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| Inquirer: Groklaw is Best Website of 2004 |
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Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 01:33 PM EST
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The Inquirer has chosen Groklaw as Best Website of 2004. Thank you, Inquirer. The awards are chosen by their reporters, so I really do appreciate the recognition from them. They have some funny awards too, after the real ones, and a certain CEO is there, twice. Hop on over and take a look. The Inquirer was the very first media outfit that took Groklaw seriously, back in the early days, and posted our Open Letter to SCO. Old timers here at Groklaw remember those days, I know.
This is a good time to tell you too how grateful I am for the incredible outpouring of support and affection I have received in the last few weeks. I have gotten an overwhelming amount of email expressing support, as well as some financial help by means of the tip jar to keep Groklaw, and me, going. It is lovely to get awards, without a doubt, but knowing that I have such strong backing from the community means the world to me, and I thank you most sincerely. I will be thanking you all individually in time, but I wanted to express my thanks now publicly, because it will take me a while to answer everyone, and I wanted you to know how much I appreciate everything you have said and done. And on that note, I'll get back to work. We'll have some more paper exhibits to share with you soon. If anyone knows how to set an HP Scanjet scanner so the resulting PDFs aren't huge, I'd appreciate you sharing your knowledge with me (GNU/Linux -- Mandrake -- or Mac OS X).
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| Authored by: PolR on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 02:16 PM EST |
You know the drill, and make the links clicky.
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| Authored by: DrStupid on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 02:18 PM EST |
| ..<raises glass> [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Retep Vosnul on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 02:27 PM EST |
ofcourse we knew this all along !.
Thanks PJ.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: zeekec on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 02:30 PM EST |
Congratulations!
But we already knew that this was the best site!
Erik[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Stinger on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 02:32 PM EST |
If anyone knows how to set an HP Scanjet scanner so the resulting
PDFs aren't huge.
I use a scanjet 5p myself, and I know that
you can scan in various resolutions. Maybe if you would lower the resolution,
say to 160, you'ld still get useful results.---
It is not I who is
mad...
It is I who is insane! [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 02:34 PM EST |
See this link:
http://www.hamrick.com/
It is not FOSS, but a version runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows XP.
I use it on all three platforms and it works great.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: WhiteFang on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 02:38 PM EST |
Size of the scanned results are a funtion of both how many colors (color depth)
and the pixel resolution scanned.
For use in OCR software, I normally scan at 400DPI and 256 colors (greyscale).
At 8 bits color depth (256 colors) and an 8.5" by 11" document results
in 14,960,000 bytes of image per page. To reduce the size of the scan, I
normally save in PNG format. This results in file about from about 2 to 6 megs
in size depending on what was on the page. Text obviously results in greater
compression than photos.
My personal experiences with OCR software are that you ger better results with
greyscale scanning than with pure black and white scanning.
Of course YMMV
You should have somewhere a place where you can configure both the scanning
resolution and the color scan value. This is where you need to set your values.
HTHs[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 02:39 PM EST |
Actually, looking at the Inquirer article, I find that it's McBride with a
mention only once and SCO with *two* mentions. Here:
Personality of the year: Darl 'Cowgirl' McBride
Dry up and blow away please award: SCO
You still exist award: Matrox and SCO (tie)
All rather fitting, I'd say.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Groklaw Lurker on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 02:46 PM EST |
This comes as no surprise. Congratulations PJ!
---
(GL) Groklaw Lurker
End the tyranny, abolish software patents.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: rsteinmetz70112 on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 02:50 PM EST |
Thank you to everyone else who has contributed.
---
Rsteinmetz
"I could be wrong now, but I don't think so."[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 02:53 PM EST |
| Congratulations PJ and Groklaw.
Even
Darl made the list - in a different way.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: MplsBrian on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 03:02 PM EST |
On a personal level, Groklaw has been a daily read more consistently than any
other website. Keep up the good work, PJ & crew.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 03:06 PM EST |
| Groklaw was not given this for the best eye candy or the slickest look or the
coolest new idea. It was for the content.
