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I think you read too much into EN's "OCR" feature. It is not OCR in the traditional sense, although what it does is probably even better for its intended purpose.

EN uses OCR only for searching, as opposed to turning an image into a canonical textual representation. It appears that this means that it can be far more liberal with its interpretation of the image, allowing for search hits on all likely solutions.

Imagine that based on the image, the OCR software can't decide whether the text is "them" or "thern". With EN, it'll match both (or such is my understanding), ensuring that a search will almost never miss its target -- although it may come up with false positives.

But the cost of this is that there may, internally, be multiple textual representations, so it's not possible to take the next step and extract the actual text.

China rattling?

Spoke to father-in-law in China, he says that nothing rattled there.  

As it happens, a colleague here in NJ was on a conference call to Toronto. They felt the quake a short time after we did, it was interesting to note the time delay.

The right to defend your property only works in Texas and maybe one or two other places. Here in NJ, a person is legally required to take all possible steps to avoid use of lethal force. You're only allowed to use lethal force when you reasonably believe that your own, or another's, life is in danger.

Ah, I see. Standards, who needs them?

  DNG *is* a standard, defined by Adobe. It's the camera manufacturers who have been causing the proliferation of formats. Adobe is helping to solve it by creating a standard that's licensed to be usable by all.

I imagine that you're actually objecting that it's not an "open" standard, to which I reply that there are countless other examples of successful proprietary standards, like PDF and RTF.

Never heard of .DNG files.

It's a kind of RAW file. It used to be that every different camera (that can save RAW files) used its own, individual format. This is getting to be a problem for makers of image processing software. So Adobe stepped up and defined a standard RAW format, DNG (Digital NeGative), that is usable by all.

My Pentax camera gives a choice of DNG or camera-specific PEF filed. It seems to me that my chances of being able to read the files, say, 20 years from now is much better if I use a format backed by Adobe than a Pentax one that's (somewhat) specific to my camera model.

I just encountered this program in the course of processing photos from my recent vacation. I was looking for a way to view the .DNG raw files from Explorer. This program claims to allow this, but in fact it didn't do anything at all.

I looked at two other things. Microsoft has a newer codec pack, but it doesn't support DNG. Adobe (the creators of the DNG format) have a codec, and that one does work.

So, if you're looking for thumbnails of DNG files, go that Adobe codec and save your time.

Let me throw in a balanced view [1]:

Don't go for the "keeping up with the Joneses" crap, periodically upsizing your home to a new one with granite countertops etc. Consider what you need, and how much you *know* you can afford without risk. Don't think that you "need" a bigger, fancier house just because the people you know are buying them. If you buy into a price range that has a risk that you'll run into payment problems, then these things can happen.

My wife and I bought a house 16 years ago, and have lived there ever since. We've watched friends and coworkers "upgrade", and we've seen them struggle to make payments even as the market price of the houses tumbled. Meanwhile, by being more practical and staying with what we had, my wife and I have no worries about this at all.


[1] Yes, the actions described above are deplorable. I won't defend their morality, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to keep out of trouble. Just like you wouldn't leave your wallet sitting out on the front seat of your car, don't court trouble here.

Interesting page showing examples of some very cool image manipulation algorithms.

[attach=1]
http://www.scriptol.com/p...ng/graphic-algorithms.php

[Important Notice]

No joy on the Google+Facebook thing. After installing it and clicking on the Facebook icon, I get this message:

Important Notice
Facebook is no longer enabling communication between Google Plus and Facebook. We are currently trying to contact Facebook to get everything back as it was. Please be patient with our efforts. We hope to be up and running again soon,
  -the Google+Facebook team.

Does anyone know how this product compares to Alien Skin's Image Doctor?

There are any number of ways to hear a variety of music on an Android phone when you've got a data connection. Pandora, Slacker, and apps of their kind can stream music to you. And I've found another app, MixZing, that will deliver playlists selected from what I've actually got on my phone, based on the music I'm currently listening to.

But what do you do when there's no data connection for this to be done through? I've found one app, JukeFox, that runs entirely locally. It scans your library and downloads tags for each of your songs; later on, it relies on this local cache to generate suggestions. However, JukeFox has stopped working for me. There seems to be a bug that is preventing it from scanning my library.

Can anyone else recommend to me another app of this kind? Specifically, something that can generate playlist suggestions based on some input (similarity to other tracks; genre; etc.), and do so without needing any connection at all (for when I'm driving through the mountains or something)?

There are way too many "f"s in photography. It means, variously:

• The focal length of the lens (this isn't what we're talking about at all)
• The minimum aperture that can be used for a lens (I think this is what you're talking about)
• The aperture setting for a given shot (this is what I'm talking about)

The smaller an f-stop number you choose to shoot at, the smaller your DoF; larger f-stops yield deeper DoF. But it requires greater light to capture an image at a higher f-stop (because the f-stop is actually the denominator of a fraction that describes the size of the opening thorough which light comes).

