I figured there must be a way to scan them in using a document scanner, then use OCR software to render the data into Excel.

Of course, nothing does this natively, but there are ways to do it.

There are three parts to this process…

1. Document scanning
2. Data format conversion
3. Optical character recognition (OCR)

For the scanning part I used a Ricoh Aficio MP C4500, which not only acts as a Photocopier, but as a fax machine, network printer and network scanner.

The main part is it’s ability to scan with document processing. This means (once configured) that it would only take a few minutes to scan a few hundred pages, rather than a few hours using a conventional scanner.

This device has the ability to save scanned documents as PDF or TIF. I decided to use the more versatile TIF image format.

I figured it would be easier to convert a standard image format than the proprietary PDF format. I very quickly discovered that it wasn’t that simple.

To begin with I had heard good things about two leading OCR software packages…

• ABBYY FineReader 9.0
• Able2Extract Pro 5.0

I found that neither of these software packages would accept TIF files, so I converted each directory of TIF files into a single PDF file using the DreamSys Tiff to PDF Converter, which was a very quick and effective command-line tool for doing the task.

I started trying out Able2Extract as I’d not used it before and I had read good things about it’s PDF to Excel conversion. The problem was it kept throwing up a “Fatal Internal Error #24″ error which I was unable to work around.

I had used ABBYY in the past and it turned out to be very good OCR software for converting to Word at least, however trying to configure it to scan the areas I wanted into Excel seemed almost impossible and took forever.

I decided to go back to the drawing board…

I quickly realised that there were a few “web 2.0″ software as a service tools out there that could assist me…

• ABBYY FineReader Online (10 pages a day for free)
• NitroPDF PDF to Excel (free)

There’s many universal “online document converters”, a few include…

• Zamzar
• cometdocs

My issue with most of these is that they would recognise the PDF, but not the images inside the PDF and use OCR to render them. They are only designed to take the text found in a PDF file and extract that to Excel.

I also came across a few other software packages that will also convert from PDF files to Excel…

• deskUNPDF Professional by docudesk
• PDF2XL Enterprise by cogniview
• ExpressConversion Server by adlibsoftware
• PDF To XLS by verypdf
• Solid Converter PDF by soliddocuments
• TotalPDFConverter by coolutils

With all this available proprietary software for converting from PDF to Excel (XLS or CSV) its obvious that it’s a service definitely in demand.

So far I’m waiting on the following:

• Zamzar and others to email me their conversion of the PDF file I uploaded to them.
• Able2Extract’s support team to get back to me with regards to the error.
• For Cogniview PDF2XL Enterprise to download.

Let’s see what gets the job done best, first, if any…

Zamzar is unable to convert from PDF to XLS, directly or indirectly. While finereaderonline will only accept images, not PDF files, which is OK, but may take some time, especially at only 10 pages per day.

Able2Extract were unable to help me with the error unless I sent them the PDF, which I can’t do due to it’s content.

I sent DreamSys an email asking them to send these guys a sample output PDF instead, but I’ve heard nothing back as of yet.

Able2Extract recommended I use their Sonic PDF Creator product to convert the original scanned TIFF files to a PDF which they claim their Able2Extract product will be able to read.

I had a play with Sonic PDF Creator and appeared to be unable to import a directory of TIF files, just each TIF file individually. This seemed like a painstaking process.

I needed to merge the TIF files together into 1 file to make it easier. PTGui Pro is able to stitch TIF files together, however it gave me an error saying:

Error loading TIFF file: Unsupported number of bits per sample (only 8, 16 or 32 are supported) or unsupported sample format. Useless.

Back to square one.

I decided to try my luck with PDF2XL, which after a little teething problem getting a working copy to begin with seemed to be quite a neat package.

PDF2XL was able to detect that the PDF I had given it (the one I created using Tiff 2 PDF) was a scanned document and began performing OCR on the file.

The results were almost prefect, VERY impressive. It seems that PDF2XL is able to do what nothing else could, not even Able2Extract. Don’t waste your time with anything else. It seems that PDF2XL is all you need.

The only thing I will say is I had to tweak the OCR settings a little bit to get it to render the page correctly.

