https://github.com/geoffreyanderson/linuxImage2AWS-EBS

I’ll be sure to beef this entry up a little more about what information I referenced to develop the script and probably more on its use!

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:xd="http://www.oxygenxml.com/ns/doc/xsl" version="1.0"
    xmlns:w="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main">
    <xd:doc scope="stylesheet">
        <xd:desc>
            <xd:p><xd:b>Created on:</xd:b> Apr 25, 2011</xd:p>
            <xd:p><xd:b>Author:</xd:b> Geoffrey Anderson</xd:p>
            <xd:p><xd:b>E-mail:</xd:b> geoff@geoffreyanderson.net</xd:p>
            <xd:p><xd:b>Website:</xd:b> http://geoffreyanderson.net</xd:p>
        </xd:desc>
    </xd:doc>

    <xsl:variable name="newline">
        <xsl:text>
        </xsl:text>
    </xsl:variable>
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:for-each select="/w:comments/w:comment">
################
# Comment #<xsl:number value="position()" format="1"/> #
################
<xsl:for-each select="w:p">
<xsl:value-of select="$newline" />
<xsl:for-each select="w:r">
<xsl:value-of select="w:t"/>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:for-each>

----

</xsl:for-each>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

The bad indenting is intentional so that you get output without weird tabbing/formatting. To use this (under Ubuntu, at least) simply unzip the DOCX file:

$ unzip someWordDoc.docx -d someWordDocDir/

And run the above XSL against the comments.xml file under the “word” directory:

$ xsltproc convertDocxCommentsToPlainText.xsl someWordDocDir/word/comments.xml

By doing this, you’ll get output similar to the following:

################
# Comment #1   #
################

        text of the first comment

----

################
# Comment #2   #
################

        text of the second comment

----

Cheers!

The actual information on doing this all is located here: http://pastcounts.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/using-xsl-to-convert-docx-to-latex/

First, you need to break open the .docx file. It basically is a simple zipped archive, so an ‘unzip testdoc.docx’ should do the trick; you’ll end up with several files and sub-directories, of which only the directory called ‘word’ is necessary for this test.

Second, here’s the XSL transformation to save in a file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:w="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main">

<xsl:template match="/w:document">
\documentclass{article}
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="w:body">
\begin{document}
<xsl:apply-templates/>
\end{document}
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="w:p">
<xsl:apply-templates/><xsl:if test="position()!=last()"><xsl:text>

</xsl:text></xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="w:r">
<xsl:if test="w:footnoteReference"><xsl:text>\footnote{</xsl:text>
<xsl:call-template name="footnote">
<xsl:with-param name="fid"><xsl:value-of select="//@w:id"/></xsl:with-param>
</xsl:call-template>
<xsl:text>}</xsl:text>
</xsl:if>
<xsl:if test="w:rPr/w:b"><xsl:text>\textbf{</xsl:text></xsl:if>
<xsl:call-template name="pastb"/>
<xsl:if test="w:rPr/w:b"><xsl:text>}</xsl:text></xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template name="pastb">
<xsl:if test="w:rPr/w:i"><xsl:text>\textit{</xsl:text></xsl:if>
<xsl:call-template name="pasti"/>
<xsl:if test="w:rPr/w:i"><xsl:text>}</xsl:text></xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template name="pasti">
<xsl:apply-templates select="w:t"/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template name="footnote">
<xsl:param name="fid"/>
<xsl:apply-templates select="document('footnotes.xml')/w:footnotes/w:footnote[@w:id=$fid]"/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="//w:footnote">
<xsl:apply-templates select="w:p"/>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

You can save that in a file called docxtolatex.xsl in the ‘word’ directory. Then, in that directory, run ‘xsltproc docxtolatex.xsl document.xml’, and you’ll have your screen full of the document, in LaTeX markup.

You’ll notice, that this XSLT only converts bold, italics and footnotes. But then again, that’s what I often only need to convert…

So yea..I’ll definitely use this to convert some word docs I have that I’ve been wanting to push into latex format. I also think I might do some additional research into tweaking this XSL so that *.docx files could potentially be converted to LaTeX, in their entirety!

Also — in order to successfully post a copy of the XSL stylesheet above, I found myself needing a script to safely escape all the xml entities….if you’re interested, here’s that script I just slapped together for doing this:

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php
$handle = @fopen($argv[1], "r");
if ($handle) {
    while (($buffer = fgets($handle, 4096)) !== false) {
        echo htmlentities($buffer);
    }
    if (!feof($handle)) {
        echo "Error: unexpected fgets() fail\n";
    }
    fclose($handle);
}
?>

Simply copy the above script into a php file, make it executable, and then run it with an input file as an argument and it’ll spit out whatever XML input you give it the encoded version of the markup.

I’ve been meaning to write a more meaningful post on how put together my current XMonad setup and what not. Perhaps in the near future!

