How to store scanned documents professional?

2007-12-15T22:19:07+0000

The file type djvu which was developed at AT&T Research Labs is an extremly powerful and professional way of storing scanned documents. Plugins for Mac, Windows and Linux are free available from the current license holder. Great online OCR or free djvu creator (e.g. for windows) make this file type very handy. For the technical details how they manage to keep the filesize so small without loosing the impression of a high quality image I will refer at the moment to Wikipedias article about djvu and djvu.org. Since I found another very nice program for post-processing of scanned images which I would like to try now.

SIP Express Router

2007-09-17T18:14:00+0100

Today I came across a small program called SER which stands for SIP Express Router. I don't know if it is really useful but I will sort this out at some stage when I have more free time.

Check transmission

2007-08-27T13:48:06+0100

Recently I copied a large amount of measurement files and wanted to make sure that there is no transmission error. So I calculated the checksum with
find folder -type f -exec sha1sum {} \; |sort | sha1sum
on both the source and destination computer and checked that all files were transmitted correctly.
Instead of sha1sum you can also use sha224sum,sha256sum,sha384sum or sha512sum, however, the length of the checksum will get longer and longer. With sha1sum you will have a 160-bit sum which is already higher then md5sum which has 128-bit.

GISAXS @ BESSY . de

2007-08-22T18:26:03+0100

During GISAXS measurement at the synchrotron BESSY I was introduced to isGISAXS which will allow to make simulations and compare these with GISAXS measurments. This makes it possible to analyze the Grazing Incidence Small Angle X-Ray Scattering from nanostructures prepared at the laboratory in the Physics Department of the Bristol Univeristy.

O'Reilly free asterisk book

2007-06-09T11:00:59+0100

As part of the O'Reilly openbook serie you can have a free pdf version of the asterisk documentation.

MS VirtualPC free download

2007-06-09T10:52:09+0100

Well, the problem is only that they don't have their virtual PC for linux environment but everyone with MS Windows might be interested in the free download of Virtual PC.

IP PBX

2007-06-09T09:48:59+0100

While thinking about some call forwarding options I read an article on the sipX@Home page and realized that probably Asterisk will do the job I need. Since they write that I need a Back-to-Back-User-Agent (B2BUA) which apparently asterisk does.

BibTex Manager with ISI (WOK) access

2007-05-25T19:05:12+0100

After I was first excited about the last reference manager from the last post I gave it a try but it was not working really smoothly. The way how this program get's the references is by checking the PDF file for a DOI entry and then it queries some public internet search engines. But I was quite disappointed with the result: many papers couldn't be found and the papers which were found had only one entry of the authors.
Later I realised that I need a program like JabRef which will access ISI Web of Knowledge (WOK) and send a query to ISI like it does it to PubMed. Well, JabRef can import ISI WOK export files, but cannot query their servers. After a quick search I found a promising program (and now I tried it first before publishing :) ) called KBib. There is only a minor disadvantage. It's a KDE application and since I run the Gnome Desktop I prefer gnome application. But this program is very good! It can query a couple of internet databases including Web of Science. But to get it working I had to configure the Proxy server for offsite access, since WOK is not publicly accessable. The fastest way to get the proxy configuration for KDE is to run kcmshell kde-proxy.desktop.
Note: If the gnome proxy configuration is activated KBib will report an error that there are more then 60million entries (almost independent of the search query). Download the first ten or 20 entries fails. But setting the KDE Proxy as described above helps.

Literature Review

2007-05-25T13:59:11+0100

This lunchtime I came across a gnome developers blog. And he presents a very similar problem that I have as well (BibTex managing of PDF files for PhD Thesis).
But fortunately he found on gnomefiles.org a solution called Referencer.
So far I used JabRef, a very nice program. But you have to add every entry manually. Let's see if Referencer is better.

Pictures of India Part II

2007-05-23T20:33:30+0100

You want to see my pictures from India? You can do this since they are online for more then a month. But you need a free account with 23hq.com and send me your username before you will be able to see my photos.