Off topic: finally a really good online OCR service

Sometimes I need to import printed documents like contracts, letters and so on, but I must say that until yesterday my attempts to successfully scan these stuff with online OCR services had gone badly.

Most of the times, in the past, the number of wrong words, letters converted into numbers, typically "l"s would become "1"s, "O"s would be turned into "0"s, "A"s into "4"s, quickly led me to dismiss online OCR as a waste of time and I always ended up re-typing everything from scratch.

fragment of the original PDF document to be scanned

Then, for some reason, yesterday I had to import a 4 pages legal contract and I decided to make one more attempt, trying out three different (free) providers. Two of them, that I won't mention for pity, weren't even able to recognize a single line and returned blank pages scattered with noise letters and numbers.

output created by one of the other two OCRs

The third one instead, to my surprise, succeeded and returned the whole document with an astonishing accuracy.
The amazement was even greater because the text was in italian and, as a matter of fact, full of legal terms.
Whilst I had to manually adjust the font weight, font style and the kerning between the letters, which I could do quickly because the corrections applied to the whole text, I had to amend very few words, less than ten in a text containing almost 1000.

the scanned output as it came out from onlineocr.net

As you can see yourself apart from the mixed font weight, there are very few problems, there is just one missing word in this segment, the rightmost word ("allegata") on the third line and an exclamation sign in place of an uppercase "I" near the middle.

In case you are interested, the site is onlineocr.net.
If you sign up for free, they'll give a 25 pages initial allowance, which you can increase by buying blocks of pages at various prices or by doing some promotional action.

Let's be honest folks, I wouldn't waste a second of my time to write this little promotional post if the service wasn't worth it.

May be it was just my lucky day with OCRs but frankly speaking I am impressed, it's the first time I was able to save some time and avoid the annoying work of typing in everything again.

PS: if you know other valuable OCR services that got the job done properly, I'd like to hear from you, so, please, drop a comment.

AC Adapter can prevent powerline adapters from working if plugged in nearby sockets

I just found out yesterday night that plugging my Apple branded Macbook Pro's AC Adapter into an electrical multioutlet caused the nearby powerline adapter to stop working completely.

While it is certainly true that the powerline installation guide recommends to NOT plug the adapters into multioutlets, it must be said that until yesterday it was working just fine in that way.

Removing Mac's AC adapter restored the operations immediately.

So, if you are wondering why your powerline has suddenly stopped working, you might consider if you have plugged some new electrical device somewhere.

I don't know if the problem is just in the proximity of the devices considering that the AC adapter is normally plugged elsewhere and it doesn't seem to interfere with the powerline or if it needs to be placed "on the same wire", let's say, in order to break the signal.

At any rate, this is what I experienced.

New OTN forums, old problems?

Nice fresh look, but unfortunately this morning it keeps kicking me out whenever I try to access the Apex forum, not to talk about the slugginesh of the log-in (it takes 30 seconds or more to get in, just to be thrown back to the dashboard instead of keeping me on the same page as it happened before).

I am also getting the pages with a mix of anglo-italian titles.  

Am I the only lucky guy here?

To all those old geeks out there

I remember an old article in the HP Journal, must be in the early '90s, where some engineer explained how to make music out of the stepper motor built into an HP Scanner by sending commands over the SCSI interface, so this must be the outcome of many hours of hard work :-)



Enjoy.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

Coalition of top tech and media companies to make internet better place for our kids

I can imagine how people will feel reassured after knowing that Berlusconi's foremost company want's to make Internet a better place for kids (in cooperation with other top companies not really famous for their achievements in privacy management).

There is nothing better than a good laugh to start a week.

A useful tip for Mac OS X users

Reinstalling or restoring the operating system to a previous state in Mac OS X is definitely something you don't need to perform often, however it seems that the time has finally arrived. As I have a few machines in different locations, I wondered how I could create a backup copy of the original Snow Leopard installation disk in order to keep my original disk in a safe place.
Copying DVDs can be a tricky matter, but thanks to a great tip I found on Walter's blog, I could clone my original disk without any hassle (well, almost, the original Apple's Optiarc drive refused to write to the disk, but my secondary Pioneer drive did the job smoothly).

