution of latex omits tlmgr and forces developers to repackage the latex packages to fit into the APT scheme. (source)

This seems to be why my previous post about fixing moderncv for Ubuntu was so popular. It is not obvious to most users that to fix the

LaTeX Error: File `marvosym.sty' not found.

error, the user has to both (1) find the Ubuntu package that provides marvosym.sty and then (2) install that Ubuntu package along with every other latex package that happens to be bundled with it.

All of that is fine if a kind-hearted developer had the foresight to bundle the latex package you want/need in a convient form for installation with APT. If not, you have two options:

1. Keep Tex Live under the control of Ubuntu’s package management and manually install the Latex packages you need. An easy way to do this is described below.
2. Break out Tex Live from Ubuntu’s package manager and use tlmgr for Latex package management. This gives you MikTex style latex package management for Ubuntu, but you are responsible for keeping Tex Live up to date. See the answers to this Stack Exchange question for details of how to do it.

For now I’m sticking with Option 1. Here is a worked example to install the Latex package outlines for Ubuntu:

1. Look at the path Latex searches to find packages with ‘kpsepath tex’ which should give output similar to:

   nathanvan@nathanvan-N61Jq:~$ kpsepath tex | sed -e 's/:/\n:/g'
   .
   :/home/nathanvan/.texmf-config/tex/kpsewhich//
   :/home/nathanvan/.texmf-var/tex/kpsewhich//
   :/home/nathanvan/texmf/tex/kpsewhich//
   :/etc/texmf/tex/kpsewhich//
   :!!/var/lib/texmf/tex/kpsewhich//
   :!!/usr/local/share/texmf/tex/kpsewhich//
   :!!/usr/share/texmf/tex/kpsewhich//
   :!!/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/kpsewhich//
   :/home/nathanvan/.texmf-config/tex/generic//
   :/home/nathanvan/.texmf-var/tex/generic//
   :/home/nathanvan/texmf/tex/generic//
   :/etc/texmf/tex/generic//
   :!!/var/lib/texmf/tex/generic//
   :!!/usr/local/share/texmf/tex/generic//
   :!!/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic//
   :!!/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/generic//
   :/home/nathanvan/.texmf-config/tex///
   :/home/nathanvan/.texmf-var/tex///
   :/home/nathanvan/texmf/tex///
   :/etc/texmf/tex///
   :!!/var/lib/texmf/tex///
   :!!/usr/local/share/texmf/tex///
   :!!/usr/share/texmf/tex///
   :!!/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex///
   

2. Note that the entry on line 21 is ‘/home/nathanvan/texmf/tex//’, which tells latex to search every subdirectory under ‘/home/nathanvan/texmf/tex’ to find packages that haven’t been found yet. You’ll have something similar for your home directory.
3. Make a ‘texmf/tex/latex’ directory under your home directory:
nathanvan@nathanvan-N61Jq:~$ mkdir -p ~/texmf/tex/latex

4. Find the pacakge you want on CTAN, say outlines, because you read this blog post and want to try it out.
5. Download the ‘the contents of this directory bundled as a zip file‘, as CTAN likes to say it, and save it to ‘~/texmf/tex/latex’
6. Unzip it right there:
nathanvan@nathanvan-N61Jq:~$ cd texmf/tex/latex
nathanvan@nathanvan-N61Jq:~/texmf/tex/latex$ ls
outlines.zip
nathanvan@nathanvan-N61Jq:~/texmf/tex/latex$ unzip outlines.zip
Archive: outlines.zip
creating: outlines/
inflating: outlines/outlines.pdf
inflating: outlines/outlines.sty
inflating: outlines/outlines.tex
inflating: outlines/README
nathanvan@nathanvan-N61Jq:~/texmf/tex/latex$ ls
outlines outlines.zip


And then you are done installing the latex package. It works great without any big hassles.

Edit: If the package you were installing contains fonts, this won’t quite work. See Steve Kroon’s comment below for details of how to fix it.

Edit: Thanks to jon for pointing out the correct directory structure for ~/texmf in the first comment to this answer. For the curious, more details, including why the directory is called texmf, can be found here.

Today is the due date for abstracts to Educational Data Mining 2011 in Eindhoven. I’m submitting two things. In a week the paper is due. A week after that I’m at AISTATS 2011. A week after that I’m presenting the last year of my work to the faculty as part of my Advanced Data Analysis / Heinz first paper / PIER IIP project requirements. Expect to hear very little from me for a bit.

