DevOnLinux

Just a quick post about tesseract, a quite good solution for OCR under GNU/Linux (specifically Ubuntu Karmic Koala).
First install it trough apt-get
sudo apt-get tesseract-ocr
Install also your preferred language (in my case eng -> tesseract-ocr-eng and ita -> tesseract-ocr-ita).

Ok, we are ready to do some text recognition…
But, under Karmic Koala, there is a problem with tif image as reported by myself here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tesseract/+bug/461177
The problem is due to a transparent alpha layer that some tif images have (investigation needed here…*), so before do text recognition is necessary to eliminate it, elsewhere tesseract will generate an empty file…
Just install imagemagick and from a shell do this steps:
convert inputimage.tif inputimage_tmp.pbm
convert inputimage_tmp.pbm inputimage_ok.tif
Original solution founded here.

Now we are finally ready to launch tesseract on our tif image.
Just do
tesseract inputimage_ok.tif outputfile
and tesseract will generate outputfile.txt with recognized text.

ps. The packaged version under karmic is 2.03 and not the last one, 2.04, that, as advised on this page, fixed it. So if you prefer, remove old version and install the new version from source.

* Solved. In Gimp is possible to remove the alpha layer. Just go to
Layer (Livello) -> Transparency (Trasparenza) -> Remove alpha layer (Rimuovi canale alpha)

In these months i have worked on an ecommerce project with a lot of products’ list. Since the customer had asked a carousel solution to show her products, we have chosen for jCarousel, an amazing plugin for jQuery.

jCarousel is great and highly configurable but it has a small lack: it does not remember the position of the carousel when a user came back to product list page after a quick view of a product detail.

I came out with a simple but practical solution that solves this problem using the support of cookies.

To do this we need few lines of Javascript. Read more…

A few day ago I began to use Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 beta on my laptop.
It’s look very fine and also work great but yesterday I’ve found a big problem for me and all developer that use Eclipse as preferred IDE.

The problem is that Eclipse Galileo doesn’t work right with the new version of gtk (gtk+ 2.18), and therefore all the Eclipse GUI is unusable.
In particular I’ve noted that click of mouse are not intercepted correctly and also some interface redraw (for example if I change perspective or move some bar) doesn’t work.

Now, this morning I’ve found the bug and also a workaround for the moment.
Just open a terminal, then give this command export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true and finally launch eclipse from the same terminal.

Open Source community it’s amazing!

Update
Now eclipse packaged in Ubuntu official repository work without above trick. Simply install eclipse 3.5.1-0ubuntu7 (or later) from the Ubuntu archive.
Eclipse version in the official eclipse site doesn’t work right yet. (See #28 in this bug for a complete explanation of this Eclipse bug)