Just when I thought everything was going great, I discovered another issue I had completely overlooked. The output was not in the correct order. I took a look at the original PDF and soon discovered that the images in the PDF were not in the correct order either.

First off, I decided that I should rename all the images based on the sheet number, that way I could be sure that they were correctly ordered. I created a batch file to preview and rename the images, called “imgrename.bat“. I was also able to use this to rename an entire directory at a time.

I tried rebuilding the PDF using DreamSys Tiff to PDF Converter which I had used to create the PDF file in the first place, only to find that it was still out of order and I couldn’t influence the sorting. I had to find something else to do the job…

Enter libtiff and it’s windows counterpart Tiff for Windows by GnuWin32. Once I had a copy of this I was able to write another batch file that would not only combine the TIFF files (with pages) into a single TIFF file (using tiffcp.exe) but I was able to convert that into a PDF using (tiff2pdf.exe). I called this script “tiff2pdf.bat“.

Bingo!

All was successful…

The next task is to firstly, cleanup anything bad in the CSV file left by OCR (cleancsv.bat) then to “normalise” the data…

But that’s another story for another time. We’ve done what we set out to do which was to scan to excel and all is well on that front.

Hope you find this useful. Enjoy!

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Quite a few months back I was looking for an application that could sit on my desktop and tell me instantly if any of my servers had stopped responding by ping.

There’s probably hundreds of ways of monitoring services, including paid for web services such as Pingdom, and open source software that runs on your web server such as Nagios. None of them really hit the spot for the services I wanted to monitor, or they were expensive.

A quick and easy way to monitor services that was fairly non-intrusive was what I wanted. Enough detail to tell you that a server was unreachable by ping and when it happened.

Pingotron seemed ideal…

Pingotron is a computer program for controlling and monitoring network devices, such as computers, network printers, routers and other devices, on TCP/IP networks. The program has two versions: Pingotron (basic) and Pingotron PRO.

A list of desired hosts that you wish to control are entered into the program.

The program sends ICMP “echo request” packets to each host and listens for ICMP “echo response” replies. Various properties (ping interval, size of packet, time-out request) can be configured for each host. The program can notify an administrator when a problem arises with any host with an alert sound, e-mail, blinking tray notification and/or network notification. The PRO version has an alarm history log feature, alarm statistics, and ping history and ping statistics for all hosts, in addition, it has a multi-user mode.

I started to use it, however, straight away I came across an odd issue which seemed to only affect the DG834 series routers.

The software reported the ping response from these routers as an “unknown response”, while in windows regular ping, they responded just fine.

It was clear that the software seemed to think that the response was malformed, perhaps it wass, however regular windows ping does not.

I emailed the details over to the author via the support email address. I got a response the same day.

Anatoly Dobrinin fixed the bug, provided me with the latest PRO version download and a valid serial number to register it as a full version.

What a great author! I was impressed. Sure I would never have paid for this software, as there were clearly free solutions, so this was great!

This was last year in 2008. This year, I find that if you visit Pingotron.com you find yourself at some kind of ad filled domain parking page. Fortunately you can still find an archived copy of Pingotron.com in the web archive.

Update: As Pingotron appears to be no more I have decided to share my resources…

Hello,

Thank you for your message.

This bug has been fixed today.

Please download and install the program again.

You can download the program here:

http://www.pingotron.com/setup_pro.zip

You can use this registration code to register  the pro version:

EET4-3EZS-VTK0-M0U7

Best regards,
Anatoly Dobrinin

Note: If Anatoly would like me to remove this, feel free to contact me.

A copy of setup_pro.zip can be found on megaupload.

Further Update: I had another issue that I tried to report, but since pingotron.com is unreachable, nothing can be done about it.

It wasn’t a major issue. The issue was that sometimes when explorer crashes, the Pingotron icon does not reappear in the system tray.

There was no way to recover the icon or window, without killing the “Pingotron.exe” and restarting it. Running “Pingotron.exe” again would only give you the error “The program is already running!”.

I solved this by writing a script using AutoIT which would Check if the Pingotron window exists, restore it, otherwise run “Pingotron.exe”. I called it Start Pingotron.

