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Dojo 1.0 + OCR

This week Dojo 1.0 was released. I already took a quick look at it, and it looks really nice. Big changes since the last version I used (0.4). The new grid is awesome, I really hope it will be easy to use but I’m pretty sure it will be. The guys from the Dojo community are really good programmers. I spent some timing digging through the code for a fix, I saw several things I didn’t even know were possible with Javascript 🙂
I’ll come back on Dojo once I’ve got some real first hand experience with it, but it looks promising (and also much faster than previous releases)
I already found out that if you pass in a JSON store to your grid, your identifier better be unique or it won’t work (took me some time to figure that one out 🙂 )

A couple of weeks ago We bought a All in one (scanner,fax,printer,copier). The nice thing about this device it let’s you scan 50 pages (document feeder) without having to put every page on the scanner window. That combined with the ability to scan to a networkdrive,email or ftp server makes this device the perfect solution for my administrative problem. My goal is to go to a paperless office but it will take some time until we get there.
Problem is the device scans the images straight to PDF. So text actually becomes an image, you can’t select it, search for text,… it’s not yet what I want. In my Ubuntu I searched for OCR and got some results witch I installed. Almost all of the tools let me scan for text in the PDF, when I saved the document I suddenly could search for text in the document. Still the selecting of text wasn’t possible. Philip told me that Google had a solution that let’s you convert these kind of documents to XHtml. I knew they were developing an OCR tool but didn’t know it would be able to do this kind of stuff. I tried to install it but I’m still missing some dependecies, I’ll try it later again.

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Am I a trader ?

I’m an IT geek with a real affection for FLOSS, but I’m not anti not-FLOSS (hmmm, weird sentence 🙂 ). I also use Microsoft on a daily base, Mac on a weekly base because my customers use it. At my company nearly all software is opensource, +90% of our operating systems are Linux.
I always try to push my customers to FLOSS software but in the end they decide what happens. I understand that some people see it black and white, but in my daily business live I’ve seen a lot of cases where opensource isn’t the best choice (yet). I would love to bring a product up to speed with the closed source competitors, but most of my customers don’t want to wait on that, so they choose a closed source product. We as IT people see that this is a bad choice in the ultimate end, but in the near future they need a solution and then the closed source is a better option.

So am I a trader? Hmm in my eyes not, but then again in some people there eyes I maybe am. Like the saying goes:
The truth is in the eye of the beholder 🙂

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the friendlyness of belgium banks

Yesterday my girlfriend and I went to the bank. We wanted to know how much we could loan to buy a house. In the weekends we are always in my birth-town and during the week we are in Leuven. So because it was weekend we scheduled an appointment with the bank in my birt-town. The day started badly as we couldn’t find a parking space, I had to drive 3 rounds before finding one. I already dropped my girlfriend off at the bank. When I entered the first thing the lady said was that our bank account wasn’t attached to the their office but to the office in Leuven. She mentioned this several times during the conversation.

She started explaining all kinds of stuff, things we actually didn’t need to know. We just wanted some figures to know in what kind of categoy we could start looking for houses. After an hour here next appointment showed up and we still didn’t have an answer, so I bluntly said, could you please just give us figure. At the moment we still don’t have one and that was the purpose of this meeting. So she made one for us. When she did, she saw that there was a lot of information missing on our bank account to give us an accurate figure. So she had to improvise a bit.

During the whole conversation she was unfriendly, simply because we weren’t attached to their office. I understand that they probably get funding according to the bank accounts attached, but you don’t have to be unfriendly. What I don’t understand is why she did this. Doesn’t she understand that it is thanks to people like us, who want to loan from there company that she gets paid? I go into a bank and want to get a loan, I’ll be paying 100.000 € interests part of this money is here paycheck. Okay probably the bank in Leuven will get slightly more but then again thanks to here we won’t loan it at the bank we visited so neither will get the money. I really hate it that most flemish banks think they are almighty, because they are not. If I want I can close all my bank accounts and move to another bank. It’s a free market, remember?

In the end,my girlfriend and I decided we are going to move all our money from our current banks to another bank (maybe even a not Belgium bank).

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Ubuntu gutsy + Google Calendar

This weekend I upgraded my main desktop from Feisty to Gutsy. It went pretty smooth I have to admit. Just click upgrade and it works as it supposed. I had installed the Ubuntu Studio theme and that got upgraded too. When my X came back up I was really amazed, I had to remember to close my jaw.
I really like the gray theme I have now. It’s much more clearer than the former one. (I could have switched to another one, but didn’t want too 🙂 )

I also noticed they ditched Gaim and switched to Pidgin. I was using it already on my F7 and works perfect with my 2 hotmail,1 google and 1 jabber account 😛

Another thing I really like is that nautilus now has the Documents,Photos,… folders in the main opendialog-form.

I have to conclude it feels like another successful iteration of the Gnome desktop and Ubuntu distro!

