If you’re one of the people waiting for RPM packages of OCRFeeder for Fedora, rejoice!
Juan, my friend and coworker at Igalia, has cooked an RPM spec and created an OCRFeeder repository for Fedora 15 and 16.

To add this repository to Fedora 16 simply download this file and move it to /etc/yum.repo.list/.
Alternatively you can download the RPMs directly from:
OCRFeeder RPM for Fedora 15
OCRFeeder RPM for Fedora 16

Important: These Fedora packages haven’t been thoroughly tested and there might be tiny issues currently (like the icons not being installed in the right place) and I’m no longer using Fedora myself (I’ve switched to Debian) so please report any issues you might find.

This article is part of the “A Couple of Weeks in Turkey” series and follows A Couple of Weeks in Turkey, Part 2: Selçuk/Ephesus.

The next stop after a well spent time in Selçuk was Pamukkale. The owner of the Tuncay Pension had helped us with our trip planning. He told us Pamukkale was not worth spending the night and instead we should rather get on a night bus to Cappadocia, saving time and money. It was a wise advice but before we were on our way we had another little Trukish adventure.
The hotel owner told us he would talk to his friend at the bus station to get us tickets and we should make sure that we headed to the right agency, Kamil Koç.
When we got to the bus station an old guy came by and we said we were looking for a particular agency, he asked us why and after our answer turns out he also sold tickets to Pamukkale…
We insisted on going for the original agency and he told us “you know, you can go for that agency but my agency is the one with the bus so they will sell you a ticket for my bus, earning a fee, and tomorrow I will be here to happily welcome you”. Hmm, how could we argue with that? We said okay but he told us a price that was higher than what we had been told before so we bargained and finally we could get two tickets to Cappadocia with a stop at Pamukkale for the price of 70 TRL each (~35 €).

At the cotton castle

After arriving at Pamukkale some guy entered the bus and told us that he was our host, that we could leave our bags in his office and have a shower and a tea at his hotel for free. We followed him to his office and when we were already inside, a guy came by the door and told us that this wasn’t our travel agency, that it was some guy trying to sell us stuff and we shouldn’t leave the bags there… What the hell! After seeing that this guy’s office was the agency originally advised by the pension’s guy and that the other one was where we had bought our tickets, we grabbed our bags and told our “host” that we were moving them to the other guy’s office and he said: “Okay, you do whatever you want but I’m telling you, they will try to sell you all kinds of shit. Don’t buy anything! They will try to sell you trips in Cappadocia, whatever, don’t buy them! I just want people to come to my hotel and have a tea for free so they can talk good things about my agency”. When we arrived with the bags to the other office the guy told us that their agencies are always fighting each other and that the other guy wanted us in the hotel to try to sell us stuff…

We wanted nothing to do with those travel agencies’ wars so we went to have lunch at a restaurant from which we could see why Pamukkale means “cotton castle”. Behind some houses we could see a big white mountain that could be easily confused for snow which looked and felt odd with such a hot weather. The reason the mountain is white is a rock called travertine made by calcium carbonate deposits.
The lunch was tasty, as always, but at the end of the day we would have an unpleasant situation with the owner of that place (which apart from a restaurant is also a hostel and a travel agency).

After lunch we headed to the “cotton castle”. The entrance fee was 20 TRL (~10 €) and it is forbidden to wear shoes in there so people don’t deteriorate the soil. There are guards around and they will blow a whistle at people who sneaked in with their shoes on or people who seat inside the water stream (blocking it) that goes along the main course of the mountain.
Some times it was hard to walk at some places which had small loose rocks but it was a nice experience.
Another main attraction of that mountain is the number of pools where people can bath. The water is of course full of calcium carbonate deposits which give it its pale look and you can feel it in your feet as some kind of weird paste.

Dr. Fish and swimming with the ruins

After we got to the top, we rested a bit laying on the grass under some trees’ shade and then went to the ancient pool.
There is an extra fee for entering the ancient pool but what other opportunity would we have to swim on top of ancient roman ruins? So there we went, the pool’s water is warm and sweet and ruins divide different areas of the pool. We could seat on some ruins, swim and relax for a while.

