Python Portugal: Latest planet entries

SeriesFinale for GNOME

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:26:42 +0000

As promised in some of my previous posts about SeriesFinale, I have finally ported it to GNOME.

For the ones who don’t know about this pet project of mine, SeriesFinale is a TV shows browser and tracker application that was originally developed for Maemo Fremantle. While I use it all the time in my N900, I have been asked to port it to GNOME and I also thought it’d be a good thing to have it in my favorite desktop.

The source code for the port can be found in the “gnome” branch of the SeriesFinale project in Gitorious, hopefully I’ll find time to clean the code a bit and prepare Debian and RPM packages. This means that you can try it and install it from source by cloning the git repository, pulling the “gnome” branch and install it “the Python way”:

# python setup.py install
(warning for non-Pythonistas: there is no setup.py uninstall but you get to see where the files are copied to by running this command)

If you find some bugs, you can file them in the Maemo Bugzilla for now (be sure to specify the platform).
Let’s see if we come up with some sort of synchronization for SF in the future so you don’t have to be marking your episodes twice.
For now, if you want to start with the SF information you had on your N900, just copy the series.db file under “~/.osso/seriesfinale” in Maemo to “~/.seriesfinale” in GNOME.

Here is a screencast to show you how it looks like:

SeriesFinale for GNOME from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.

Hope you enjoy SF on GNOME!

OCRFeeder version 0.7.1a released

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 18:04:16 +0000

The 0.7.1a version of OCRFeeder has been released.

This version introduces some tasks performed by Emergya as part of the GuadaLinfo Accessible project, such as:
* Importation from a scanner device.
* Copying text from the content boxes to the clipboard.
* Users can now use the typical spell-checker dialog to correct mistakes in the text recognized by the OCR engines.

Other highlights include:

* Rewritten ocrfeeder-cli (which also introduces a help method now)
* Added the automatic detection of the Cuneiform OCR engine
* Move the OCRFeeder modules to its own folder (so it is better organized and doesn’t conflict with other modules when installing it)

And some bug fixing:

* Add the help option to ocrfeeder-cli (gb#630829)
* Fix selecting all areas
* Fix ellipsis and title in the queued events dialog
* Prevent “invisible” boxes creation
* Remove temporary images for the Tesseract OCR engine

A big thanks to the great GNOME translators for keeping OCRFeeder available in a number of languages and to Berto for making it available in Debian (which later got into Ubuntu as well).

Just as I was releasing the 0.7.1a version I realized the spell-checker.ui file was not being installed so I quickly did a tiny release, hence the 0.7.1a and not simply 0.7.1.

Download OCRFeeder 0.7.1a source tarball

Small update to my WordPress Export to HTML script

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 21:33:36 +0000

Original post. Code repository.

The Magical Art of Extracting Meaning From Data

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:52:22 +0000

The Magical Art of Extracting Meaning From Data (presentation slides in PDF format)

Case Study Project Code for The Magical Art of Extracting Meaning From Data (zip file with python source code)

Presentation Video (partial) from sapo videos:

Install Numpy and SciPy on Mac OSX – Scipy Superpack

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:54:37 +0000

StrongInference – Scipy Superpack: “This shell script will install recent 64-bit builds of Numpy (2.0) and Scipy (0.9), as well as PyMC (2.1 beta) for OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on Intel Macintosh. All builds are based on recent development code from each package, which means though some bugs may be fixed and features added, they also may be more unstable than the official releases. I have also included release builds of Matplotlib 1.0 and iPython, rather than the development versions, under the assumption that most users prefer stable versions of these packages. Distributing them together should improve interoperability, since the supporting packages (Scipy, Matplotlib, PyMC) were all built against the accompanying build of Numpy. These packages were compiled on OS X 10.6 using Apple’s Python 2.6.1, FFTW 3.2.2 and GCC 4.2 (build 5646). To avoid compatibility issues, the installer also optionally downloads and installs the gFortran compiler (4.2) built against Snow Leopard’s GCC 4.2 for Xcode 3.2.”

Best way to install a recent version of NumPy and SciPy on Mac as far as I know.

SeriesFinale 0.6.5 released

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 18:39:39 +0100

The last SeriesFinale version was released before I went to GUADEC and then on vacation which means that it’s been a while since you have had news from this nice little app but today I’m releasing its 0.6.5 version.

