“Google Squared vs. Wolfram Alpha” and other links…

linuxloop.com: “First WolframAlpha, which tells me that this Saturday is 157th day of 2009, arrives and now we have Google Squared, which tells me that the most important operating system is Linux, which is the same as Ubuntu. They both are headed towards the same goal, but in different directions. Google^2’s result is more useful (and wrong), while Wolfram’s result is actually correct, though useless to 99% of us. How, then, are they heading for the same goal?”

“Developing Cross Platform application with MonoDevelop”

Miguel de Icaza: “MonoDevelop runs on top of the .NET Framework and uses the .NET managed debugger instead of using Mono’s runtime and Mono’s debugger, so there is no dependency on Mono to be installed on the system.”

“Portable Ubuntu Runs Ubuntu Inside Windows”

Kevin Purdy: “Built from the same guts as the and Linux system that lets you seamlessly run Linux apps on your Windows desktop, Portable Ubuntu is a stand-alone package that runs a fairly standard (i.e. orange-colored, GNOME-based) version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. It just doesn’t bother creating its own desktop, and puts all its windows inside your Windows, er, windows.”

“SftpDrive becomes ExpanDrive for Windows”

Of course I am late to celebrate this announcement as news but what I can say is that I appreciate the openness of a comment like, “Fixed major issue where Windows Explorer would sometimes crash while SftpDrive was loaded…” This detail shows me that my experience exists in the same universe as the vendor… this can be in stark contrast to, say, folks who live in the same space-time continuum as the Microsoft SharePoint team (I’m sure this will all “magically” change after 2010)…

“Desktop Apps Made Easy”

“Titanium is the first open platform for building rich desktop applications.” I assume that this product is Adobe AIR without any commercial limitations. I still lack the time to even desire a technology like AIR.

“Google’s Tesseract OCR engine is a quantum leap forward”

Nathan Willis: “The Tesseract code was written at Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s and ’90s. In 1995, it was one of the top-tier performers at UNLV’s OCR competition, but when HP withdrew from the OCR software marketplace, the code languished. Then in 2005, HP handed off the code to UNLV’s Information Science Research Institute (ISRI), an academic center doing ongoing research into OCR and related topics. ISRI discovered that original Tesseract developer Ray Smith was now an employee at Google, and asked the search engine giant if it was interested in the code. Google spent a few months updating the code to compile on modern operating systems, and released it on SourceForge.net.”

“Review of Linux OCR software”

Peter Selinger: “In terms of accuracy, Tesseract vastly outperforms both Ocrad and GOCR on bitonal images. But strangely, Tesseract is completely useless on input that is not bitonal, so one should always threshold the input first. The actual thresholding method used seems almost irrelevant, which makes me wonder why Tesseract doesn't simply threshold its non-bitonal input internally.”

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