American Manufacturing

This web site speaks volumes about America's economic history.

http://www.kirxklox.com/project/aess/essay0002.html

I am particularly drawn to the image at the bottom. It is the site of the
Elgin factory, as it is today. The Elgin National Watch Company story is
the story of manufacturing in this country. It's the story of an
industrial and technological boom due to ingenuity and integrity, decline
in the face of cheap foreign competitors, and, ultimately, what we are
left with today, a mall; a symbol of our consumption-based society.

Watch Word

This week I managed to get some OCR working and have posted a few
selections from "The Watch Word", Elgin National Watch Company's
long running monthly internal publication.

http://www.rdrop.com/~jsexton/watches/kyp/

These magazines contain quite a lot of interesting watch information and
Elgin trivia, but they also provide a glimpse into the lives, work and
workplaces of earlier times.

More to come...

MS-Bozos

It's staggering sometimes just how out of touch Microsoft is with
computing in the real world.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2007062209235346

Crooks

Just how much will the public tolerate?

http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/3261

Thickening the haze of secrecy surrounding the executive branch, the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney has declared itself exempt from a yearly requirement to report how it uses its power to classify secret information.

In its 2005 report to the president released last month, the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), a branch of the National Archives, provides a quantitative overview of hundreds of thousands of pages of classified and declassified documents. But the vice president.s input consists of a single footnote explaining that his office failed to meet its reporting requirements for the third year in a row.

...

In 2003 . around the time Cheney's office stopped reporting to the ISOO, the Bush administration affirmed and expanded the vice president.s classification powers through a revision of Executive Order 12958, the same order mandating the yearly ISOO assessment. The amended order explicitly granted the vice president unprecedented authority to classify information "in the performance of executive duties," including the ability to label information "secret" and "top secret" on par with the heads of federal agencies and the president himself.

Moving Day

Moving the Ladd Carriage House

http://picasaweb.google.com/jsexton0/MovingTheLaddCarriageHouse

Don't People Like OCR?

The first flatbed scanner I ever owned came with OCR software that worked
just fine and I used it a number of times. I've bought two more scanners
since then and neither one had such software for some reason. Ironicly
the only reason I replaced that first one is that I needed to do a driver
re-install and I had lost the CD (and to add irony, I later found the CD,
after the scanner was gone).

Anyway, I've wanted to do some OCR for web pages for quite awhile.
Finnally there's this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tesseract-ocr

Interestingly, this is an old commercial engine from HP that they dropped
work on a long, long time ago. It's just resently been made open source.
It's reviewed in the June Lunix Journal and appears to be just what I
need!

DRM - Why It Can Never Work

Digital Rights Management (DRM) has never worked, and will never work. In this artical Jeremy Allison of Google sums it it all up about as well, in laymens' terms, as I've ever seen.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6189011.html?tag=nl.e550