So a lens that can do a smaller f-stop gives you the ability to capture shallow DoF, as well as giving you the ability to capture a given shot in darker light.

Nice work, tomos.

For doing landscape stuff, one advantage of a real SLR lens is the ability to stick a circular polarizer onto it. This really helps manage the sky color, as well as bring out other colors more vividly. However, I'm not aware of any non-SLR polarizing filter.

Really bright lenses are themselves a big problem, because of their price tag. But I don't think that's what you need to get that shallow DoF for your cornflower picture. I may be wrong here, I'm nothing like a pro, but here's how I understand it. The F number of the lens tells you how much light it lets through. And the more like coming through, the higher an f-stop you can shoot at. And f-stop is proportional to DoF. So a lower F number thus allows for a deeper DoF, which isn't what you're looking for in this case. (having written that, I'm now off into Google land to see if I can verify my understanding...)

[The best camera is the one you have with you.]

tomos, you didn't mention what you're most interested in taking pictures of. Portraits vs landscapes vs kid's soccer games vs macro all have different needs, and would benefit from different feature sets.

I wouldn't necessarily go the DSLR route unless there are specific kinds of pictures you'd like to take, that other cameras can't do. Remember, the biggest difference between cameras. The best camera is the one you have with you. And if the camera's not convenient to have with you, you'll miss a lot of pictures.

You mentioned sensor size, and there's more to that than just image quality (noise, sensitivity, etc.). A smaller sensor has a greater depth of field. If you're taking pictures of the soccer game, that's probably a good thing. But if you're doing portraits, you want a short DoF to give emphasis to your subject.

I'm a Pentax person myself. I made that decision in part because I can use any Pentax lens ever made -- and still get the benefit of the on-board image stabilization. But in retrospect, I'm not certain that this was the best decision. With Canon and Nikon being the two big boys, economies of scale seem to cause the cost of image stabilization to have only a small impact on price for their lenses. And on the other hand, it's harder to find Pentax-compatible equipment.

This may not be relevant to you, but mine is a non-Sony household. From their rootkit debacle to their treatment of IP to their recent security problems, I don't like how they do business, and don't want to be associated with them.

@WaggleSoft - Committing all my records to your system is a pretty big leap of faith. I'd feel a whole lot more comfortable in doing so if there were a way to export the data into some standardized format (XML, CSV, Excel, whatever). Do you have any way to do that?

Just to chime in:

AndyM is correct in contradicting your dad. Fuel is burned to create motive force. In Newtonian physics, force = mass * acceleration. Given a constant mass for your car, the amount of fuel burned (ignoring the efficiency curve of your particular drivetrain) is proportional to the total amount of acceleration you're demanding of it. When traveling down a hill with a tailwind, you're not asking the engine to provide acceleration, while uphill (and with a trailer) that demand is greatly increased.

And mwb1100 is also correct. The "octane" reflects the amount of octane molecules; you may notice that the word sounds somewhat like "methane", "butane", "propane", etc. These are all different petroleum compounds. The octane one happens to require a greater amount of energy to stimulate its oxidation reaction. When there is more ambient energy, in particular, when the pressure is greater (remember, PV=nRT, so the compression cycle of the cylinder, where volume decreases, is pretty much equivalent to cranking up the temperature), then other petroleum molecules are prone to ignite before the cylinder head has moved to the optimal position. This early ignition (a) lowers fuel efficiency, since the explosion is fighting against the cylinder head getting down to that bottom position; and (b) increases pressure even further, creating more heat that can actually damage the engine.

In older cars, these premature ignitions can be perceived as a "knock" or "ping" sound. In newer cars, the engine has a knock sensor that will notice this before you can. In such a case, I believe the engine will compensate by changing the timing of the ignition spark, or dumping extra fuel into the cylinder in an effort to lower the temperature and stop the premature ignition -- thus lowering your fuel efficiency even more.

So, by using a fuel mixture with a higher proportion of octane molecules, you avoid this problem.

All that said, it's only an issue if the degree of compression in your engine is high enough that "normal" gas is in danger of that premature ignition. This is the case in a small minority of normally-aspirated engines (the Toyota FJ comes to mind). But if you've got forced induction (i.e., a turbocharger or supercharger) increasing the pressure, then you probably need high-octane gas.

If you don't have a car whose engine is susceptible to the problem, then paying for that extra resistance to ignition is wasted.

Notes: The dataset stuff is annoying, but not insurpassable.  If that is the normal behavior of the dataset generator...

I think you're still running into the VS designer "quirks" that I mentioned in a past post. It's really quite annoying, but I've had to go through the process of rebuilding this stuff many times, while dealing with vanilla SQL Server databases.