When we got out, we saw they had “doctor fish” tanks in there. We had first known about “doctor fish” in the TV, tiny fish that eat dead skin of one’s body and leave the healthy skin really smooth. After a failed attempt to bargain the price of 35 TRL, we decided to do it anyway. For 20 minutes we were seating with our feet in the fish tank, feeding the fish and paying for it, that is! The feeling is like some fast and small tickles, Helena could not stop laughing for a while until she controlled herself.
A guy that was working there told us that each fish costs 30 US $ and that although they are originally from Turkey and other middle-east countries, they are now usually imported from Singapore. Nowadays it is getting common to see these fish in Spanish health clinics but we can say we had the fish treatment at a beautiful place after swimming in an ancient pool in Turkey

(Helena feeding the fish)

There is adventure everywhere!

After we were done with the pool and the fish we went down the mountain again to be there for the bus at 19. When we got to the office where we had left our bags, the guy told us: “What are you doing here so early? We had more people that needed to take the bus so we delayed it to 20:30!”. Yup, they delayed it without any warning or consideration for us.
We were hungry and pissed at the guy so we went back to the place where we had had lunch, ate something and met a Canadian guy from Quebec who was also going to Cappadocia on our bus and didn’t know anything about the hour changes …
When the time came, we seated in front of the office next to the restaurant where we were supposed to get our night bus ticket and this is where the situation I mentioned before started.
The Canadian guy went inside the office and came out with a piece of paper for the three of us (note that we didn’t know each other) that was supposed to be exchanged for a ticket at the bus’s station.
So there we were seating in front of the office, waiting for the bus and the restaurant’s owner, a woman in her 50s, started talking to us. “So you’re going to Cappadocia… Do you have any planned trips in there? You should probably book in advance because they get full and then it’s a shame you don’t get to visit the stuff in there”. “Hmm, we don’t like tours that much so I guess we’ll decide about that when we arrive in there…” I said but she just went on and on about how such good prices they have, about how much cheaper it would be to book with her, etc. Finally the Canadian went inside and after a while the woman told us: “Your friend has bought every tour and even a balloon trip! You should also buy some tours… Do you speak Spanish?” and she went on talking to us in Spanish. It wasn’t about the money anymore, it was about not giving in to that sick woman so I told her in English: “Look, we speak Spanish but we also speak English as you might have noticed, we are not even Spanish, so you don’t have to speak in another language! We are not buying anything so please stop trying to sell us stuff!”.
We were really pissed off and on top of that the bus was late so that was a really unpleasant couple of hours.

Fun with the funky night bus

Finally the mini-bus arrived, it was a dolmuş (read the part 2 of this trip to know more about these buses) and was gonna take us to Denizli’s bus station. After an uncomfortable trip in a dolmuş full of people where I seated at a small stool in the aisle we finally arrived. We went inside the bus station, showed the piece of paper to the first assistant that we saw and he pointed us to the right place where we finally got our individual ticket and then we went outside to wait for our bus. Next to us were some Korean guys talking to each other about a piece of paper they had. I decided to ask them if they were going to Cappadocia on a night bus; they were but they thought that the piece of paper was a real ticket and didn’t know anything about exchanging it for a real ticket and were waiting for the wrong bus number so I think I saved some Korean folks from spending the night at Dinizli bus station.

When the bus arrived we hopped on and had our seats next to the Canadian. I was seating next to Helena and our new friend was seating on the other side of the aisle next to a woman. The ticket inspector came buy, took a look at our tickets and started yelling something in Turkish and giving directions to us. Finally we understood, the tickets have the passenger’s genders printed on it and he was trying to switch Helena’s seat with the Canadian so the other woman wasn’t seating with a man but she said she didn’t mind and Helena claimed she was married to me so the guy gave up in the end.

The bus was equipped with a small TV for every passenger (one of the channels was from a camera in front of the bus) and they served snacks and drinks. Still, this 11 hour trip was more uncomfortable than I thought. Every time the bus stopped the lights went on, then there were people coughing, children crying, the sound of the water hitting the windows when they washed it (they washed it at every stop). We didn’t have much sleep but we saved a night and had this experience.

