Eating my words about OCR

I've said in the past that I thought OCR was pretty ridiculous for receipts as it isn't 100% accurate and receipts have so many wacky formats. Well, after a lot of work and evaluation, I have managed to integrate the Tesseract OCR engine into ReceiptWallet. It is an open source engine that has OK results for the price. (I did investigate some commercial engines; there are 2 that are on the Mac, and the costs were outrageous and currently one doesn't even work on PowerPC machines.) As Google continues to work on the engine, I'll be integrating the new versions into ReceiptWallet.

So, how did I manage to get things to work and get OK results? How about I just say magic? :-). Turns out the hardest part is attempting to recognize merchant names; I cheated on this and simply recognize merchants that the user has already used. This works quite well as I find that I keep going to the same merchants, so while it won't recognize a merchant the first time you visit it, it has half a chance on subsequent visits.

I've been using my ScanSnap for testing and it produces very clear images that the OCR engine seems to like. My DocketPORT, however, has had mixed results. I think I need to change the contrast/brightness settings for better results. I'll leave this up to beta testers to try out.

My goal is to push out a beta this weekend and see what happens. There is no way that this will be 100% accurate, but it might help a little and then I get to say that it has OCR!

Made in China, the ultimate warning label

Yesterday I took Marley (our dog) to the vet because of some redness on his belly (yes, I realize we keep taking Marley to the vet, but he's our first "child"). As I was talking to the vet, I mentioned we just bought him some Kingdom Pets chicken jerky treats at Costco. The vet said that they were made in China and he stopped giving his own dogs anything made in China. When I got home, I looked at the package and sure enough, it is made in China. Looks like the treats go back to Costco (luckily they take just about anything back; I just have to pull up the receipt from ReceiptWallet and print it). Looks like it is back to Trader Joe's peanut butter treats (as long as they aren't made in China).To top off my day with Chinese made products, I was grilling dinner and ran out of propane. Why is this a Chinese product issue? I had purchased an electronic gas gauge that shows me if my propane tank is full or needs refilling. As I was grilling, I ran out of gas despite the gauge saying that the tank was full. Yes, the gauge was made in China. That goes back to Costco, as well.

iPhone not syncing on dock (Solution)

I noticed that my iPhone didn't launch iTunes when I dropped it in the dock even though I specified automatic sync. It dawned on me that in the past I saw an iTunes Helper app as a Login Item. Sure enough, this wasn't in my Login Items. I dug into iTunes.app/Resources, launched iTunes Helper and also dragged it to Login Items. Now when I dock my iPhone, it syncs automatically. You'd think that Apple would make sure that the iTunes helper is always running, say on each launch of iTunes. Anyway, I have a solution to my problem.

6 weeks with a VPS

It's now been six weeks since I moved all of my web sites to a VPS (virtual private server) on vpslink.com. So far, things have been smooth sailing. They have had 100% uptime, good performance, and nothing to complain about. They did get hit with a DOS attack which made things slow, but they quickly resolved that. In addition, I have 3 IP addresses on my account which made it quite convenient for me to host a client's wiki as well as some work I'm doing for them.

I still run the server in my house for email, but I consider email less critical as SMTP has built in re-try mechanisms so if the server goes offline, it isn't the end of the world.

Overall, I'm glad I decided to get a VPS; hopefully my enthusiasm for it continues.