Are you planning on doing any work in LINQ? I'm curious how well VistaDB works in that context.

Another mention for Zoot. There's a full 32-bit version that handles rich text and images in beta, release expected soon (the current version is text only).

The differentiator for Zoot is its smarts, specifically its ability to automatically place products into their correct folders based on rules that you can define.

You mention that you couldn't quite wrap your head around it, and that's a common complaint (and I've certainly felt it). Unfortunately the upcoming new version doesn't do anything to improve that.

But there are some other compelling improvements in the new version. Most notable to me is its ability to collect notes from a remote source. Basically, you set up a Gmail account for it, and send new stuff to that account. Zoot, back at your desktop, monitors that account, and automatically loads new material from it. It's also got some good integration with Dropbox.

So Zoot does have its allures 

[On another note, if anyone has any other ways of doing this that don't involve cursors, I'd appreciate the help.]

This only returned the results from the last row.  No matter how I simplified it (I removed the joins and everything else to make it as simple as possible, and still no go).  On another note, if anyone has any other ways of doing this that don't involve cursors, I'd appreciate the help.

That's because you're selecting into a scalar variable, and then selecting out its (one!) value. Try just this:

Formatted for SQL with the GeSHI Syntax Highlighter [copy or print]
SELECT gt.description
FROM GameTags gt JOIN Game2Tag g2g ON 
	gt.keygametag = g2g.keygametag   
WHERE g2g.keygame = 1

Note that you're *not* going to get back a comma-separate list, you're going to get back a datatable. There's no standard SQL way to get that CSV list (and I say that with some authority, it's not just that I don't know how, I'm sure there's no *standard* answer). In SQL Server there's an undocumented feature that will get it (but I avoid such, so I don't recall). There's also a way you can use the XML facility to generate it, but it seems awful heavy-weight for such an operation. Or, of course, the cursor approach that you ruled out. The best answer, I think, is to just get the datatable and let your C# code transform the data as necessary. Use the DB for persistence, and handle presentation (i.e., putting things into pretty lists) higher in your architecture.

EDIT: or, as you mention, you might be able to do it with a recursive CTE, but that's (a) nonstandard SQL, and (B) non-supported here anyway.

For some reason, the table adapter was created, but it was not exposed in the dataset, so I had to hack it.

I can't tell if this is definitely your problem, but I've had a lot of trouble with "quirks" in the DB-related visual designers of Visual Studio. In particular, table mapping have been a problem for me. I frequently need to regenerate the whole thing when all I want is to change a single entry in it.

Anyway, thanks for this review. I've considered VistaDB, so seeing a step-by-step in-depth review is very interesting to me.

I think you shouldn't sweat too much over which school you choose. So long as you're above the bar of "good enough" (whatever that is), it won't make too much difference. In the end, you'll get as much out of the experience as you put in. If you go into it doing everything you can to learn, you will. But even in the most selective schools, if you're not always pushing to learn, you won't.

Back in the days when I used C++, I had a pattern that kept memory cleanup pretty clear. If you own an object, you're responsible for seeing that it's cleaned up. And if you've got a pointer to the object (as opposed to a reference), then you own it.

But I've been using C# for quite awhile, and have no problem with the GC in .Net. the using(){} pattern is easy to use, and does just fine. I've got a performance-critical app I finished a few months ago that holds a whole database of a hundred million objects in a Dictionary, using it to build other collections of a few hundred thousand objects at a time. This thrashes huge amounts of RAM, but is performant enough that the CPU and RAM usage is barely noticeable, dwarfed by the cost of writing out the results.

I think that one way people get themselves into trouble is that they fail to differentiate properly between class and struct. There's the obvious (but still poorly-understood, oddly) issue of boxing, but they have different performance characteristics in other ways as well. Plus the use of sealed, readonly, etc., can give the compiler/JITter a lot of help.

[Akimbo player]

After a bit of searching around and testing, here's a supplementary list (i.e., not including things I already talked about) of apps worth looking at.

