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

Hope every suit boss out there watches it.

So, today I continued my work in my SAPO Summerbits project. It consists in developing an OCR plugin for DSpace.

It’s been a while since I touched JAVA, the last time I did something with it was for BluePad which has a much simpler code-base.
Anyway, I don’t think I am a little rust on JAVA, it’s just that if you spend a while doing code in Python, there is some things you just take for granted. I mean, taking a look back at the JAVA API docs (good docs, BTW) just make me think: “Why the hell so much stuff for such a simple task (say, reading from a text file)!?”

But anyway, it is GOOD to switch programming languages once in while so you don’t stick too much to some stuff. One of the things I like doing most is *learning*, so I am looking forward to write more code in C once I get time, maybe learn C++ as well.

I was selected to be part of the first SAPO Summerbits, an initiative inspired on Google Summer of Code but only to people studying in Portugal.
I was really willing to be part of Google Summer of Code this year but didn’t apply to it since I was supposed to be working in Spain. So, when I left Spain I was of course disappointed by not being then part of Google SoC.

This said, I am really happy to participate in Summerbits and be part of this great initiative by SAPO.
This first edition of Summerbits is composed by only 10 projects and two of them from my University, mine and Paulo’s one.

My work will be on top of DSpace developing a system to perform OCR over a scanned document so it retrieves the printed words from it and sets them as its document’s tags. This will hopefully automate and spare a lot of work for some people.

For the ones who don’t know:
SAPO is the Portuguese major ADSL provider and is considered by some to be the Portuguese Yahoo (the company, not the adjective ) with a search/media/shopping/information/etc homepage.

Recently I needed to come up with some sort of widget in PyGTK to be able to draw selection boxes, drag them around, etc. over a background image. After spending two days with pycairo and having only what would be the basis for what I need done, I found Goocanvas, particularly its Python bindings!!

I already knew the name due to my subscription on PyGTK Mailing List but never had a change to dig in further. It is amazing!! You create items on a canvas, and you can deal with them one by one setting their properties, dealing with input events, etc., really nice.

Now I pretty much have what I needed (the drag selection boxes on top of an image) and I might extract it from the main program and make it available for anyone with such needs like I had.

Checkout this amazing work that allows one to do some neat stuff with cairo without sweating too much!

My friend Valério will be working on OpenMoko for Google Summer of Code!!

This means that 50 % of the BluePad team will be working on OpenMoko. I am sure OpenMoko will benefit for choosing him and I am very glad for him

On my side, my “Coding on Summer” will be on BitRock where I am happily working in a weapon of mass installation!!!
Good luck for the hacking, Valério (and I’ll be here if you want someone to test the OpenMoko prototype for you… :D)!