Posted by Parent, a member of the Amador Valley High School community, on Oct 26, 2009 at 9:37 am

What are they up to? Not much from what I hear. The parent community participants all want to quit because they are not allowed to be real participants and give input just there so the "Board" can say they have public input...sad.

PUSD links to pdf's have not worked for a long time, they know but won't fix it so we all can download correctly. It's one thing this happens with meeting minutes but sometimes happens with students homework assignments too. Tech department not working well, no money and many good people lost jobs or were reassigned.

Posted by a reader, a resident of the Another Pleasanton neighborhood neighborhood, on Oct 26, 2009 at 12:07 pm

The downloads work fine for me? Have you run a system scan with your anti-virus software?

Posted by Stacey, a resident of the Amberwood/Wood Meadows neighborhood, on Oct 26, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Stacey is a member (registered user) of PleasantonWeekly.com

The problem is not client software, although in some cases it would be (i.e. improperly installed/configured Adobe browser plugin).

The school district's web server doesn't send a closing End of File (EOF) on some PDF files. In one case, a PDF I downloaded that didn't work turned out to be a Microsoft Word Document that was named with the .pdf extension. The true broken PDFs without an EOF are most likely the result of an issue occurring when the file is uploaded to the web server.

As I have heard, this problem has been going on for a long time and continues after others have complained. I doubt very much it will be fixed.

Posted by Stacey, a resident of the Amberwood/Wood Meadows neighborhood, on Oct 26, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Stacey is a member (registered user) of PleasantonWeekly.com

DCoT wrote: "By the way, why won't PUSD post .pdf files that are text searchable?"

I think it is due to how they are making the PDFs. For example, if one takes a Word Document and converts it to PDF then the text will be encoded as text. If one takes a printed paper and scans it, if the scanning program isn't set to do OCR (optical character recognition), the text will be encoded as an image.

It is somewhat mystifying as to why a printed copy would be scanned if these documents originally were written on a word processing program. I can only assume that when the meeting minutes are put together, because they are made of several different electronic documents, the operators aren't learned in how to make a single PDF of multiple Word documents.

Posted by a reader, a resident of the Another Pleasanton neighborhood neighborhood, on Oct 26, 2009 at 1:03 pm

Do you have a link to one of the broken files? Everyone I have tried works.

Posted by Stacey, a resident of the Amberwood/Wood Meadows neighborhood, on Oct 26, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Stacey is a member (registered user) of PleasantonWeekly.com

Parent,

Post a link to a PDF that doesn't work for you.

Posted by Stacey, a resident of the Amberwood/Wood Meadows neighborhood, on Oct 26, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Stacey is a member (registered user) of PleasantonWeekly.com

Reader,

Try this: Web Link

Posted by Stacey, a resident of the Amberwood/Wood Meadows neighborhood, on Oct 26, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Stacey is a member (registered user) of PleasantonWeekly.com

Now here's an interesting link. This one didn't work for me before. Now it does. Web Link

I had saved the broken PDF file to my computer and am able to compare the two files. They're the same up until the end. The broken copy is missing about 600 lines at the end of the file. The only difference in my client is updates to Firefox.

So I try again to download this file, this time using wget on a UNIX box. wget's first attempt didn't download the whole file. It had to try again. So something is still funny with PUSD's webserver and the serving of this file. It cuts off the download near the end of the file. Maybe the second attempt worked because the full file got loaded into some web server buffer by after the first request. *shrug* I'm no Microsoft IIS/ASP.NET expert.

wget www.pleasanton.k12.ca.us/HumanResources/CertificatedInfo/Downloads/APTAgreementUpdateFinal102307.pdf

-- www.pleasanton.k12.ca.us/HumanResources/CertificatedInfo/Downloads/APTAgreementUpdateFinal102307.pdf

Resolving www.pleasanton.k12.ca.us... 206.110.20.211

Connecting to www.pleasanton.k12.ca.us|206.110.20.211|:80... connected.

HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK

Length: 498554 (487K) [application/pdf]

Saving to: `APTAgreementUpdateFinal102307.pdf.2'

96% [===================================================================================================================> ] 482,456 131K/s in 3.6s

(131 KB/s) - Connection closed at byte 482456. Retrying.

-- (try: 2) www.pleasanton.k12.ca.us/HumanResources/CertificatedInfo/Downloads/APTAgreementUpdateFinal102307.pdf

Connecting to www.pleasanton.k12.ca.us|206.110.20.211|:80... connected.

HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 206 Partial Content

Length: 498554 (487K), 16098 (16K) remaining [application/pdf]

Saving to: `APTAgreementUpdateFinal102307.pdf.2.1'

100%[++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++===>] 498,554 --.-K/s in 0.1s

(118 KB/s) - `APTAgreementUpdateFinal102307.pdf.2.1' saved [498554/498554]