So, it’s the middle of the week and I’m posting about last weekend (yeah, it’s sad…).

Last weekend I could do some work on Rancho and I committed a patch to make its width fluid, that is, to be relative to your screen resolution instead of having a fixed size. (let me know if it’s working right in your machine)
The rest of the day was dedicated to watching some movies with my girlfriend

On Sunday I had the pleasure to show the beautiful city of A Coruña to my parents who came to visit me.
We had a great lunch at La Penela, a restaurant in the main city’s square.
They really liked the city and the people and specially enjoyed the landscape where the sea meets land and the mix of buildings with traditional tapas cafes and small grocery stores.

You should also take a break and visit this kind city where, as the people here say, “No one is an outsider”.

Everybody loves screencasts, they’re the new screenshots for say.

Here’s a video of OCRFeeder in action so you see what it can do for you.

Enjoy:

OCRFeeder from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.

Finally, the first initial commit to a public SVN of my new project — OCRFeeder.

OCRFeeder is an Optical Character Recognition and Document Analysis and Recognition program for GNU/Linux.
It features a complete graphical user interface in GTK but can also be used from the command line for automation purposes.

It is written in Python and was developed as the project for my Master’s Thesis in Computer Science Engineering.

So go on and checkout the project’s source:

  svn checkout http://ocrfeeder.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ ocrfeeder-read-only

Note this is only an SVN release yet so I get some feedback and the traditional first bug reports.
You can also be part of this project as a developer or a translator, just drop me an email.

I hope this is a good step on the evolution of OCR technologies in GNU/Linux system.

Soon I’ll be adding here a list of features you can find as well as a screencast.

Enjoy!

Its being almost a month since my last post… so, lets catch up a little.

On the last February 19th I drove down from Galicia to Portugal, it was quite a boring trip of more than 7 hours. Luckily I had my girlfriend right on my side and the iPod’s battery honored its fame and soundtracked the whole trip.

I went to Portugal because on the next day, February 20th, I finally presented my Master Thesis in Computer Science Engineering!
Yeah! A little more than a year after I went to Seville and about 8 months since returned to Portugal, I finally presented it and culminated my Master of Science degree.

The thesis was about the developing of an OCR suite for GNU/Linux, based on some ideas I had before. I started developing it the when I returned from Seville and finished it on October (had the luck that the deadlines got extended and wouldn’t need to deliver it before September), then it took me until the mid of December to finish writing the thesis and (final tests of the program included) — I delivered it the 15th of December. Thanks to the bureaucratic services at my University, the sooner the thesis presentation could be arranged was the mentioned February 20th… But hey! Now it is done!

About the OCR program, it is written in Python featuring a GUI powered by PyGTK and can use several Open Source OCR engines to perform OCR. It allows user correction/edition of the results, etc. and generates ODT or HTML file. You can also use it from the CLI in case you want to automate some tasks or link it with other apps.

I am releasing the program soon as GPL, so stay tuned.

I’d really like to thank a lot to all the people that supported me all the time and keep supporting:
Mom, Dead,  Bro, Girlfriend, Professor Luís Arriaga, and friends such as Luís Rodrigues and Pedro Salgueiro.

PS: My absence in the www world outside of work due to the fact that I’m internetless since I came to A Coruña, *hopefully* next week the ISP I chose will turn the switch of information in my flat and I’ll be connected once again to the world. Then I’ll post what’s happened in my world of GTK, Igalia and Django.

Yesterday I started the first sessions of Linux Training in Lisbon.

I’ll be teaching this course together with my friend Paulo Cabido for the R&D Center of University of Évora. We’ll be teaching this course to high-school teachers and this constitutes one of the first Linux Academies organized by the Portuguese Ministery of Education.

Hopefully this will represent a more widespread usage of Linux in the Portuguese high-schools as the intentions are to make a viral spread of knowledge — the teachers that are attending these training sessions will themselves give teach other professors and recursivity keeps on…