• Akimbo player for audio books ($)
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...rial/com.akimbo.abp.trial
• Backgrounds for … backgrounds. Lots of pretty backgrounds
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...rial/com.akimbo.abp.trial
• BoggleDroid Lite. Play Boggle.
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...lite/org.lite.boogledroid
• C:geo for geocaching
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...-for-android/carnero.cgeo
• Bump - transfer files between devices after a bump
  http://www.appbrain.com/a.../bump/com.bumptech.bumpga
• Evernote – cloud-based notetaking, sync with desktop
  http://www.appbrain.com/app/evernote/com.evernote
• Lookout – security: antivirus, find lost device
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...bile-security/com.lookout
• Inserty – store frequently-type text, insert into text fields
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...ur.android.market.inserty
• Roboform (yes, I know... But KeePass doesn't allow editing of v2 data on the android) ($)
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...boform/com.siber.roboform
• WidgetLocker – replacement for lock screen, hosts regular widgets. This lets me play or pause music or audiobooks while I’m driving, without having to unlock ($)
  http://www.appbrain.com/a....teslacoilsw.widgetlocker
• D7 Google Reader – pulls RSS from Google Reader
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...ader/com.droidlab7.reader
• Dolphin Browser Mini – replacement web browser, has tabs
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...-mini/com.dolphin.browser
• ES File Explorer – file explorer, also explore SMB and FTP folders (I’ve got a problem on my PC, where connecting the SD as USB causes BSoD, so I have to pull files through WiFi)
  http://www.appbrain.com/a.../com.estrongs.android.pop
• Facebook
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...droid/com.facebook.katana
• Folder Organizer – Tag your apps, then put a widget on launcher that, when clicked, brings up a menu of apps having corresponding tag. Useful if you have too many apps  ($)
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...rganizer/com.abcOrganizer
• GO Contacts – better organizer for contacts. Also, a better Dialer.
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...ntacts/com.jbapps.contact
• GO Launcher EX – nicer launcher. Also, its support for scrolling widgets is required for some other stuff I listed.
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...-ex/com.gau.go.launcherex
• GO SMS Pro – much better SMS. Threaded conversations, etc. Nice widget.
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...p/go-sms-pro/com.jb.gosms
• LunaSolCal – widget showing sun rise/set, moon rise/set and phase
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...obile/com.vvse.lunasolcal
• Battery Solo Widget – just show battery strength in a pie
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...t.maicas.android.batterys
• NewCompass(AD) – like normal compass, but also shows direction relative to sun and moon
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...(ad)/com.leeyh.NewCompass
• Pure news widget (scrollable) – Show headline news in a widget, as scraped from a Google Reader account  ($)
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...lable)/org.koxx.pure_news
• Pro HDR Camera – take HDR photos. (really just a toy, but a cool one) ($)
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...era/com.eyeappsllc.prohdr
• Quick Settings – Quick access to common settings
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...-settings/com.bwx.bequick
• Scrambled Net – puzzle game.
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...et/org.hermit.netscramble
• Wikitude – like Google Sky Map, but for Earth. Labels what you’re looking at.
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...orld-browser/com.wikitude
• GoldenPicLite – calculate "golden hour" and "blue hour" for photography
  http://www.appbrain.com/a...iclite/jebs.goldenpiclite

look at Pimlical from the developer who wrote the Datebk extender for the Palm

Datebk is exactly what I had in mind when I made my comment.

As a calendar app, Pimlical looks like a winner. However, the web page makes no mention of a widget to display my agenda in my launcher "home page". That's a deal breaker for me. If he gets around to that feature, count me in.

I just got a Droid X a week ago, so I'm still getting my bearing. But here's what I've found so far:

• GO Launcher EX - More attractive than the built-in launcher, with more features
• Beautiful Widgets - attractive and functional clock and weather widgets
• Jorte - The built-in calendar app is unacceptable. This offers pretty good functionality, including some nice widgets. (But it seems that we're still behind apps I had on my Palm a decade ago)
• ES File Explorer - better UI than must, but the defining feature to me is that it can access SMB and FTP shares
• AVG Anti-virus - anti-virus, as well as lost-phone locker/finder
• GO Contacts - more usable than the built-in
• GO SMS Pro - nice, threaded conversations with a great widget
• D7 Google Reader - native app for Google Reader. It's the only one I could find that allows access to Google's prioritized list of articles, and decent offline formatting
• PowerAMP - music player
• Quick Settings - simpler, more direct access to most commonly-changed settings
• Photo Tools - calculators for focal length, exposure, etc.
• LunaSolCalMobile - info on solar and lunar positions, for planning photography. Nice widget
• GoldenPicLite - Like LunaSolCal, but doesn't have widget. But it does show golden hour times
• Pro HDR Camera - really just a toy, but a fun one. Take HDR pictures with the onboard camera

I'm now trying to learn a couple things. First is how to sync my music library using MediaMonkey on the desktop (this is complicated by the fact that connecting my Droid as a mass storage device causes a blue screen). Second is effective use of Tasker, for more fine-grained automation of the device (like, automatically turning on GPS when I run a navigation app, or silencing the ringer whenever I'm at work). I'd be interesting in hearing any input you folks might have on those things.

In my experience, the actual delivery of USPS mail is excellent, both in shipping time as well as the service provided by my letter carrier.

However, the ancillary services pretty much suck. The tracking situation is just one example; the fact that they charge so much for what other carriers provide as part of the basic service is a broader one.