Sane Performance in openDIAS

I've noticed that while scanning using openDIAS, the scanner can pause for half a second. Sometime this happens a dozen times over one page, which is rather annoying. So I've put some time aside to investigate and resolve the issue.
It turns out that the order that the scanner parameters are set, can have a significant affect on the performance of a scanning run - who knew? Anyway this issue is resolved, but....
While investigating the above, I've done some re factoring in the scanning modules which  I think will make the addition of colour* scanning easier than I'd thought., so I'm going to have a bash at introducing the option of colour scans.

*Yup - This blog/post is in the Queens English (en-gb) :D

Overriding system libraries

Regression testing is great, but when you're testing your applications interactions with other libraries (especially ones that do lots of work) while doing memory checking (valgrind) things can get really really slow. Opendias testing is no exception.

Since we don't want to test these libraries - we just want to test opendias - I've decided to 'stub out' some of the larger application libraries (some parts of same, tesseract and PDF parsing) while running regression tests.

Some very cool stuff. Here's two links I've recently found very useful in that task.

• http://www.techytalk.info/c-cplusplus-library-programming-on-linux-part-two-dynamic-libraries/
• http://entrenchant.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/linking-static-libraries-into-shared.html

I'm pleased to say, they do their job very well, and I'm very happy at the results.

Serious Authentication

The big news for the 0.9 series is the migration of location based privileges to a proper user authentication mechanism.
The first stage of the is making the application session aware, and that's what's been going on recently.
This looks to be going well and give us some extra flexibility (with fancy user specific functionality in the future.)
Once things are stable on the session handling, user profiles/ management/ authentication and finally migration of location based privileges, will happen.

Let's just get on with it!

So, I've created a new development branch for the 0.9 series.

First on the list is removing all the hard coded directory locations. Hopefully by the end we'll be able to install the application into any location (eg /tmp/opendias_test/) so that no root access is required for testing (or local deployment).
The idea is to take all location config from the GNU automake "--prefix" variable.

openDIAS version 0.8.1 released today.

The openDIAS development team are pleased to announce that openDIAS; the open source document imaging and archive system, have today released version 0.8 of the application.

OpenDIAS is a product designed to allow the home or office user to store and catalog documents, mainly (but not exclusively) from scanned physical documents. Documents are stored on a central machine and can be scanned/ imported into the archive, searched for by OCR content, date, title or assigned tag from any machine on the network.

Opendias 0.8.1 Document Detail

New features in the upcoming 0.8 release include:

• Document linkage to other docs,
• Scanning device locking,
• Document list has been migrated to an auto loaded list,
• Imported PDF, ODF and Image objects now generate a thumbnail and have OCR performed,
• Introduction of a localisation framework (initially with English and German lang packs),
• Various other frontend and backend improvements, tweaks and optimisations,
• Better testing of various hardware and OS configs (including 64-bit, Ubuntu, Redhat, Debian).

OpenDIAS is available in deb and rpm packages, from a source tarball or GitHub, with a comprehensive testing suite.

Opendias 0.8.1 Document List Page

We encourage all users to upgrade their production systems to this newest version.

For further information or help, visit the project homepage at http://opendias.essentialcollections.co.uk/

Opendias 0.8.1 Document Scanning

The next cycle begins

Work has started on the new development branch (the 0.9 cycle).

Already started is the 'configurable install location' and 'access controls by username/password'.

No rest...

Version 0.8.1 Released for public beta

The openDIAS development team are pleased to announce that openDIAS; the open source document imaging and archive system, have today released version 0.8 of the application as a public beta.

OpenDIAS is available in deb and rpm packages, from a source tarball or GitHub, with a comprehensive testing suite.

Opendias 0.8.1 Document List Page

We invite all users, either new or familiar with openDIAS to install (onto non production environments) and give feedback before the scheduled release date of Monday the 19th November 2012.

For further information or help, visit the project homepage at http://opendias.essentialcollections.co.uk/