Regarding my enrollment in the SAPO Summerbits program, I created a media filter for DSpace called OCR4DSpace.

With this media filter you are able to submit document images (scanned documents) and be able to search for their contents without having to fill them manually at submission time. The image contents are read by the OCR engines you have on your system.

The media filter is really simple to configure and use and hopefully will make some people’s life easier!

The web page is currently only in Portuguese but will be translated to English soon but rest your soul, the README is included in English.

To checkout the code, all you need is to run:

svn co svn://svn.softwarelivre.sapo.pt/ocrd/trunk/OCR4DSpace

Read the README file carefully and enjoy the automation that Optical Character Recognition can do for you!

Portugal needs more events like these, I hope next year more companies will join SAPO and Associação Ensino Livre and bring up the second edition of Summerbits with more projects!

If you’re a Django guy or are wanting to be, you have to visit This Week In Django (TWID) website.

TWID started out as being a weekly podcast by Michael Trier but evolved to be a complete website full of Django resources to either help you give the first steps or keep you informed.

Go on, download the podcasts and listen to them while driving to your job or jogging.

Will Larson wrote this great article on how to use Django to create those web pages you happily used to do when all you knew was HTML.

Until about an year ago, I was using PHP for these static web pages.
The idea was to have just one base index.php and include files by usage of GET to retrieve the PHP files. It was a basic but helpful automation.

The way Will teach you with Django and a basic Python script is much more useful as it abstracts a bunch of stuff.

Give it a try!

Erik Holscher has a blog filled with Django interesting stuff that can be really useful if you wanna step in the Django world or just keep up to date with Django’s nice add-ons.
He’s also making screencasts presenting some of these feature.

Here’s his latest screencast about Django’s command extensions:

Django Command Extensions from Eric Holscher on Vimeo.

Here’s a touching short movie about our poor, struggling lives as programmers

Hope every suit boss out there watches it.