Back in undergrad, I wrote a term paper for May Berenbaum’s Insects & People honors seminar. The assignment was to relate something about insects to people’s daily lives. At the time, I was finishing up the first course in the year long classical mechanics sequence, so my daily life was physics problem sets. For the first time, I noticed something. There are a lot of insects in mechanics word problems (if a roach is walking on a turntable…; if a bee files in a spiral parametrized by… ). It seems they were always there, but take a class on insects and all of sudden you notice them making cameos. So, that’s what I wrote about. It was a fun paper.

Seven years later, this paper makes it into the first chapter of her book: The Earwig’s Tail: A Modern Bestiary of Multi-legged Legends.

It’s kinda funny; reading it on Google Books. My only complaint is that she misspelled my last name. It’s not Van Houdnos; it’s VanHoudnos. That’s why I didn’t know about it; I had never google stalked myself with the alternate spelling of “nathan van houdnos” before.

I’m pretty excited about this. I’ll have to see if she’ll send me a signed copy. :)

UPDATE 5/9/2011
This essay in the American Entomologist is actually my first citation in a published work. It’s from Spring 2003, so it beats the book by several years. (Of course, the essay is the relevant part of the book; it’s not like I have two citations or anything.)

My HITS have a rather high bounce rate. Between 40-50% of the Turkers who preview my HIT, choose not to accept it. I previously posted a histogram of the screen widths that I observed from workers who had accepted at least one HIT. That is very clearly a biased sample; it could be that only workers with screens large enough to comfortably display my HIT choose to accept it. I was curious to see if there was another population of Turkers that chose not to accept my HIT because their screens were too small.

I made the necessary modifications to my webapp and then generated the following graph:

Screen resolution observed for Experiment 15

You’ll notice that there isn’t much of a practical difference between the workers who accept the HIT and those that do not. This makes me feel a little better. I’m not worried that my bounce rate is due to a display artifact. It does make me wonder though, is my bounce rate typical?

I wrote in my previous post about some scripts I developed to make interacting with Amazon Mechanical Turk a bit easier from the command line. I didn’t talk much about the web2py + Google AppEngine piece that actually serves the ExternalQuestion HITS. I realized after talking to another PhD student that people might be interested in a way to host general purpose HITS for free. My web2py application does that.

Getting it running is pretty simple. Sign up for an AppEngine account, install their SDK, install web2py into the SDK, and copy my application (really a directory) into your web2py installation. Use the development webserver included with the SDK to test that your installation is sane. Push it to google to make sure your account is working right. Once you have it running on appspot, install the Amazon Command line tools, install my wrapper scripts to make them behave better, and run the test experiment on the sandbox to verify that AMT + GAE + web2py are talking nicely in the clouds.

Once that’s done, defining your own rubrics for HITS is pretty easy:

1. Define a new controller to handle your custom rubrics. Example: grade6.py to hold grade6_test2_problem35_version1
2. Copy the provided method template and modify it to handle a given rubricCode. The template builds a SQLFORM.factory to present the questions to Turkers and then validate the form input. Once the form is accepted, the method processes the result (scores it) and forwards it to a generic method to write it to the GAE datastore and sends it back to AMT. Example: def grade6_test2_problem35_version1() ....
3. Copy the provided view template and modify it to ask the question you want for a given rubric code. The template extends a view class that knows how to display an informed consent in preview mode and track whenever a Turker clicks on a form element. It uses standard web2py tricks to protect you against injection and give you form validation for free. Example: grade6_test2_problem35_version1.html
4. Prep the HITS by using my scripts to cross the rubricCode with the image (or whatever) you want to display. Run it on the sandbox and test it out. Promote the experiment and run it on production when you are ready.

Okay. Well maybe the setup doesn’t look easy, but a complete definition of a HIT is just over 125 lines of code including comments. That’s not really that bad. It’s a heck-of-a-lot easier than trying to put an ExternalQuestion together from scratch. If the internet is interested, I’ll clean up the application code (read: remove the parts pertinent to my research and IRB restrictions) and post it on GitHub. Leave a comment or send me mail if you are interested.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a useful thing. Interacting with it can be a giant pain.

