Thanks to Jonathan L. for the suggestion to check out this tagcloud widget. It’s interesting that someone would write a widget for this. I wrote a basic tag cloud before with simple scaling arithmetic to render tags in different font sizes. This widget adds a few more features. The extra features also add significant weight to the page footprint. So, some weeding work might be necessary to eliminate extra unneeded features.
Archive for May, 2008
How to create histograms with NeoOffice
Here is a tutorial that I found that shows how to create histograms. For the part on Filling a Cell Range, I needed to enter the start point, end point, and an increment.
First impression with ocropus
OCRopus is an OCR system. I initially wanted to see how it can handle handwriting. So, I gave it a try by installing it on Ubuntu 8.04. To get started, I used Synaptic to install the following required software:
- jam
- libpng12-dev
- libjpeg-dev
- libtiff-dev
I installed one of the optional packages, libaspell-dev. Beyond that, I also installed build-essentials for the compilers needed to build from source.
Next, I checked out tesseract-ocr from Google.
svn co http://tesseract-ocr.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ tesseract-ocr
I had to use the patch from this forum thread. To install the patch, I used this command:
patch java/makefile < java
Note that java is the patch file and java/makefile is the make file in tesseract-ocr/java directory. After I applied the patch, I continued building tesseract-ocr
./configure make sudo make install
Now I have all the required software, now I am ready to install ocropus:
svn co http://ocropus.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ cd trunk ./configure jam sudo jam install
By this step, the basic ocropus is installed.
One thing I noticed after the initial install, I needed to create /usr/local/ocroscript directory and create the following two soft links within the newly created directory.:
ocroscript -> ../bin/ocroscript scripts -> ../share/ocropus/script
To test the software, I used the sample image came with the software:
/usr/local/bin/ocrocmd /data/pages/alice_1.png |less
The default test case above worked for me. Next, I took out my camera and took a picture of my handwriting. Upload the image and ran it through the OCR software. I was disappointed to find that ocropus couldn’t recognize my handwriting very well. Is there something that can do better?
Open source Proxy for AJAX Calls
In response to Judit’s question in my HTTP Proxy Servlet post, there is actually a XmlHttpProxy Client in jMaki. It has some useful features that’s not available in HTTP Proxy Servlet. Check it out!
