Heroes Happen {2008} - Adelaide

Yesterday, along with the rest of my team from UniSA, I attended the Adelaide "Heroes Happen {2008}" event - the local launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008.

It was a good day, and we got some nice goodies (including a T-Shirt, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, and Vista Ultimate with SP1). One curious thing is that the extra EULA with the Vista DVD says you're only entitled to use it for 365 days! What's up with that?

The location at the Hilton was good, if a little crowded. Excellent catering though, which is always something I watch out for.

Some good presentations, and I did learn something new - I didn't realise that the .NET Framework 3.5 includes support for RSS and Atom feeds.

It was great to bump into lots of familiar faces too.

Batch-converting JPEG files for OCR

I was sent a whole bunch of .jpg files of scanned documents with text that I wanted to extract.

I have Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) installed, so I was keen to use that to perform the OCR (instead of re-typing all the text!). The only problem is that MODI only understands TIFF and MDI formats.

I used ImageMagick to do the conversion. Convert might sound like the best candidate, but mogrify did the job for me.

You can convert a whole lot of files using the following command:

mogrify -format tiff *.jpg

This creates new tiff files for each JPEG file. The only problem is that MODI doesn't like the particular flavour of TIFF generated. Fortunately ImageMagick has 1001 options to configure exactly what you want to happen.

A bit of experimentation and I've found that the following extra options generate TIFF files that can be read without problems:

mogrify -format tiff -colorspace RGB -compress RLE *.jpg

All good, except that I then discovered that the scanning was at such a low DPI that the OCR wasn't able to find any text :-(

Something else that sounds interesting is that MODI can be programmed against. Maybe I could automate this even more!

10 Years!

It's hard to believe, but it really is 10 years ago today that this gorgeous woman said "I do"! Yes, Narelle and I are celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary.

In a lot of ways, it seems to have gone very quickly. It's like only yesterday we were going out and then engaged, flying interstate once a month to see each other (I maintain I kept Ansett afloat that year). Long distance relationships are very difficult, but the wait was worth it.

We were married in Sydney (which is where Narelle and her family were living at the time), so that meant there was a fair bunch of Adelaide family and friends who made the trek across. Not to mention Cathy from USA. Then as a complete surprise, Mr & Mrs Rush and Mr & Mrs Badger decided they'd drive to Sydney just to see the wedding, then drive all the way home again on the same weekend (1,400km each way).

After the honeymoon, it was back to Adelaide. As if getting married isn't enough, Narelle also moved interstate!

Now Narelle's Mum & Dad have moved here to retire and help share the babysitting with my parents. Very handy, especially with G3 due in May.

It's not all beer and skittles mind you. Well I don't drink beer for one thing (strawberry milkshakes are more my cup of tea) though I think the kids do have some skittles in the toy cupboard. Seriously, there have been some tough times, but we've got through them, and they've been more than made up for by the good ones.

Well all I can say is if the first 10 years are any indication, I'm looking forward to the next 10, and the 10 after that, and the 10 after that…