Create a file called ~/.adobe/Acrobat/8.0/JavaScripts/reload.js with:

reloadCurrentDoc = app.trustedFunction(
   function(currentDoc) {
      app.beginPriv();
      currentDocView=currentDoc.viewState;
      currentDocPath=currentDoc.path;
      currentDoc.closeDoc();
      currentDoc=app.openDoc(currentDocPath);
      currentDoc.viewState=currentDocView;
      app.endPriv();
   });

app.addMenuItem({
  cName: "reloadCurDoc",
  cUser: "Reload",
  cParent: "File",
  cExec: "reloadCurrentDoc(event.target);",
  cEnable: "event.rc = (event.target != null);",
  nPos: 0
});

app.addToolButton({
  cName: "reloadCurDoc",
  cExec: "reloadCurrentDoc(event.target);",
  cToolText: "Reload the current document",
  cEnable: "event.rc = (event.target != null);",
  cLabel: "Reload",
  nPos: -1
});

Reopen Acroread and you now have a reload button!

Subject: Dress in Hall
To all junior members
Dress in Hall
Some junior members evidently need to be reminded that the dress code for Hall is smart casual. The porters have instructions not to admit those dressed for the beach or other diversions.

PAL

Dean

It’s like being in high school again or something.

It is really easy to get one of these up and going. You can just follow the instructions in the Getting Started Guide. You need to set up various security aspect (which you can do easily from the command line) and then fire up an instance. You need to pick one of the virtual machine images (AMIs). I suggest using one of the Ubuntu images here.

The frustrating part is that unlike web hosting, in scientific computation I want to fire up an instance and take it down easily. Unfortunately, any data on the instance is lost when you take it down. So, to get the tools required for your work, you will need to make a custom image. You start with a base image, set it all up and then store off your custom image to Amazon S3. From there you can start an instance from your private image just like you could with the public instances. Whatever calculations you make will need to be stored somewhere else if you shut down the instance again. If you have some ephemeral state that you require for starting your computation then you’ll need to upload it whenever you fire up a new instance.

So, it’s not a magic bullet, but it seems to have some nice potential. The 8-core machine is kind of like renting a Ferarri for a day. Even though my code parallellizes quite well, I don’t get anything near linear speedup. I think this may be due to limited cache-coherency. Nonetheless, it seems about twice as fast as the dual-core machine.

There are about 300 million men, women, and children currently living (legally) in the United States, so the bailout is equal to roughly $2,300 per person. That’s right around what we each paid, on average, for gas and oil in 2006 ($2,227) and a bit less than our average personal tax burden ($2,432).

Think the price of gas is too high? Well, you could buy gas or you could pay for the bailout. Are you someone who complains a lot about welfare recipients getting money from your taxes? Here you go – you’re providing retrospective welfare to people who got rich taking the risks that caused this crisis. That’s basically all of your tax dollars right there: no Iraq or Afghanistan, no health care or veterans’ services, no highways or education – all your tax money this year is going straight to this bailout.

Ask yourself: how has “elitism” become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn’t seem too intelligent or well educated.