This version has some nice new features apart from regular bug fixing and code improvement.
Juan has added the portrait mode (borrowed from the great gPodder) which surely pleases many users.

To control the rotation and other forthcoming preferences, I’ve rewritten the settings class and created a settings dialog:

Sometimes I get sick of getting the “Special” season on every shows, basically because I never watch those; so, I added a check button to the settings dialog where one can tell if the special seasons are to be considered or ignored, when adding new shows or updating existing ones.

But, if you’re like me and have a bunch of shows already added, it’d be a pain to delete episode-by-episode from the Special seasons in every show in order to delete these seasons… To solve this and to fill a missing/neglected action, I’ve added the “Delete Seasons” view which makes it easy to delete seasons.

Some problems with the threads have been solved as well, so, maybe weird issues like missing shows’ full title and stuff will likely be solved after this version.

Finally, a feature that has been requested a few times has been added: list shows by recent episode date. This means that now there are two filters in the shows’ view that list the shows by most recent episodes or by name. This is really useful because selecting the recent episodes’ sorting you can now update your shows’ list and the ones that got already aired, unwatched episodes will be listed on top of the list.

Here’s the changelog for this version:

* Add sorting shows by most recent episode or name
* Add auto-rotation support
* Add settings dialog
* Fix problems with threads
* Fix episodes highlight when checking/unchecking all episodes
* Rewrite settings
* Add special seasons addition preferences
* Make returning to the shows view faster
* Add delete seasons view

Soon, in a Maemo Extras repository near you!

(Oh, and the next time I touch SF’s code it’s very likely that it will be to port it to GNOME, so, stay tuned…)

How to install RPy2 on Mac OS 10.6

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 21:35:27 +0100

How to install the R python bindings library RPy2 on Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard using Homebrew.

Install R

In order to install R in your Mac as a framework, make this change in your homebrew/Library/Formula

brew install r

Install RPy2

wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/r/rpy2/rpy2-2.1.4.tar.gz#md5=cf4e0d80ba498a6d76f107531966478d
tar xfz rpy2-2.1.4.tar.gz
cd rpy2-2.1.4/
sudo python setup.py build --r-home /usr/local/Cellar/r/2.11.1/R.framework/Resources/ install

Troubleshooting

If you are having a problem related to “-framework vecLib” when installing rpy2, insert a new line after #134 of setup.py with the following:

extra_link_args = extra_link_args[:-1]

Worked for me.

One more step in OCR with OCRFeeder 0.7

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:44:14 +0100

I have been hacking on some new and cool features on OCRFeeder for a while and now it is time to show them to the world in a new release.

These features I’m talking about fall mainly in 2 areas: improving the a11y of the UI and improving the recognition of documents.

A11y Improvement

The improvement of the a11y has the typical UI changes to include mnemonics, missing labels and relations, but also other approaches that have more to do with UX like using a progress dialog to inform users that time-taking operations are being carried. This means that now, the PDF importation and OCR won’t block the UI.
Other changes in this category were the navigation through the content boxes (before, these could only be selected by clicking on them), the selection of all boxes and the deletion of selected boxes.

The following screenshot shows the box editor area of OCRFeeder with its mnemonics highlighted:

Box edition area

Recognition Improvements

Sometimes, text columns are so close to each other that they end up being recognized as a single paragraph, so I added a post-detection method to solve this issue. This feature is optional and can be toggled from the Preferences dialog.

Here’s an example of the difference it makes:

Before columns' detection improvements

After columns' detection improvements

Scanned document images are usually skewed and this makes it more difficult for the contents to be successfully detected and “OCRed”. I decided to implement an algorithm to deskew these images. The algorithm uses the Hough transform to try to find lines in the image and their angles and, while it is a bit slow, it works well:

Skewed image

Deskewed image

This action can be used in a loaded image but can also be configured to be automatically performed before the images are added. The Unpaper tool can now also be set to be clean images before adding them.
This makes it much easier to successfully recognize images obtained from a scanner device.

Some fine tunning of the content boxes’ bounds was done by trying to shorten their margins, that is, lowering the distance between the boxes and their actual contents.

The font size recognition was also tweaked to solve the problem of having paragraphs with initials (you know, the huge starting characters) which were influencing the whole paragraphs’ font size.

To finish the recognition’s improvements, I have added an optional action to find and fix the text’s line breaks. Usually, OCR engines don’t consider “semantic line-breaks”, that is, OCR engines always insert a newline in the end of each line.
Using some regular expressions, I try to find these “fake” line-breaks and recover the original flow of the text. Like some of the features mentioned above, this one can also be turned on/off from the Preferences dialog.