By the way, if you are experiencing problems with the WiFi connection in your Mac and the Mac is running on top of Snow Leopard 10.6.7, chances are you hit a mysterious bug that seems to affect Macs with this patch level and certain wifi access points. Since I upgraded to 10.6.7 my wifi network has become sluggish if not completely unresponsive.
So now, in order to demonstrate the theory, I need to revert at least one machine to 10.6.6 and see if that does the trick as some users claim, hence the need of using the original installation disk.

Regardless of the final result, the dvd cloning tip is something a mac user definitely needs to know.

Mandelbrot

Benoît Mandelbrot passed away a couple of days ago, but the news wasn't reported until late saturday.

I remember spending countless hours drawing the Mandelbrot set on a HP workstation some 24 years ago.



Farewell Dr. Mandelbrot!

Now i know why they call it a "primary need"

Recently i heard that in a few countries of the world, the access to internet has been declared a primary need.
I believe Finland and Iceland are among the countries and i have no doubt that they are taking the web very seriously.
But as it always happens with us Italians, the so-called primary need could be interpreted in a different way altogether, as we shall see.

So, what is a primary need in the first place?
Water, bread, peace or....?

The right answer can be easily with the help of the instant search of Google, that is the capability of the search engine to supply fresh results while typing.
Yesterday for some reason i was looking for images on www.google.it, so i began typing the letter B and the type ahead feature quickly suggested me some terms (the most frequently sought coming first i guess):
Belen Rodriguez
Belen Rodriguez senza mutande (translation: Belen Rodriguez without pants)
and presumably other less interesting results.
I called a friend of mine and asked to repeat the search using a diffent OS and a different browser and he got the same answer.

Then i typed D and the most sought terms were
Donne senza niente addosso (tr: women without cloths)
Donne senza reggiseno e mutande (tr: women without bra and without pants)
Donne spogliate completamente (tr: completely naked women)
etc.

For C the most sought term was "Cristiano Ronaldo", for L "Lady Gaga" and "Larissa Riquelme", for M "Megan Fox", for N "Nina Senicar", for P "Pokemon" immediately followed by "porcherie sessuali" (tr. wild sex), for S "Shakira", for T "ti amo" (tr. I love you) followed by "tattoo".

Eventually we found some real poets!

For what I've seen these results are fairly unique in the google realm, i tried with google.es, google.fr, google.com.mx, google.is and google.de, but none returned something alike (except "Britney Spears" in Spain), so either the search terms are really different or Google is serving me some generic terms basing on my geographic location.

Well, even without any scientific pretension, it must mean something.

Ig Nobel 2010 winners finally revealed

As I owe to the prestigious Annals of Improbable Research the inspiration for the title of this blog, i thought that we could end this week with a good laugh by reading the list of this year's winners of the IG-Nobel awards.

I am particularly happy for my fellow countryman who won the Management Prize
by "demonstrating mathematically that organisations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random", a theory that I find not only revolutionary, but also absolutely true.

Nobody's perfect

An intriguing SQLException unknown error exposing some code on the Amazon Web Services home page that corresponds to the recent announcement of the new ultra-low-cost micro-instances.

8 crazy things? i'm game!

As i've been tagged by my friend John Scott, i cannot escape from the fate.

Before saying anything else, let me summon just a few acquaintances in this crazy chain, David Peake, Joel Kallman, Patrick Wolf and Bernhard Fischer-Wasels as most of the others I know have been already tagged.

In order of (descending?) craziness:

1. I had to learn RPG IV in my thirties.
2. I was used to play tennis until a broke a meniscus, otherwise i'd be playing at Wimbledon by now.
3. One night in London, at a restaurant, i met the pop-star Lionel Richie but i was tempted to ask his girlfriend for the autograph.
4. I am probably the only Italian who cultivates Mexican green tomatoes and authentic Mexican chillies and, for this reason, i hope one day I'll receive an honorary Mexican citizenship.
5. Some years ago i was seriously thinking of taking lessons of Nahuatl during summer time.
   