And the process (maybe that's the
"coolest new idea").
And the results.
Very impressive.
Congratulations PJ and the rest who make Groklaw what it is.
MSS [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Observer on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 03:20 PM EST |
| The "Dry up and go away" Award? I almost spat coffee all over my keyboard.
Goes to... Well, I don't think you'll have to work your beanie very hard to
guess that one.
---
The Observer [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Nick_UK on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 03:36 PM EST |
Pamela, you deserve it all... to be honest, would there be
an outlet if you didn't start blogging? I dunno, but you
did and here we are.
Also I would like to comment on your through put of work.
I think you are AMAZING in the way you day in, day out,
churn out an amazing amount of information onto a web page
- sometimes I am astounded by the workload you carry and
do - and this isn't like just blog rubbish - this is legal
analysis, if you will, of documents that 90% of people
cannot understand anyway.
You are an amazing girl.
Nick [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Observer on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 03:51 PM EST |
| I remember when this fiasco first broke that the one site to go to for
heavy-hitting analysis of what was being said was the Mozillazine
(http://www.mozillazine.org/). That was the site where you had the first real
breakdown of where all this code came from, and who had developed it, and an in
depth, factual dissection of SCO's claims. If I remember right, this was before
SCO had even brought the suit against IBM.
Question is, where are they now?
The site is certainly alive and active, promoting Mozilla and its spin-offs, but
you don't see much about SCO. Did they simply bow out to Groklaw? Why did this
site explode while Mozillazine's SCO coverage fizzled? ---
The Observer [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Latesigner on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 03:52 PM EST |
| . [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: rm6990 on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 03:58 PM EST |
This isn't really conveniant but what I do is scan it in using Kooka, because I
can set the size on the bottom left (the top number thing down there). Then I
save it as a .jpg, paste it into OOo and export it to a PDF. It has worked for
me in the past, although I haven't done huge documents so this might be
impractical for you. Anyways, hope I helped.
---
IANAL
(C) Copyright 2004 Ryan McGregor
The above post is released under the Creative Commons License
Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: fLameDogg on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 04:03 PM EST |
Congratulations, PJ. You, and the Groklaw community, earned it.
You've certainly opened my eyes, and far from mine alone, not only to the
machinations of SCO (and their backers, attempting to hide like elephants behind
signposts), but to the kind of legal (and patent) gamesmanship in general that
thrives in dark places. Kudos to you for casting light on them.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: LarryVance on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 04:11 PM EST |
|
Inquirer article that hits
right on the money with respect to where McirSoft is
headingM
---
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE YOUR INFLUENCE!
Larry Vance [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 04:15 PM EST |
"Old timers here at Groklaw remember those days, I know."
Let us not forget those old timers who are no longer with us. "To absent
friends"
Maat[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 04:24 PM EST |
Congrats on the awards! They are well deserved!
Regarding the HP scanner:
I use sane as backend and Xsane as graphical frontend under SuSE 9.1. I scan
documents (A4) in 600 dpi b/w and use tif2pdf to convert to .pdf files. I've
done this for approx. 2000 pages (personal document database) and .pdf file
sizes are between 50 and 150 kb for most pages. The scanned documents print like
good photocopies (quality-wise), but I don't know how suitable they are for
OCR.
Kind Regards,
./ Kristoffer[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 04:32 PM EST |
Congratulations PJ! Of course we all know that, but it's great coming from the
outside! Keep up the great work!
--glenn green[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 04:37 PM EST |
... you're just gonna have to let someone else win an award now and
then.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 04:39 PM EST |
| When you use a scanner on a document, choose the options to get a grayscale
image file. Choose a high resolution, you will change it later. Doesn't matter
at this stage whether you scan as .bmp, .jpg or whatever. You get a big image
file.
Open the image in GIMP. First step is to reduce the resolution. Right
click, Image, Scale Image. Click in the "New Width" box and type a number that
is half whatever is already there. Then click in the "Height" box, GIMP will
adjust that to keep the aspect ratio the same. Click OK. You will then probably
need to zoom the image. But if its readability is still OK, continue. If it is
no longer easily readable, go back to the original image.