Here’s how the Preferences dialog looks like now:

To finish, images can now be dragged and dropped onto the pages’ area and the mouse wheel can be used to scroll horizontally combining it with the Shift key, thanks to Stefan Löffler, and of course, several bugs were corrected and code was improved.

As you see, this is a “rich” new version of OCRFeeder that keeps being the easiest way to use OCR in a desktop. You are welcome to file bugs in bugzilla or to send patches and features’ requests to its mailing list or approaching me if you’re in GUADEC.

Download: OCRFeeder 0.7 tarball on GNOME FTP

SeriesFinale 0.6.1 released

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:05:37 +0100

It’s been a while now since I released the last version of SeriesFinale.
The truth is that I’ve been busier than usual these days and of course, this is reflected on pet projects.

As some of you may have experienced, there was a kind of a nasty bug in SeriesFinale’s last version: it wouldn’t update certain shows (when they had been added long ago)… and the good news is that this is one of the things that got fixed in this new version.

One of the good things Juan introduced for this version is how the next episodes to be watched are shown. Before, the episodes were shown according to their “first aired” date and in case of the same date for two or more episodes, the highest index one would be marked as the one to be watched. In this 0.6.1 version, the episodes are shown according to their number and season, so, if episode #3 has the same air date as episode #4, #3 will always be shown as the next one to be watched.

It is now using a priority queue to download the series’ covers and info that gives priority to the info. This means you won’t have to wait for the info AND covers to download when you hit the Update All menu but instead wait only for the info; the covers will then be downloaded in the background while you use the app normally.

I’m now introducing the new Russian translation, which Misha Ketslah had kindly sent to me a while ago but that I hadn’t had the time to integrate.

Here’s the list of major changes for this new version:

* Add Russian translation (thanks to Misha Ketslah)
* Fix updating of shows
* Use a priority queue to differentiate the downloads of covers or series’ info
* Use only one AsyncWorker at most to deal with the series
* Prevent the download and usage of images to generate problems
* Fix showing next episode
* Add TheTVDB credits
* Add THANKS file

So… what about that GNOME version, you ask? I’ve already started to port it to GNOME but couldn’t dedicate much time to it and taking into account that I’ll be on vacation very soon, it’s likely it will take a little longer. But I’m looking forward to use SeriesFinale on GNOME!

As for the N900 owners, I’ve just promoted the package to Extras-Testing so either use the Extras-Devel repo as usual or wait ~10 days for it to appear in Extras.

Grilo powered Rhythmbox

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 11:42:09 +0100

Grilo is getting really interesting and one of its newest nice things is the DBUS interface Juan has been working on lately.

This DBUS interface is currently known as Rygel-Grilo (it was originally intended to be a source for Rygel) and uses the MediaServerSpec to allow developers to retrieve the media objects Grilo provides.

Since there aren’t still Python bindings for Grilo, I decided to use the Rygel-Grilo to be able to use Grilo from Python.
So I developed a Rhythmbox plugin that shows every MediaServer1 object available and lets the use browse through the contents of these. Needless to say, although this plugin provides a very generic basic and usage, it’s easy to see how applications like Rhythmbox could be using Grilo to get their media.
The philosophy is: Grilo gives you content, GStreamer plays that content, and you’re free to focus in the rest of your app’s details.

Here’s a video of Rygel-Grilo and the Rhythmbox MediaServer1 plugin in action:

Grilo MediaServer1 Rhythmbox Plugin from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.

You can find this plugin under the MediaServer1 Plugins project on Gitorious.

Juan did also developed a cool plugin for Totem similar to this one. Take a look at this post to see the plugin working and a more detailed explanation of what Rygel-Grilo is.

Summer internships in 2010 at Igalia

Tue, 18 May 2010 11:14:15 +0100

Igalia, a Free Software Galician company, offers for the ninth consecutive year the possibility of undertaking internships for twelve to fourteen weeks from early June to early September, at its offices in A Coruña and Pontevedra (Spain).

This opportunity is offered to Computer Engineers or Computer Technical Engineers who have completed over 50% of their degrees.

Why do it?

* Most of us undertook internships when we were students.
* It is a good way to give back something to the university from which we come.
* It is also a good way to hire people. Almost 50% of the people who made undertook internships with us in the past are part of the company today.