You can get a glance at my work on the proposal here –> http://capstone.geoffreyanderson.net/

As for the other site, I finally got my partner to start designing a better portfolio site for her work. We set up a basic sub-domain for her here –> http://cullenillustration.geoffreyanderson.net/

Check out her stuff, pretty good art!

RIT Hockey on Halloween!

Phew, it all seems like so much, yet I’m still finding that I’ve got an awful lot of free time (y’know…since I don’t have 16 hours worth of real classes..).  Suffice to say, I’m excited for all the things I’ll get to work on this year, and especially getting to spend a lot more time with my partner now that we’ve moved in together at the new apartments across from campus!

So, to break down everything I’m working on this school term (and year):

• Need to (start and) finish my capstone proposal for a potential course in Business Intelligence that could be offered in the IST department at RIT
• Want an ‘A’ in Data Architecture and Management — I should probably get started on the paper we have due next week
• I need to create some more in-class exercises for the Database course I’m TA’ing so our students can get a better grasp of the material.  This is also because the course format changed to a “studio style” class (students meet 3x a week for 2 hours) from it’s old lecture format (1.5 hour lecture 2x a week and a 2 hour lab 1x a week).  I also need to get the new coursework to our database tutors for this year.
• I need to rebuild the virtual machine for our Information Assurance course at some point and also tweak the database for our Database Performance and Tuning class.
• Try and keep up with the homework assignments for Native Mobile Application Development (since I’m “sitting in” and not auditing/registered for the class)

Beyond that, I’ll try to snap some pictures of the changes happening around campus to share!

I discussed this idea with some folks from TOS and they’re all for it.  Unfortunately, after discussing it with a professor in the IST department here (at RIT), he opened my eyes to the flip-side of what may occur when pushing students to access these resources: the “cheating” aspect.  This certainly poses a challenge because, as I was talking to Mel about this, I was able to clarify that there are some hardships that students need to go through in academia to genuinely grasp some of the material they need to learn.  Having access to the various FOSS resources, like IRC, may allow them to skip the hardship that would detriment the learning process.  The example I made was how in our Computer Science department, students need to code different data structures by hand while students in Information Sciences and Technology department don’t need to code data structures by hand.  Being an IT student myself, I still don’t necessarily know which data structure might be best for certain situations (regardless of how much I’ve read up on them), while some of my friends who went through the CS curriculum know it like the back of their hand.  My point is that directing freshmen to access to different FOSS resources might cause them to skip the ‘hardship’ of learning how something genuinely works.

The primary solution I see to this conundrum would be introducing students to the FOSS resources and community later on in their academic career. (say…sophomore or junior year).  The reason I feel this would be more effective is because students have gone through the initial learning experiences/hardships and may be a little more independent when solving problems without automatically falling back on the community as a crutch.  I feel that this would also allow them to be more effective in giving back to the community.

Mel pointed out that by having students blog about their experiences with an academic hardship and how they fell back on the community may also be a solution, but I still feel there might be some loss in the educational value of some content if students are readily able to fall back on a community resource to solve their problem.

Thoughts?  Please comment and give me feedback!  I’m hoping to get some other perspectives and thoughts on this so I can find the best way to help the FOSS community and resources penetrate into our curriculum earlier.

Presently, I just finished annotating some content for the DBMS Fundamentals class (which I’ll go back and flesh out more at some point!). Now I’ve moved to preparing a wiki for a class in the Fall quarter, and I’m really excited that the professor of the course was receptive to trying this new approach (using a wiki!) for the class. I’m still grappling with the best way to organize some of the information, but as of now, I’m preparing the wiki to help introduce students to wiki’ing and using collaborative tools like Etherpad and *crosses fingers* IRC.

Anyway, I should get back to work, so I’ll just leave this here for now!

The first thing we started on that I thought was very important was the “Rose-Bud-Thorn review” that Chris had us all do.  It allowed everyone in the group to express their opinions on the week thus far and, more importantly, provide feedback for Chris and Mel on how they could help improve POSSE for other people.  Next up was a hefty walkthrough of the Bugzilla interface, which I found to be particularly interesting (seeing as I’ve previously used Trac ).  It was also interesting to interview with some students during our lunch hour so that we could all try to shed light on our perspective of Open Source and how we feel it could be integrated in the classroom.

Beyond that, we broke off into project groups and I found myself talking with Luke an awful lot about python (<3) before we started working on the Measure activity.

Ohhhh the Measure activity….:P  We ended up debugging issues that were already “resolved” though…they weren’t marked “resolved” on the bug tracker.  Anyhow, it got us to better grasp how the code for an activity works and after a little more bug hacking, personally, I lost interest in measure because I wasn’t sure what else I’d be able to contribute.  That’s when I decided to help out a student debug his work on the IRC activity and well…I got about 2 hours deep into that and still got some work to do today

Also…dinner tonight…mmmmmmmmmmmmm