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

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.