On June 21st we arrived at Göreme, Cappadocia, the best place where we stood during the whole trip, but that’s a story for the next article…

to be continued…

It is one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity and we should be proud of it:

If Wikipedia is useful for you, click the link above and make a donation to help supporting it.

After more than 4 months, I am finally releasing OCRFeeder‘s new version (its last release was in August, just before the DesktopSummit).
The reason for the delay, apart from some vacation in Berlin and Portugal and being busy in Igalia, was that this release brings deep changes internally.

The big issue

The problem with developing such an application from scratch in just a few months and worrying about writing a thesis is that you don’t care much for design and performance. So from 2008 until now, OCRFeeder has suffered a big problem related to memory consumption: depending on the number of images loaded and their size, it would create a reviewer (this is what I call the place where you do stuff on the images) per image and those would remain in memory, eventually crashing.
I assumed that since nobody complained about that for so long it was probably because people made a simpler usage of the application and didn’t use it for full books but now it seems that some institutions are interested in OCRFeeder and there have a been complaints and bugs filed (gb#637599 and db#646605).

This was fixed by having only up to 5 instances of reviewers. When selecting a new image, it will drop the oldest reviewer and have this one added to the cache. It gets a bit slower to select a new image but the trade-off is worth IMHO. In future changes I’ll probably make the number of reviewers configurable in some way.
Each of the content areas now also shares an editor instance instead of each one having a dedicated one.

I was able to load more than 500 images of ~4.5 Mb each and it was still usable so hopefully this will improve the experience for users who had these problems.

Other changes

Another change is that now OCRFeeder stores all its temporary files in a dedicated temporary folder under the system’s temporary folder (usually /tmp). By deleting this folder when the application quits it’s guaranteed that no temporary files will be left (as happened sometimes). Related to these changes, I’ve also decided to remove the possibility of choosing the temporary folder. Supposedly Python will already know what’s the system’s temporary folder and having such an option would make it look like Windows software from 1998.

As usual, some code cleaning and bug fixing was done and I would like to thank the awesome GNOME i18n team and everyone who sent their contributions.
Thanks to my friend Berto you can also expect an OCRFeeder Debian package on a repository next to you soon.

For a more detailed list of changes, check out the NEWS file.

Source Tarball
Git
Bugzilla

This article is part of the “A Couple of Weeks in Turkey” series and follows A Couple of Weeks in Turkey, Part 1: Istanbul.

Having decided that our destination after Istanbul would be Selçuk, we bought a flight 2 nights before leaving. The closest airport was Izmir and we used the Turkish low-cost airline Pegasus to buy cheap flights.
It cost around 120 € already with the expensive eDreams taxes…
Pegasus is a very well chosen name for a flight company but it is funny that their website is flypgs, which I always read as “fly pigs”
But I’m saying this because it’s funny, I don’t mean to disrespect, in fact, everything was great! The seats are reserved and the departure was at a reasonable time in the morning (unlike other low-cost companies) and I totally recommend it.

After we arrived at Izmir, we had to take a train to Selçuk. We had read in the guide book that although you buy a ticket, it doesn’t mean there will be a seat reserved for you… Indeed, the train had only two cars and when we entered it we saw there was already people sitting on their luggage or standing because all seats were taken. The trip took a bit more than one hour and we stood in the aisle the whole time. Even though it was not a comfortable way of traveling, at least we got to see landscapes very different from Istanbul’s that kind of resembled Portugal many years ago; I’m talking about large plantations, tiny villages and kids riding old motorcycles without using helmets.

(in the end of the trip we were not so smiley)

Finally we arrived to Selçuk, all tired of standing in the train and as soon we left it a guy came asking if we had a place to stay. Yes we had, we were physically tired and also sick of having people approaching us all the time (to sell stuff). Turns out that when we got to the hostel, the owner wasn’t around so we waited a bit for him and when he arrived, he was the guy that had just approached us in the train station. He just wanted to guide us to the hostel. We obviously felt really bad.
The hostel was Tuncay pension and although it was not in the center it was not too far, had a pleasant courtyard, the breakfast was tasty and there was a nice family feeling to it: the owner, his brother and their families had dinner at the courtyard every night and were happy to help us with planning the next step of the trip.
The only negative thing was that the tub was obstructed (though they fixed it within a few hours) and the owner, although nice, was being a bit too insistent with trying to sell us stuff (guided tours to Ephesus, bus tickets and tours in Cappadocia).