How are the internships?

* 350 hours with flextime, with a minimum of 5 hours/day and a maximum of 8 hours/day during July, August and September.
* 325 hours working on a Free Software project and 25 hours to write the report.
* Help 1500 €.

If you are interested in applying for the internship, the period for receiving of applications starts from May 14th to May 28th.
Please, fill this form.

SeriesFinale v0.6 AKA “Xmas Comes Earlier” edition

Tue, 11 May 2010 13:21:12 +0100

It’s been a while since last SeriesFinale’s version and I have been a bit busy meanwhile but still got time, together with Juan, to pull up some nice new features. In the end, we had so many changes and the app felt so smooth that we nicknamed it “Xmas Comes Earlier”!

So what can you find in this new version?

* The covers are now downloaded in the background which allows users to keep using the application and improves idle times when adding/updating shows.
* No more database deletions. Many people complained that sometimes it would suddenly delete all the database. We have now introduced a few verifications that make it harder for the database to be deleted unless you do it yourself.
* The format of the JSON of the database and the way the serialization is done is now faster which allows faster load and save times.
* The impossibility to delete shows is also fixed.
* No more problems with characters like & on the episodes and shows’ names.
* Already added shows are now marked with color when searching for shows.
* The highlight of episodes is now fixed, when marking them.
* A new logo that works in a black background has been added.
* Images are now downloaded to temporary files which allows a safer assignment to the shows/seasons.
* The images are now deleted if it’s not being used anymore (when shows are deleted), and are not downloaded more than once (when a show is added twice).
* The removal of the application now deletes the images folder.
* AUTHORS, README and THANKS files were added to the package.
* Translations were updated.
* The search dialog now allows you to search shows in a chosen language.
* The About dialog was added. Here are a few screenshots:

Shows when no cover has been added

Temporary image when downloading cover

Search dialog with Language choices

About dialog

Two other things that are new are the creation of two mailing lists for SeriesFinale:
seriesfinale-general for general discussion, help and feature requests
seriesfinale-development for discussions related to features development and bug tracking

You should be able to upgrade SeriesFinale from the extras-devel repository. I’ll promote it extras later.

Enjoy!

Are you the next star application developer for MeeGo?

Fri, 07 May 2010 15:43:41 +0100

Want to work in the coolest team at Nokia ? (mine of course )

MeeGo devices at Nokia is looking for a Linux expert that knows how to write C++ code, knowledge of Qt, Python and HTML 5 is a plus, check out this event for more details: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=105529266158916

Python class at Master in Free Software 09/10

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 10:02:49 +0100

Last Friday I gave an introduction to Python as class in Master in Free Software.
In this session I tried to cover Python from the very basics to decorators, properties and PDB. All covered only as an overview, not in deep detail.

After the introduction we did a simple PyGTK application to list the files from a folder the user gives it; it will hopefully come in handy when they start to develop their project’s UI.

So I’m sharing here the presentation I created for it. If you’re thinking of learning Python or have started learning it recently it might be helpful for you.

PIL on SnowLeopard

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:33:51 +0000

Package Install

Nuno Lourenço created a PIL package for Python 2.6 on OS X.

Compilation

How to install PIL (Python Image Library) in Snow Leopard with freetype2 and libjpg support.

Libjpg

brew install jpeg Or download source and compile.

Freetype2

wget http://mirrors.fe.up.pt/pub/nongnu/freetype/freetype-2.1.10.tar.gz

tar -zxvf freetype-2.1.10.tar.gz && cd freetype-2.1.10

./configure && make && sudo make install

PIL

wget http://effbot.org/downloads/Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz

tar -zxvf Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz && cd Imaging-1.1.6/

Open setup.py and change JPEG_ROOT and FREETYPE_ROOT to:

FREETYPE_ROOT = libinclude("/usr/local")

JPEG_ROOT = libinclude("/Users/alcides/Code/Support/homebrew/Cellar/jpeg/7")

Finally, sudo python setup.py install

OCRFeeder 0.6.6

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:11:22 +0100

OCRFeeder version 0.6.6 has been released.

This version has no big improvements and exists mainly to introduce the fix of a bug that prevented using the algorithm for recognizing documents automatically.

The copyright was updated to include the proper copyright and license notices of ODFPy, which ships with OCRFeeder.
It also features some improvements to Debian related files (thanks to Alberto Garcia, who is creating the official deb package for Debian) and a few translation updates.