6. I was an HP calculator addict and i spent many night writing assembly routines instead of hanging out with friends and girls (but later i caught up...). Now i am in the Apple Mac phase.
   
7. I love cooking, including prepare home made pasta and Mexican recipes and i publish recipes and photos of the results on a different blog.
8. I haven't set up yet an Oracle Apex site dedicated to Mexican chillies.

There would be more to add, but we said just eight... :-D

And now for something completely different

I know this is off topic, but with the title this blog bears, i cannot just ignore the event:
find out who are the winners of the 2007 IGNobel prizes!

Let me pick among these valuable researches the gay bomb, the only weapon that can truly achieve the famous slogan: make love not war.
Great, it looks like we can now make both at the same time!

Cheers,
Flavio

Off topic: Routers, VPN gateways, MTU, chili peppers and the unbearable lightness of buyer's comments

If you ask me today what occurs to my mind if you say "1492", i'd reply without hesitation: the perfect value for the TCP/IP MTU parameter of my new router!

I know that 1492 is an important date, actually i am enthusiast reader of books about the discovery of America, the Conquest and so forth, but this fatal number proved to be also the turning point between a crippled network and a perfectly working one.

Some weeks ago i bought a replacement for the "old" VPN gateway router D-Link 804V and, by the way, the ADSL modem and the Wi-fi Access point that made up my network configuration. For some reason i picked the Belkin G+ MIMO and ADSL2 Router Modem.
It's like when you go to the store to buy apples and you come home with a bunch of oranges.
In the end it's just fruit, isn'it?

Finally, last Saturday, i managed to find some spare time to do the swap:
the installation was quick, i just changed the default IP address in order to let my existing configuration work transparently and in a matter of minutes i was on-line, so i decided to download the latest version of SQL Developer and see if there were any problems with relatively "large" downloads.

The first impression was good, but then the download rate began to drop until it stabilized itself at around 80Kb/s, a fairly bad value compared to the 250Kb/s of my previous configuration.

Then i went to download the e-mail and i got mixed results. I downloaded emails without problems from certain servers but i could not get past the "connected" message on others.

Hum, strange, let's try from another computer.
Nope, still the same problem.
But i could not download emails even on my PDA, so i concluded that there must be a problem at the remote site.
I rang the provider and they said that the server was slow even at their site.
Well, hopefully they will fix it by tomorrow, i thought.

On Sunday afternoon i went back to check the email, but there was still the "connected" issue.
I checked with my PDA, but this time i could download my emails from there.

So, just for curiosity i began searching on the internet what people said about this router:
needless to say, opinions ranged from "the best product ever" to the "worst piece of plastic that you can buy".
How can it be that people got such mixed experiences on the same product?

Tired to read dozens of useless reviews, i refined my web search and i started finding some more useful comments of people who had troubles setting up the device.

In particular i found a few comments of people describing poor download rates.

Suddenly i remembered that years ago, when installing the DI-804V, i had had more than a headache trying to figure out the value of the MTU.
I repeated also the manual procedure that allows you to find out (by trial and error) the current MTU parameter using ping:

ping -f -l mtu_value IP_address

If you get an error message, then you must decrease the MTU size, otherwise you can try increasing it.

So, i connected to the console screen of the Belkin router and it turned out that the current MTU value was 1432.
Why did the installation procedure set it to 1432?
Is that a factory default or is it derived after doing some "probing" on the network?

I don't really know and i could not find any clues in the accompanying documentation.

I know that after changing the value to 1492, the maximum allowed by the device, suddenly the email started working again, the download rate increased to 254Kb/s and i could finally go the backyard to seed my favorite chili peppers: guajillo, jalapeño, serrano, poblano and chile de arbol, whose cultivation is one of the outcomes of the other 1492, the circle is closed.

Yet there is one outstanding question: how should i rate this router?