Next step is to
reduce the number of levels. Right click, Tools, Color Tools, Levels. (If you're
using an older version of GIMP, Levels is under Image | Color I think. But
anyway, get to Levels).
The Levels dialog box has 2 slider controls, the
upper one has 3 little triangles that you can drag. Drag the left one toward the
middle and the right one toward the middle. (Don't touch the sliders in the
lower slider control.) Look at the image - you want the gray background to
become white, while not losing any text clarity. What you are doing is reducing
the number of different shades of gray. When you are done, the 3 little
triangles should be very close together, but you should not have lost
any readability of the text, and the background should be all white, not
the shaded gray you started with. Save this image in case you need to go
back.
With few levels, you now change the "mode" of the image. Right
click, Image, Mode, Indexed. You see a dialog box with a box labeled "Max no of
colors". Since the document you scanned is basically black and white, you should
be able to get a good image with a very low number in this box. Try 4. (You
might even be able to get away "Use black and white palette", which produces the
smallest file, but probably not). Click OK and save the image a a .png file. It
should be very small compared with your original image.
The remaining
steps are just the usual ones for converting an image into a PDF. I use
OpenOffice - create a text document, Insert | Graphics | From file, resize it as
you want, then File | Export to PDF - but there are other ways, use whatever
you're used to. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: StLawrence on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 04:44 PM EST |
Way to go, PJ! Can't believe you beat out scoinfo.com...:-)
Congrats! Well deserved.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 04:50 PM EST |
Best site. I guess they must have ignored my many comments, as they would have
dragged it down at least 5 places. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 04:54 PM EST |
Hi there,
In the utilities folder inside applications (on Mac OS X
Panther), there is
something called "colorsync utility." You can apply
colorsync filters to PDF
files with this utility. One of these is called
"reduce file size." In the ColorSync
utility help, choose the "modifying PDF
images using ColorSync filters" for
instructions on how to make this work. It's
a bit esoteric, so does not have as
intuitive an interface as it
could.
you may also find these
applescripts helpful, though some may be for
mac os 9. Here is a nice overview
of PDF and Panther. From here is an
explanation of the CS utility:
Launch
ColorSync Utility, and open an image-heavy PDF file
(File: Open).
In
the
Filters section of the dialog box that appears, click on New. Double-click
on
the newly created Untitled filter and rename it Compressed. Click on the
Details button, and set the Color pull-down menu to Images. Set the second
pull-down menu to Compression, and the third to JPEG. Choose a Quality
setting
-- for the smallest possible file, choose Least -- and then click on the
Apply
button (located below the Filters section). Go to File: Save As and save
your
PDF under a new name. To see what you've done, return to the Finder
and check
out the new PDF's file size -- it should be significantly smaller than
the
original's. In our tests, we shrank a 57MB file to 4MB via this
process. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 05:07 PM EST |
| Does the reach of res judicata differ in criminal and civil decisions? [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: clark_kent on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 05:07 PM EST |
Hey, it was Groklaw that shed some light on the SCO situation. Just shed some
light in the little dark corner and watch all the rats scurry! The rats (MS,
SCO, Baystar and maybe a few others) were about to eat the Penguin, the cute
little feller.
If it wasn't for Groklaw, I'd be stuck watching has-been news on Yahoo!
Microsoft got away with killing off Novell DOS 7, the Amiga, the Commodore 64,
BeOS, OS/2 Warp, and hurting the Classic Mac real bad. But now everybody is
watching! Heh, heh! So, what did you say about Linux, Microsoft and friends?
MS and SCO: And we would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for those
meddling KIDS!
the PJ gang: Scooby-dooby DOOOOO!!!!!
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 05:48 PM EST |
I usually scan with Xsane (v0.91 on Mandrake 9.1) and save as postscript. Then I
convert to pdf using ps2pdf.
I usually scan at 150dpi, it is more than enough for text.