On planet gnome I saw this article. In the feature list it states

• Viewing default calendar
• Creating/modifying/deleting the appointments

Hubba hubba, /me wants this for his desktop. I use Google Calendar all the time. My girlfriend even uses it. I still have to find a better Calendar web application! I even get notified by SMS.
At the moment I just import it as a read only calendar, so getting the other CUD features is … … SWEET

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New OS’s in my house

Like I posted a couple of weeks ago, I bought a Windows Vista laptop. The more I use it, the more I’m convinced it ain’t that great. Even friends of mine who are microsoft consultants don’t like it. So the things you read about it are really true 🙂

I have a customer who has a couple of Macs inhouse and they asked me to do something on it. I had never used it before and the first experience was kinda weird. Because you are used to using computers, you can everything rather quickly. But your feel stupid and slow. If somebody would ask me a support question I couldn’t answer it. So I bought myself a MacBook. The smallest cheapest version that’s available. And I have to say it’s actually really nice. It actually feals familiar to my Gnome desktop even thought it is a bit different.

The thing I like the most is the fact that underneath this system, there’s a BSD kernel running. And offcourse the hardware … well what can you say about it. I wish they would produce Linux prebuilt laptops like that. I would buy one immediately. (Although I miss my firefox spelling checker (default on my Ubuntu system) 🙂 )

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Comments

As I don’t check my comments a lot (they are full of spam) I did check them and filtered out the spam. It seems there are people reading my blog \o/ !!!

On my linux PDA phone someone pointed me to http://www.road.de. It does seem like an interesting product. I contacted them asking about compatibility with Belgium and about prices. I hope to get an answer. There os is using a linux 2.6 kernel and QTopia is there GUI framework. Don’t know if QTopia is really fully opensource but its prolly more opensource than the IPhone will ever be 🙂

In another comment someone posted the following:

Linux has broken through ages ago. Only the sheep haven’t noticed yet.

While I consider projects like Ubuntu and GNOME and KDE to be dangerous to the progress of Linux, they do contribute to the success of Linux in that they bring sheep over who will eventually realize the full potential of Linux and start using it normally.

What I meant with my blog entry was if Linux will break through in the mass market desktop space. IMHO it only has when you go into the local computershop or local GB or … and you can buy a computer with a Linux preinstalled. In Belgium I haven’t seen it yet.
Another measurement are the sheep if you say microsoft or windows to a sheep they know what you mean. Many of my friends are sheep and if I talk about Linux they don’t have clue what I’m talking about.

I measure the break throught of linux using these 2 items among us geeks Linux indeed has broken through ages ago (I’m using it +10 years know and you don’t here me complain 🙂 ). And it’s definitely here to stay no question about that, but the general public doesn’t have a clue (yet).

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Linux phone / pda

Does anybody know a Linux based phone that you can actually use to phone,sms and that has a wifi connection? (current openmoko can’t sms yet AFAIK)

The guys over at openmoko are almost there, but they don’t have the wifi support in there current product. The next release should include the wifi connection. I was just wondering if anybody knows such a phone please do let me know?

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Windows vs Linux

I was wondering if Linux finally will break through. Now HP also started offering Linux computers it won’t take long before all major computer vendors all will be offering Linux computers IMHO.

I’m pro Linux and I do think it is a better OS than Windows but I’m just wondering if it will gain more market share. And if it does if the reason will be that it is free,better,… or just because MS dropped the ball with Vista … If you look at the news sites, you get a lot of messages saying people want to downgrade back to XP. I wonder how the IT world will look the next couple of years.

As much as I’m pro Linux I actually don’t hope that MS will get broken down (like SCO). You might think ‘WTF’ but from my point of view MS doesn’t create that bad tools. I for one am pro VS.NET, I really like it as an IDE. In my dayjob I’m a JEE developer but at night I put on my black cape and mask and develop dotnet solutions for customers. You might ask why ? But the answer is actually very very simple. I yet have to find a tool that let’s me create a solution as quick as VS.NET. So if Linux will prevail (I do hope so) I actually also hope MS will become a tools vendor on the Linux platform and make there dotnet environment fully Linux compliant.

In short let’s just all live happily together 😀

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IBM Lotus Symphony

As most people probably know by now, IBM has released Lotus Symphony. But what’s the idea behind it? Okay it’s based on the Eclipse RCP, supports ODF and is free (not sure if it’s opensource). The also announced thy are backing Openoffice but why create a new office suite if you already support one? Why not focus on Openoffice, maybe even create a paid version (like the do with Eclipse and WSAD)? That would make more sense to me … Anybody got some more information on this ?

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Poeff

My server was making a lot of noise, after inspection it seemed the fan on the videocard was making the noise. As it is a headless server that I use as vmware server I thought just unplug the stupid fan you don’t use the graphics card. It booted and noise was gone, whoeray!!
When I came back from our soccer game the server was down. (Not to worry this is an inhouse development server) I tried to reboot but nothing. I unplugged it, replugged it and started it. Sparks were shooting out of my videocard. As I still have an onboard card, I unplugged it and rebooted. Now everything works fine but now I lost one graphics card 🙁