See the whole list of changes here.

Your usual links:
OCRFeeder’s git
OCRFeeder’s bugzilla
OCRFeeder’s Tarball from GNOME’s FTP
OCRFeeder 0.6.6 Debian package

Caribou and Text Predictor Input Mode

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 10:26:11 +0100

I have been wanting to show how Caribou can be used with the Text Predictor Input Mode I wrote a while ago and finally today I took the time to do it.

Caribou with Text Predictor Input Mode from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.

Okay, the shortcuts to accept prediction candidates or scroll through them can be changed into some that are quickly accessible.
With the changes I did to Caribou, one can even easily provide a special button, such as “ACCEPT”, like the screenshot below shows:

The changes I’m talking about and that you see in the video and the QWERTY keyboard layout I used can be found in Caribou’s bug #613229.

I wrote these changes because the current way of writing layouts for Caribou doesn’t seem very flexible nor appropriate for non programmers, in my opinion.
These changes drop the current usage of Python files with tuples as a way to configure Caribou’s layouts. Instead, json files should be used and more functionality that wasn’t implemented before is also possible with the mentioned patch.

Basically, instead of having either character keys or symbol, label pairs that Caribou understands, each key should be a set of attributes that define it, which Caribou then interprets accordingly.

For a basic key, all one needs to have is the value attribute, which can receive a string (for example a character) or the name of a key in GDK (you can easily figure them out from the GDK key syms file).
So:

{”value”: “a”} will create a key labeled a that inputs the character a
{”value”: “BackSpace”} will create a backspace key but labeled with “BackSpace”

You can override the label of a key using the attribute “label”, as:

{”value”: “BackSpace”,
“label”: “⌫”} will create a backspace key but labeled with “⌫”

Labels can use Pango Markup to change its text style, for example: {”label”: “<small><b>Small Bold Text Key</b></small>”, …}

A width attribute is also introduced and means the width relative to a usual key’s width. A width of 3 will generate a key that fills the space of 3 keys whereas 0.25 fills a quarter of a regular key’s space.

A key can be of a given type which indicates how it behaviors. There is 5 types of keys: normal, layout_switcher, preferences, mask and dummy.
A normal key type indicates it is a regular “you-press-you-input” key and is the default type, which is why it wasn’t specified in the examples above.
A layout_switcher key, when pressed, will change the keyboard sublayout to the one given by the value attribute (and must exist in the layout file), so, if we are in the “lowercase” layout and we want a key labeled “UP” to change to the “uppercase” layout:
{”label”: “UP”, “key_type”: “layout_switcher”, “value”: “uppercase”}

The preferences key type brings up the preferences menu.
A mask key means that you set a mask indicated by the value attribute when you press it. For the Alt key:
{”label”: “Alt”, “key_type”: “mask”, “value”: “mod1″} again, the “mod1″ is the mask name from GDK.

Finally, there’s the dummy key type which is used basically to set spacer keys and allow to separate some keys from others in order to improve visual grouping. Rows that don’t have the number of keys in any row (including dummy keys) will be centered horizontally.

These let you play with keyboards’ layouts and design any kind of layout in a flexible and easy way.

At the moment, the patch is still pending review. Let’s hope it gets a green light and is applied.

SeriesFinale 0.5 AKA Supa-Dupa Edition released

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 15:14:54 +0100

For those who didn’t notice, last week SeriesFinale finally got promoted to Extras which are very good news and now SeriesFinale 0.5 has been just released!

Why is this edition so special? Because it will from now on retrieve images for the shows and its seasons.
This morning I finally took the time to check how to retrieve those and I really like the way SeriesFinale looks like now. Of course, this means that the next shows update you do will start retrieving all the images for your shows and seasons which might take, let’s say, a while. Still, don’t worry because once it gets the images, next time you update, only the general information will be retrieved.

I’ve also fixed the slowness when panning the different content views. Panning should now be much more fluid.

Another good thing in this edition is that the tiny episodes’ checkbox still looks tiny but it’s in fact larger and this means you can much more easily tap on it to mark episodes.

Juan, the maintainer of the Diablo version and a colleague of mine at Igalia, sent patches for including the season number together with the episode number, so it shows like “2×05″ which is more useful than just the episode’s number.
He also pointed a bug when adding a show manually, which got fixed for this release as well.