For a large scan (22x29cm, or 8.5x11.5''), I get a 24-bit image over 6MB
uncompressed and as high as 13-14MB as ps.
The pdf, on the other hand, are consistently under 500kB
(images are usually stored in jpeg format in PDF files).
It will be difficult to achieve better than that without using character
recognition, as you have to store the image in your PDF and the data is just
there. jpeg is about the best compromise and this is why it is used in PDF
files.
Hope this helps,
Regards,
Stephane[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 07:38 PM EST |
Darn!
It was won by "It's like a thing, but without the LEDs"
My "I think that blue plastic thing is the handle" didn't even get an
honorable mention!
Oh the ignominy!![ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, December 08 2004 @ 07:45 PM EST |
300 dpi is good for most docs and you may remember the earliest HP laser
printers did it at 300 dpi.
I drop it down to 250 and the docs stay fairly sharp while the file size stays
fairly small.
Theoretically a 250 dpi file will be about (250^2/300^2) times the file size of
a 300 dpi. It comes out to about 70%.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Simon G Best on Thursday, December 09 2004 @ 11:27 AM EST |
Regarding your OCR file size troubles, I thought I'd add some comments to the
various comments already posted (possibly duplicating some of them, but I'm too
lazy to read through everything).
One thing to remember is that just
because an image is visually 'greyscale', it doesn't mean that it's
being stored as a greyscale image.
Your scanned documents may well be
visually colourless, but your scanner might be scanning them into colour images
anyway. Depending on the image format being used, it can result in image files
that are up to three times the size they would be if they were stored as
greyscale. (If, for example, you convert a PGM (Portable GrayMap) into a PPM
(Portable PixMap), it'll end up three times the (file) size, though obviously
still be just as colourless as the original PGM. It's because each graymap
pixel value is replaced with three pixmap pixel values, one for each primary
colour in the pixel.)
Oh, and Netpbm can be very useful. You've
probably already got it (or a lot of it) installed on your system. It fits
particularly nicely with the Unix philosophy of combinable tools
(pipelines!).
Oh, and the order in which you do the various stages of
processing and conversion can matter. Reducing depth from eight bits per pixel
to one bit per pixel before reducing the resolution could result in a
significantly worse result than when reducing the resolution first, for example.
(You might even find it helpful to increase the depth before a
particular step, and then reducing it again afterwards.)
Just some
things that came to mind :-)
---
Open Source - open and honest? Not
while the political denial continues.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, December 09 2004 @ 02:20 PM EST |
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, December 09 2004 @ 05:47 PM EST |
| I think that Mike Magee should be happier that PJ recognized
him.
- INQ fan, not from the Island of the Mighty, but
named for it
brian [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, December 10 2004 @ 02:47 PM EST |
... and then distill the resulting file into PDF format. Ghostscript should be
a good tool to use; I use GSView, a front-end for Ghostscript, under Windows,
and generate PDFs that way. The downside is that since the distiller doesn't
generate optimized files, the size might still be large.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, December 12 2004 @ 02:46 AM EST |
> And on that note, I'll get back to work. We'll have some
> more paper exhibits to share with you soon. If anyone
> knows how to set an HP Scanjet scanner so the resulting
> PDFs aren't huge, I'd appreciate you sharing your
> knowledge with me (GNU/Linux -- Mandrake -- or Mac OS X).
Depends on what you are interested in doing with the PDFs.'
If you are wanting facsimilies of the original documents then I would suggest
using The GIMP to do, say 360 DPI scans of the documents, and then reduce the
resolution from 360 to 72 DPI, and then save the images as Jpegs. That way
you'll have images suitable for your website that won't need anything other than
a browser to display them.
If you are wanting to create PDFs with the CONTENT of the original documents,
but not necessarily being facsimilies of the originals, then scan in at, say,
150 DPI and then use OCR software to convert the scan into text, and then use
Open Office to convert the text into PDFs. I presume that there is suitable OCR
software for the MAC. I don't know if there is good OCR software for Linux yet.
D.
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