(the courtyard of Tuncay pension)

As soon as we left our stuff in the pension, we went to explore the center of the town. We had lunch at a place where the main waiter (he was probably the owner) could say “thank you” in probably every language of the world. He said “obrigado” to us and, apart from other mainstream languages, we heard him even saying it in Norwegian!
This waiter was one of the people that confused us for Turkish people. We weren’t aware of it but apparently both Helena and I have Turkish looks because more than 5 times people thought we were Turkish.
In this restaurant I tasted a Turkish drink called rakı, it was really strong, both in alcohol and in the anise flavor (I didn’t like it).
After lunch we walked around a bit and found a street market with many kinds of vegetables like it’s hard to find in most European cities these days. On the way back to the hostel we found a couple and their son cooking some sweet fried dough. We were so amazed at the way and the speed the guy shaped the dough that we recorded a video (that’s why I don’t have photos) and while we hadn’t decided yet if we were gonna buy a bag, the couple gave us a bag of it for free and it tasted like heaven! What can I say, people are nice in Turkey. Doing a later research, it seems that what we ate there was called “lokma”, although the shape was different from the Wikipedia article.

(the Selçuk market)

After this walking trip, we went to the Pammucak beach. This was the first time we took the dolmuş. What a ride! A dolmuş is a minibus or better, a van, used as a shared taxi. People hop on and ask for the driver to drop them where they want. So there we were on our way to the beach, all seats taken when we saw some people on the side of the rode waving at the dolmuş. Too bad I thought, it is full. Nope, the driver stopped, they came in and the driver signed them where a folding stool was lying. Further on our way, more people came in and stood, so we were like 15 people on a van driving at around 100 Km/h.
Still, we arrived in one piece to the beach and the beach was awesome. The water wasn’t crystal clear or anything like that but it was warm, the weather was hot but not burning hot, really nice!
A picture might describe it better:

After the beach, we explored a bit of the town again, had a pleasant dinner where I tasted an Efes beer for the first time and went back to the pension and finish our day learning online how to play backgammon. Backgammon is very popular in Turkey and we wanted to learn how to play it as learning new things is part of travelling.

(men playing backgammon)

The next day, we had planned to spend the morning visiting the ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus. The park is huge and is totally worth visiting — a ticket was 20 TL (~10 €) if I’m not mistaken. It is a good idea to arrive early in order to avoid the burning sun and the crowds and although there are walking tours, we just went on our own again. A friend had advised me to check the house where Mary, the mother of Jesus, had lived but we skipped it as it was not in Ephesus itself and we were both tired and not really interested anyway.
When passing by Ephesus’s Theater we were surprised by a group of Korean tourists who started singing in choir to us who were seating in the stairs. Who else can say they went to Ephesus and there was a little show waiting for them

(seating in front of the ancient library)

After walking a lot among the ruins we took the dolmuş and went again to the beach where we had a nice kebab and, since it was so hot, 4 ayrans. Ayran is a cold drink made by mixing yogurt, water and salt and though it is popular in many countries, it was supposedly created by Turkish people. I had tried ayran for the first time in Belgium and I love it so after drinking it every day during our stay in Turkey I sometimes make it at home because it is pretty much impossible to find here in Galicia (I’ll leave the recipe for another post).

Back to Selçuk, we tried to visit its fortress but it was already closed. I had read on our guide that sometimes ancient coins are still found in that fortress and that there are people who try to sell those to tourists which is illegal. Turns out that a guy started talking to us, asking us where we were from, asking if we had seen the main attractions, etc. while we were walking a bit with him until we were in a more hidden place and he pulled a cigarette pack but instead of cigarettes it was holding, guess what, ancient coins.
I kindly declined his offer and he insisted and lowered the price until I told him that although it was very tempting, I would eventually have problems at customs and we got the hell outta there as fast as we could…

The next day we were leaving for Pamukkale and it would become yet another funny story but that’s for another post…

to be continued…