Here are a couple of screenshots showing what you’ll see soon (I just finished sending the packages to the server) in your favorite mobile phone:

SeriesFinale with shows' art

SeriesFinale with seasons' art

(I didn’t have time to update or integrate any translations in this version but I’m planning to have it done for the next one so I apologize for any inconvenience.)

OCRFeeder version 0.6.5

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:59:46 +0000

I have just released OCRFeeder version 0.6.5!

Here are the main changes in this version:

* Importing PDF files is now faster
* The OCR engines manager dialog now allows to detect and choose to use system-wide OCR engines (this action is also used when the application is started with no engines configured)
* Multiple content areas in OCRFeeder’s canvas can now be selected using Shift+Click
* Introduces Ctrl+a shortcut to select all content areas in OCRFeeder’s canvas
* The Tools menu now has the new action “Recognize Selected Areas” which will perform the automatic recognition on selected content areas of OCRFeeder’s canvas

Also, a few bugs were fixed:

* Removed PDF files’ extension from the images generated from them
* Sorts images when adding them from a folder
* Selection areas are now getting selected after creating them
* Fixed problem when quitting the application

(You can also read the full list of changes)

Recognize All Areas action

You can download the new tarball from GNOME’s FTP or a Debian package from here.

I’d also would like to thank the GNOME i18n Team for their work translating OCRFeeder.

SeriesFinale 0.4 released

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:20:32 +0000

I have just release a new version of SeriesFinale.

For this 0.4 version there is a very useful and requested feature: Update All!
Now you will be able to update all the TV shows by just clicking a button instead of having to go show by show and waiting for each one to be updated. As you see on the screenshots below, the shows view now also displays the next episode to watch plus, when updating the shows, feedback on the shows that are finished updating is given by a banner.

You’ll also notice that initializing and quitting the application is now much faster. This happens because as for the shows’ updates, the loading and saving of the database is now run on a different thread.

There was also a bug when manually editing an episode, which is now fixed.
Another bug you might have experienced was duplicated episode entries. It usually happened when there were placeholder episodes named “TBD”, since SF was using the episodes’ names to compare them, when the “TBD” episode was updated with the correct but different name, a new episode would be added instead… I removed the name checking from the comparison and now two episodes are the same if they have the same number and same season number.

Also, you might have noticed that the TV shows view scrolls really slowly. Today I found why such happens and will try to have it fixed for the next release.

As usual, you can find SeriesFinale code on its Gitorious project and expect this new version to appear soon on an AppManager next to you.

I hope you like this version as much as I do!

OCRFeeder is now on GNOME Bugzilla

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:47:53 +0000

OCRFeeder is now a product on GNOME Bugzilla and it should now be used for filing new issues. OCRFeeder Google Project’s bugtracker should be abandoned then.

So if you have been using OCRFeeder and found some issues or think it’s missing a great feature, go to the following URL and file a new bug:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=ocrfeeder

Thank you for helping the GNOME’s OCR application.

OCRFeeder version 0.6.1 released

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 23:22:03 +0000

As has become usual every couple of weeks or so, I released a new version of OCRFeeder!

This is version 0.6.1 and the main changes this time are:

* Now you can increase or decrease the zoom using Ctrl+Mouse wheel. This kind of shortcut is well known in many GNOME applications and even I was missing it;
* Warning dialogs are now shown when something went wrong while opening an image;
* Fixed encoding problem when reading non-ASCII characters;
* Fixed error when configuring a new engine;
* Improved Debian package’s files (thanks to Alberto Garcia)
* Fixed zoom issues (sometimes the allowed zoom would not be consistent among tries);

It was a good week on OCRFeeder’s bug tracker, specially thanks to user Hank who reported important problems.

I am really glad about how OCRFeeder is turning out and I expect to make it even better with the help of its users, either by sending suggestions, reporting bugs or simply by using it you will be helping the project.

You can download OCRFeeder 0.6.1 tarball from GNOME FTP or optionally download a Debian package directly.

OCRFeeder 0.6 released and the move to GNOME

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 17:32:31 +0000

I’ve just released OCRFeeder 0.6.

