Programming

The spaced repetition software system Anki is the de facto standard for foreign language vocabulary learning. Its algorithm requires lots of performance data to schedule flashcards in the most efficient way. Anki displays these statistics in a group of thorough and informative statistical graphs and descriptive text.

However, they aren’t easily available for the end-user to export. Thus, the reason behind the companion projects AnkiStats and AnkiStatsServer.

The premise is that you can run your own more extensive experiments and statistical tests on the data once you have it in hand. A bit of technical expertise is needed to get it operational but if you are up to it, clone the github repos above and go for it.

I have a number of AppleScript applications that need to run at odd times. These maintenance tasks often attempt to run while the computer is sleeping. Particularly those that rely on UI scripting do not function during this period.

This most flexible way of dealing with this is to manipulate the power management settings directly via the pmset(1) command.

The variety of options available using pmset is staggering and beyond the scope of this post. Here’s what I do to wake the computer up at specific times so that scheduled AppleScripts can run:

After waking up this morning with my mouse locked onto the Anki icon in the dock and trying to figure out how to get Activity Monitor up and running so I could force quite my Automator application that I described yesterday I figured it was back-to-the-drawing board.

I’d like to have used the Accessibility Inspector to manipulate the PyQt objects in Anki’s windows, they aren’t exposed in a may that you can script them. But System Events rules all.

While working on a project to automatically collect statistics on my Anki databases (stay tuned…) I worked out a system for scheduling synchronization from my desktop OS X machine.

Prerequisites

• LaunchControl is a GUI application that lets you create and manage user services on OS X
• Anki is a spaced repetition memorization software system

The solution relies on Automator. Normally, I don’t care much for Automator. It has too many limits on what tasks I can accomplish and workflows created with it are often fragile. However, in this case, we take advantage of its workflow recording feature. We’re going to record the process of opening Anki, selecting the profile to sync, then quitting Anki. This sequence of events ensures that the database on the local system is synchronized with the remote version.

Hexo, the static blogging system that I use is very extensible and provides numerous hooks into generation pipeline.

Because the blogging system that I use doesn’t apply finely grained object-level caching rules, I end up with objects such as images that cache appropriately but an index.html page that does not. I don’t want client browsers to hang on to the main index.html page for more than an hour or so because it should update much more frequently than that as its content changes.

It’s possible that I could dig around under the hood of hexo and create a version that applies customized caching rules. Instead, I make a second pass over the content, adjusting the Cache-Control and other metadata according to my needs. For this task I use the Amazon Web Services command line interface AWS-CLI.

This blog is served from an Amazon S3 bucket, a practice that has worked well for several years. With static blogs such as this, object caching is an important consideration. Since the blog is generated on the writer’s client side then synced to the server rather than being generated dynamically on request, the browser caching practices are a consideration. I have a few comments about how I’ve dealt with caching for this blog. This isn’t meant to be a definitive piece on caching.

Speaking of Anki, here’s a Swiss Army knife of database utilities that provides searching, moving and renaming functions from the command line.

On GitHub.

You can do things like this to rename and collect tags:

$ anki_tool mv_tags '(dinosaur|mammal)' animal

Looks cool.

[N.B. 2016-03-26 Nathan Ifill pointed out that it is possible to use Anki’s built-in conditional replacement feature to do what I’m illustrating. I’ll have to work on another example!]

Anki is a widely-used flashcard application. If you’re learning a foreign language and you’re not using Anki, you should be.

If you are using Anki and are picky about the appearance of the cards, you should know that JavaScript can be used in the card template. This opens up a number of possibilities for dynamic cards. I’m just touching on the technique here.

“I actually called her, and she never mentioned my name. You know, I - when I sold - oh, did I get a call from one of the Environmental Protection Agency, they couldn’t find it because it comes out in big globs, right, and you say to yourself, ‘How does that help us?’”

Trump is one of the most amusing orators in the history of presidential politics in the the U.S. But I wondered what would happen I took the text of a few of his speeches and fed it into a algorithm that uses Markov chains to shake things up a bit.