Leptonica

Leptonica is the name of an image processing library which uses image recognition to determine the "bounding boxes" and orientation of all the letters on a scanned page.

This was named by a scientist I'm sure. "Leptons" are the tiny little light weight particles like 'photons' in comparison to the big heavy particles - like neutrons and protons. Photons are the particles that are in light...
that allow us to see images at all! :)

Right now it is the thing that will not build or is interrupting the build of "tesseract" my optical character recog nition library.


    checking for leptonica... yes
    checking for pixCreate in -llept... no
    configure: error: leptonica library missing

Hmm most frustrating... 

Swendawg

Sendgrid and Online in Sydney!

Okay guys,

So I've finally got my act together - after switching jobs I gave my new job my 100% attention for the first three months - but now I'm able to do a little bit of work on my own project at home.

So this morning I checked out sharehouser from github/heroku (after some fun with ssh keys...)

*TIP* if you forget your passphrase for your ssh key - use "ssh-keygen -p" it will let you "reset" your password - but you can also use it to locally attempt remembering your passphrase! :)

Then "ssh-add" to add the key to your keyring (you may need to do:

chmod 600 ~/.ssh

chmod 600 ~/id_rsa*

)

Yes so now it's all up and running and I'm good to go - before I left Germany I actually managed to get Sendgrid hooked up into sharehouser - so now you can email it your bills directly into your sharehouser house - it expects bills to be in the following format:

etc...

It's a pretty nice feature to be able to add bills to your sharehouse from anywhere.

Okay gotta keep codin!

Swendawg

Free icecream for children travelling on german railways

The main train company in germany "deutsch bahn / die bahn"

has decided it is a good idea to give children free icecream every time

they travel on german railway.... there is a special deal for families.

Children under 15 can travel for free with their family.....

AND get free icecream...

this is not just any sort of icecream... it is:






well well well!

This a promotion of the new "X-POP" ice cream... a perfect

captive market for the product... ALL other children in the train will get this

ice cream

making it almost impossible for any "normal" parent to resist also purchasing

an icecream for their child... they KNOW the dangers of being "different"

for young children at school age....


So... what nutritional benefits do the children under 15 get from their special treat?




First weird thing... this is a german website... but it doesn't use the german
numbering system instead using 0.3 ..... they should put 0,3 because the comma us
used in Germany as the decimal sign... ohhh well

So basically not very much protein..
The thing we DO NOT see here - the main thing which is important is the amount of fructose sugar that's in it. It's becoming slowly clear that fructose is a special type of sugar that affects the body in a very particular way... and over a long period of time and REGULAR exposure... it can cause very bad effects...

(or so goes the theory...) :)

If you look at MOST processed foods - they VERY often use fructose - specifically "high fructose corn syrup" - it's very easy to produce and store - and it increases the shelf life of all products. It even has a slightly addictive quality to it... in some ways... (or so the theory goes..) :)


Let's take a look if we can find out the REAL type of sugar in this ice cream.

More questions about ingredients? - read on

The main ingredients of ice cream are milk and cream, includes milk fat, skim milk, buttermilk,
cream and milk. Our other ingredients are cane sugar and glucose syrup.


Okay... so we are mainly talking "glucose" so that's not so bad... however...
the "cane sugar" term is actually hiding behind it this fact... although not SOOO scary/impressive

• Syrup: a traditional sweetener in soft drinks, now largely supplanted in the US by high fructose corn syrup, which is less expensive because of corn subsidies and sugar tariffs.^{[citation needed]}

[wikipedia]

But what percentage is this...?
As they mentioned their other ingredients are "cane sugar" and "glucose syrup"
IN THAT ORDER (if order is important here... I guess it's an informational web site
and not bound by the same laws as nutritional labeling..)

Well I searched for a while... it's very hard to find the actual percentages of fructose
in cane sugar :).

It's hard to get good information...

Sounds like an interesting web site idea - a fructose content search engine for food.

gotta go!