This new version introduces the following changes:

* Hide import pdf and unpaper menus if the respective commands are not available
* Several code improvements
* Removed Studio from the application name
* Removed unneeded engines folder
* Lowered the package name font case
* Updated copyright notice on the about dialog
* Swedish translation (thanks to Daniel Nylander)

Another very important change is that I moved the development of OCRFeeder to the GNOME infrastructure.
This means I’m using GNOME’s git server and will soon use GNOME Bugzilla to track bugs.
I always thought of OCRFeeder as a unique Free Software application (in the way that there isn’t anyone similar to it) and that it would be great to get it more involved with our favorite desktop environment.

I’d like to thank Claudio for supporting me on this move.

You can get the latest source from GNOME FTP.

OCRFeeder version 0.5

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 00:02:41 +0000

What’s up folks!? I hope everybody is enjoying some good holidays or getting prepared to do so soon.

As for me, I am currently in Portugal to spend Christmas with my family and I have just released a new version of OCRFeeder, its 0.5 version. This will be the last version released in 2009.

So, what’s new in version 0.5?

Hongde Liu (刘洪德), a Chinese user, was kind enough to provide me with the Simplified Chinese translation of OCRFeeder.
This will hopefully allow more GNOME users from China to use what is the most complete Open Source OCR application for GNOME.

The engines Tesseract, Ocrad and GOCR are now automatically detected from the system when no engines are configured.
Regarding the OCR engines, some verifications were also introduced to prevent errors when no engines are used.

The bounding boxes are now restricted to be dragged inside the image’s limits, that is, it will no longer allow a box to be dragged beyond the image’s borders.

For users interested in the development, the Makefile now features the generatepot and compilemessages commands which generate the application’s pot file and compile a po file given its language code, respectively.
I plan to replace all minidom code by ElementTree, so, since this version, the feeder module is uses ElementTree.

As usual, get OCRFeeder’s source from Gitorious or download a Debian package.

SeriesFinale 0.2.1 version on Extras Devel

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:12:05 +0000

SeriesFinale seems to have had a good reception by the community. I didn’t imagine that such a simple app could please to so many people, or more particularly, that so many people would have issues with keeping up with TV series’ episodes. I’m happy for having written it.

(SeriesFinale together with some of the community apps I use)

So, in the middle of last week I uploaded the version 0.1 to extras devel repository after solving the Debian package generation within the Scratchbox (Lizardo, from PyMaemo, helped me on this and wrote a helpful FAQ entry to the PyMaemo website). Still, the repository builder kept using Python 2.3 to build the package just like the problem I had on Scratchbox… tried again to push some changes and build it and still: fail! In the end I just gave up using CDBS for the package generation and edited the template of dh_make directly. Luckily, having a working Python setup script cuts part of the work (I like writing software, not packaging it!) and about the failed attempts, that’s what extras devel are for anyway…

Now version 0.2.1 is the one you can install and not call me ugly names afterwards
This version should have been available since last week but apparently there was some kind of problem in the Extras Devel repository and some apps weren’t made available until yesterday.

What does version 0.2.1 brings apart from working out of the Application Manager?

* Added mark all/none menus to the episode list view (suggested by Paco Zafra on the comments to my last post)
* The configurations folder is now stored under /home/user/.osso . My co-worker Calvaris suggested this to me since it will include the folder when you backup the device. And don’t worry with the current configurations you have now because I added a script to move the old folder automatically to the new location after this package is installed.
* Code improvements, among them, corrected local paths inclusion in sys path (for developing and running)

For the next version I plan to enhance the visual of things a bit (how or what lies in my brain currently) and to introduce translation files.

Add your suggestions as comments to this post or sent them by email to me.

Have a nice weekend!

SeriesFinale

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:10:54 +0000

I’ve been neglecting this space but I hope this post will compensate.

So, I had a problem. My girlfriend and I really like to watch a few TV series but we never know what was the last episode we watched… The irregularity of the TV schedule and the fact that sometimes we stop watching a show and catch on with it after a while make us forget how far in a TV show are we at.

Hence, I imagined it would be really useful that every time we start watching an episode I grab my N900 and mark it as watched! Plus, it would be nice to read the episodes’ synopsis in case we need to know what happened at a certain episode before.

And that’s what my hackfest time at Igalia brought to life! Using the TheTVDB API, users can search for their favorite TV shows and it will pull the shows’ information with every season’s episode information as well and present them as a check list. Of course, all this can be inserted and edited manually, useful for example for TV shows that are not available on TheTVDB.

While I try to put it on Extras Devel, you can get its source from Gitorious, download the source package or download a Debian package directly.

Enjoy SeriesFinale:

SeriesFinale from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.

