Saturday 30 March 2013

OpenDias 0.9 beta release.

I've just tagged a beta version of the 0.9 series of openDias.


We've added some great stuff this last cycle. Thanks to everyone who contributed. Here are some highlights:

  • Auto detect similar documents, offer to 'tag' and 'title' new docs for you.
  • Privilege assignment by username and password.
  • Added Dutch translations.
  • Can now scan in colour.
  • Detail page now has a 'print now' button (for scans and jpeg imports).
  • Increased the max number of scanning pages to 30 (from 10).
  • Deprecated location based privilege assignments.
  • Improve scanning performance.
  • Application and install, now honours GNU autotools --prefix option.
  • Tests no longer need special permissions to run.
  • Web application is now session aware.
  • Implemented bind vars for result returning SQL statements.
  • Stubbed out many external libs for testing (performance).
  • Localisation is now much easier.
  • Cleaned up homepage.

Visit the download page on the official website and give it a try. Everything is explained from there.

http://opendias.essentialcollections.co.uk/

At present, I do not recommend using this version on a production system, but, performing an upgrade on a current system (copy of) is something I'd really like to hear about.

Otherwise, have fun, I hope you're really going to enjoy the new features.

Sunday 17 March 2013

Let me tag that for you.

For years I've wanted to add some functionality I've had in mind, that really would make openDias truly useful. Automatically sensing that a new doc 'looks similar' to one you already have stored. Then, when it does, be able to apply the same tags and title to the new doc.

I've always had this down in the "would love to have" / "pipe dream", mostly because I couldn't think of a reasonable way of doing it. Well the other day during some idle brain time, some surfing got me to reading about media comparison algorithms for copywriter protection, and suddenly that long archived idea gets reclaimed as a "viable target".

Some focused Googling later and I find the pHash library. pHash is a perceptual algorithm that will provide a hash value for a media file. These hash values can be compared later to give a rating on how similar the two input files were. ........ Perfect.

A short hop and a skip later, we now have a 'would you like me to tag this for you sir?' option in openDias. I could not be happier.