Swendawg

Online!

Sharehouser IS online.... but I won't say where... it's in alpha alpha alpha

phase at the moment... but it can already send me emails!

I want to use the "sendgrid" extension to allow it to receive emails as well.

Interesting times ahead!

Stay tuned.

FINALLY! Sharehouser on Windows

Okay so now finally I have configured RMagick so that it runs on Windows!

What an odyssey that was! The thing was I think I had different versions of the libraries

and perhaps they didn't play together. So I uninstalled EVERYTHING and then followed

these instructions

Now it works!

Now I can do parallel work - at the desk - or on the lounge in the morning.

Awesome!

Now with the crop effect that I can apply to the "multi-receipt" scans selecting out the individual receipts for further cropping to select the important parts of the receipt (title, date, item list - with price per time). How do we handle multiple items - currently they display that

in an interesting way - that may need to be further investigated!

OKay! now time to crop my first bill in windows! YEAH!

swendawg

The biggest mistake a big company can make

The thing is - in a large company - there is a lot of software.

That software replaced people.

Humans who made mistakes.

Then the software sometimes makes a mistake (well a bug that existed in the software

actually causes an "unwanted effect") .. and eventually the bug that caused the mistake

is found and fixed.

In humans the error is never fixed.

It just gets fired and hired somewhere else....

hmm that's a weird way to think of things..

Anyway so the biggest mistake?

If you have a LARGE software base - and then your developers often have to clean

and rebuild this base - then they need FAST computers.

The price you pay for your developers having slow computers

is FAAAAR higher than the price that you pay for the super fast computers.

If you let them get bored and distracted by forcing them to wait a LONG TIME

to do something... (open a file, search a directory, run a test..) then they will go

off on tangents, start up discussions... or go

and disturb other workers... who might be in the PRIME of their working

time...

That's wasting simultaneously BOTH of their times....

It's interesting to calculate the "COST" of a meeting...

maybe we could calculate the cost of the meeting using

Length of the meeting - we could time that easily...

multiplied by the amount of people in the meeting's salaries...

Assuming an average of $60,000 per year.

60,000 / 250 days (working days per year)/ 7.5 working hours per day = 32 euros per hour.

So with 8 people present sitting around waiting for other people to be present.

We are wasting 8 people * 32 euros = 304 euros per hour

5 Euros per minute? Is my calculation wrong?

I'm not factoring in the loss of productivity caused by interrupting a programmer who is

working deep in the bowels of intricately interwoven spaghetti code.

LOTS of companies don't realise this or seem to even care about this.

I don't know why - I think most people like to keep things the way that they are

and fear change.

That's strange - because every change I've made in my life has ended up being positive.

Swendawg

Why did I make sharehouser?

I was thinking about this recently.

I've been working a lot more on it and it's been a LOT of fun!

It's amazing how working with Ruby and Rails can be such a great experience!

It's really rewarding.

So the reason I made it?

Well I remember living in a sharehouser - I had a HUGE house - it had 4 bedrooms.

So I always had three flatmates which was such an interesting dynamic

and an interesting experience.

But it was also troublesome to sort and file and add up bills

and we were a little constricted...

One idea:

what if you could put a special mark next to each item of the bill

a cross or a dash - and it could also check that element and make sure

that it auto assigns them to that person...

A symbol for each flatmate - a cross and a plus sign? a dash?

That would be a nice feature and pretty easy to implement - using a HTM...

or some sort of technology that can deal with slightly different styles of writing.

So I thought if I could write an application where I could easily enter in the data

and then drag and drop (I remember watching the scriptaculous drag and drop demo => so

awesome) each of the bills in the list - to each of the flatmates.

I could also have repeating bills - that automatically copy themselves forward into the next

month - as I set the status of the bills for that month as "paid".

I wanted to make it FUN - so that I would WANT to do the bills and I wanted it to not

use up very much time. Then I could use my time for other more fun things

like writing web applications and designing user interfaces.....