OCRFeeder version 0.4 released

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:16:45 +0000

I’ve just released the version 0.4 of OCRFeeder.

This version introduces, among other changes:

* Debian package generation
* Tesseract’s example configuration file
* Frame around the page view for a better visualization

Special kudos to P. Christeas that did some (good) changes to OCRFeeder that I integrated in this release.

The following new translations are now available:

* French by Philippe Normand
* Galician by Xabier Rodríguez Calvar
* Italian by Andrea Grandi
* Spanish by Andrés Gómez

It’s funny that all but Andrea’s translation were made by Igalians due to the growing multi-cultural nature of Igalia.

Get OCRFeeder’s:
* Debian package
* Source from repository
* Source tarball

I would also like to thank everyone for sending me feedback about the applications, that’s where the motivation I need comes from.

Enjoy the OCR on GNOME!

OCRFeeder version 0.3 released

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:25:23 +0100

Moments ago I released OCRFeeder v0.3!

This version contains several improvements like:

* A setup.py script that makes installation easier
* Zoom fit option to the zoom options and its usage when an image is loaded
* German translation
* Code improvements
* Better integration of the Tesseract OCR engine
* Better desktop integration by using an application icon and desktop file
* Updated instructions in the README file
* Corrected a few issues in the OCR engines manager dialog
* Corrected engine name access
* Fixed project being cleared whether a new project is successfully loaded or not
* Correct actions availability depending on the existence of images

A big thank you to Renard Voß who was kind enough to provide you all with a German translation.

Give it a try, either download the tarball release or clone the git repository.

You too can help: either submit bugs or feature requests or translate it to your language.

For the next release I’m thinking on having a deb package to make it even more easier to install OCRFeeder.

Stay tuned!

OCRFeeder Repository Relocation and Maemo Preview

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:19:38 +0100

It’s been a while since I wrote my last post but I guess this one will compensate.

When I posted about how I made OCRFeeder run in Fremantle I said I wasn’t thinking of porting the application but in later talks with some people, it was clear that OCRFeeder might come in handy for some people.
One of the use cases that we have talked about was to be able to create a contact in the address book by recognizing the contact fields from a business card.

So, for some days in these last weeks, I’ve been porting OCRFeeder to Fremantle!
(The card-to-contact feature is still to come as I wanted to have OCRFeeder “fremantelized” before)

New Respository

I had been using git-svn to develop OCRFeeder and while this was okay when there was just a branch (trunk), with the Maemo version it was clear that Google Code’s SVN repository wasn’t enough. (Yes, I know they have mercurial but I’m git user)
So, yesterday I relocated OCRFeeder’s development to Gitorious where you’ll find the branch “maemo” besides the “master” one: http://gitorious.org/ocrfeeder

Development Notes

I must say that although I had for a long time used PyGTK for my UI code, on Hildon, I am more experienced in using C. While from the theory part this is the same, on the practical side, the PyMaemo bindings had some issues that delayed the development a bit (mainly undocumented functions that differ from the direct and expected usage, as well as some bugs I found).
I must thank Lizardo and other PyMaemo folks who were kind enough to help me every time I bugged them with questions and suggestions.

I think OCRFeeder for Maemo represents another example of how a desktop targetted application can be ported to Fremantle, specially from the design point of view. The chats I had with my friend and colleague Felipe (who, by the way, has just become a Master degree student in a in User-Centered Interactive Technologies) surelly helped in this matter.

Trying OCRFeeder for Maemo

Now, you can try to use OCRFeeder but you’ll have to first compile and install pygoocanvas and Tesseract or another OCR engine like I wrote here. I hope I have time to create deb packages for both pygoocanvas and Tesseract as they’re also very useful apps to have.

As a final note, I must say that although everything was working fine on Maemo 5.0 SDK beta 2, today the final SDK was released and I tested OCRFeeder on it… and not everything works well as before. The problems are mainly related to GtkTreeViews (Hildon style) which, from the C side seem to be working okay, but from the PyMaemo side seems not to obey the selection mode I assign to it.

Some Eye Candy…

OCRFeeder for Maemo preview from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.

Preferences dialog

Recognized page

Python 2.5 is out!

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 13:50:49 +0100

Python 2.5 is the latest major release of Python.
As Guido it promised, wsgiref was added to the Python 2.5 Standard Library. For those who don't know what wsgi is, read this.
You can find what's new in Python 2.5 here