Off the boil

Sorry for the lack of progress on making this release a reality. The library issues continue, in fact there has been no improvements since Raring's release. I'm seriously thinking about dumping memory management testing for openDias, even temporarily, just so we can get some movement.

OS Upgrades

The openDias release has been derailed slightly with the recent release of Ubuntu Raring 13.04.

It seams that a whole bunch of library updates have introduced memory issues, which has sent openDias tests crazy. I could not in all conscience plan to release with failing tests, even if they are seen to be in 3rd party libraries. Fixing these or providing suppression configs for all the issues will be a major time pit, so what I plan to do is wait a few weeks for Ubuntu/Debian to fix the libraries up.

For now however, there is nothing stopping the current versions - posted on the website - from being used, as other than this bump, we've got 'green lights' across the board.

Beta testing continues

We've had a great response from the beta testing release we made last month, receiving a record amount of feedback - thank you. 

Off the back of that feedback, a number of updates, fixes and tweaks have been applied to the beta version, so we've gone ahead and created a new release cut - 0.9.3b. Check it out at the opendias download page..

We've also set a final release date, as, Thu 25th April.

However, please continue to send your feedback, and help make this release the most useful and stable release yet.

Cheers.

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.

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.

Dutch language translations

Thanks to Piet de Vries openDias now has Dutch translations. Thank you.

User management

It's been a while since the new authentication system has been put in place, and it looks to be here to stay. So we needed to add user management, to complete this functionality. This is now available in the current development branch.

Colour scanning

As discussed in an earlier post, I've done some refactoring of the scanning modules to allow for colour scanning. A welcomed increase in functionality.

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