My “standard” approach is to use web2py running on top of Google AppEngine to serve ExternalQuestion HITs. This allows me to have quite a bit of control over the Turker’s experience and collect useful data like when they click on each button in the webapp. Although my current project doesn’t use this click history, a related, later project will. It also let’s me do fun things like use a bit of JavaScript to figure out the distribution of screen widths across workers so that I can optimize their viewing experience.

Anything under 700 pixels is fair game.

But that’s not what this post is about. I’d like to eventually use boto to build the control of AMT directly in to the webapp itself. For now, I’m using the command line interface that Amazon provides. The CLT is an ugly hack that implements the Java API in a bunch of shell scripts. I have written my own wrapper around their scripts that enforces a certain amount of sanity. You can get the scripts over on gitHub.

There isn’t really any documentation beyond the scripts themselves. The idea is that you create an amt-script directory where the new-and-improved scripts live. Under that directory, you create several exp# directories that hold the info that you need for experiments. Even ones are for production runs. Odd ones are for sandbox runs. Once you get a sandbox run working you run buildGoLiveExp.sh and it makes a copy from the staged experiment to a new go-live experiment. It’s a bit of a hack at the moment, but it works for me. I like it because it gives me an audit trail for each thing I run on AMT. Feel free to use them yourself. (Or use them as inspiration for something better that you can write yourself!)

I figured I’d document this since I have to do it again. If you are using Google App Engine and you get the following:

2011-01-26 14:17:45,892 WARNING appengine_rpc.py:405 ssl module not found.
Without the ssl module, the identity of the remote host cannot be verified, and
connections may NOT be secure. To fix this, please install the ssl module from
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ssl .
To learn more, see http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/general.html#rpcssl .

You download the file from the page suggested in the error. Then do this:

vanhoudn@gauze:~/Downloads$ tar xzf ssl-1.15.tar.gz
vanhoudn@gauze:~/Downloads$ cd ssl-1.15/
vanhoudn@gauze:~/Downloads/ssl-1.15$ python2.5 setup.py build


If it worked, great! Just do sudo python2.5 setup.py install and you are done. If not, you may have run into this error:

vanhoudn@gauze:~/Downloads/ssl-1.15$ python2.5 setup.py
looking for /usr/include/openssl/ssl.h
looking for /usr/local/ssl/include/openssl/ssl.h
looking for /usr/contrib/ssl/include/openssl/ssl.h
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "setup.py", line 167, in
ssl_incs, ssl_libs, libs = find_ssl()
File "setup.py", line 142, in find_ssl
raise Exception("No SSL support found")
Exception: No SSL support found


You can fix that by installing the relevant parts of the SSL source code with sudo apt-get install libssl-dev. Trying again you might get:

vanhoudn@gauze:~/Downloads/ssl-1.15$ python2.5 setup.py build
looking for /usr/include/openssl/ssl.h
looking for /usr/include/krb5.h
looking for /usr/kerberos/include/krb5.h
running build
running build_py
running build_ext
building 'ssl._ssl2' extension
gcc -pthread -fno-strict-aliasing -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC -I./ssl/2.5.1 -I/usr/include/python2.5 -c ssl/_ssl2.c -o build/temp.linux-i686-2.5/ssl/_ssl2.o
ssl/_ssl2.c:17:20: error: Python.h: No such file or directory
In file included from ssl/_ssl2.c:76:
./ssl/2.5.1/socketmodule.h:112: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘PyObject_HEAD’
.... lots of other errors ....
error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1


You can fix that by installing the headers for python2.5. Apparently, when I initially installed deadsnakes I forgot to install the headers. Easy enough with sudo apt-get install python2.5-dev. But not I get a bluetooth related error:


In file included from ssl/_ssl2.c:76:
./ssl/2.5.1/socketmodule.h:45:33: error: bluetooth/bluetooth.h: No such file or directory
./ssl/2.5.1/socketmodule.h:46:30: error: bluetooth/rfcomm.h: No such file or directory
./ssl/2.5.1/socketmodule.h:47:29: error: bluetooth/l2cap.h: No such file or directory
./ssl/2.5.1/socketmodule.h:48:27: error: bluetooth/sco.h: No such file or directory


So, you guessed it: sudo apt-get install libbluetooth-dev. Then finally success! Finish with sudo python2.5 setup.py install and the GAE error goes away!