Anyway, since Pingotron is clearly no longer in active development, I am wondering is there’s anything else to use instead. Any ideas? Let me know.

Perhaps I’ll just end up writing my own service instead…

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However, you may soon find yourself with a font overload. The problem is that once you get over about 1000 fonts in your Windows directory (usually “C:\Windows\Fonts\”) you’ll find that windows becomes very slow, particularly at startup.

To get around this, you don’t add the fonts to Windows, instead you add them into Photoshop, which is able to handle many more fonts than simply loading them into Windows.

The trick is to put them into the Adobe common fonts folder under program files (usually “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts\”).

You can get to this directory by going to Start > Run and issuing the following:

%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts

This should bring you to a directory called “fonts”, place your fonts in here and they will be loaded when Photoshop loads.

The more fonts you put in here, the longer Adobe Photoshop will take to load, however, Windows will perform a lot better overall this way.

If you’re downloading fonts from dafont.com like me, you’ll find that you’ll need to extract them from the zip file before you place them into this directory, although to most people that should be obvious.

You don’t have to reload Photoshop for the new font to start working, it should appear in the drop down menu straight away.

I had to do this the other day for the first time in ages on a new machine I had setup Adobe Photoshop CS3 on. I realised that I had forgotten the details! Once I had reminded myself I figured I would write it up here for future reference.

This should work on any version of Photoshop above 5.5, including Photoshop 6, 7, CS, CS2, CS3 and CS4.

Hope this helps!

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At first I thought there was only a few, but I soon discovered that there are quite a few…

Commercial

• Delicious Library (Mac OS X Only)
• DVD Profiler
• MediaMan
• DVDpedia (Mac OS X Only)
• Movie Collector
• AllMyMovies
• EasyMovieOrganizer
• GoToMyCollection
• Disk Catalog
• ReaderWare

Free

• GCstar
• Libra
• XMM
• CD Collect
• Movie Catalog
• CruchyMedia
• Coolector
• Movienizer
• PVD/VideoDB
• VCDdb
• Griffith
• Camel Disc Catalog
• EMDB

Web

• DVD Crate
• DVD Corral
• DVD Spot
• Movie Collector Plus
• What Yah

Firstly I intend to find one I like and use it to organise my DVD collection. My favourite so far is DVD Profiler, however once you get to 50 DVDs, you must pay to add more. I easily have over 100.

I didn’t really like many of the free or open source ones and some didn’t seem to even work correctly, however, I have no intention of paying for something that really should be free.

As you can probably see, there are a few entries in Wikipedia, so eventually I may palatially port this list to Wikipedia.

Let me know if you find this useful and let me know how you get on with the software.

Thanks.

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It started when I helped improve an article on “Icon Editors“, but because it lacked notability on its own, it was merged with the parent “Computer icon” article.

The list of “Icon Editor Software” then became a “List of icon software“.

So far, the list contains: @icon sushi, Axialis IconWorkshop, Greenfish Icon Editor Pro, IcoFX, IconBuilder, IconEdit2, Microangelo Toolset and RealWorld Icon Editor.

My favorite icon software for Windows is Microangelo Toolset, but since this is expensive, I’d probably likely use a freeware alternative such as IcoFX, since there’s no decent open source alternative yet. However, I have yet to try out @icon sushi and many of the others.

I am looking to expand the list, so if you know anything about icon software and can provide notability (such as a professional written review or tutorial) for it, that would be very useful.

The best reference for icon software I could find was an article called “Create your own icons” written by Karl Hodge (who often writes for one of my favorite magazines – .net magazine).

Although contributing to Wikipedia is satisfying, I can’t help but think that I’ve wasted far too much time on this, and I wouldn’t like to think my efforts are totally futile so perhaps one day an online magazine such as SmashingMagazine will use it as a base to review of all the popular icon software out there or perhaps even credit me for the content suggestion and it will have all been worth while.

Your feedback is welcomed.

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I no longer need the features of psyBNC and decided that there must be a better way.

At first I started looking at other, more basic BNC software, but then worked out that they work in very much the same way as psyBNC in the fact that you have to first connect to it, then tell it where to connect to.

So I thought… What about a socks5 proxy?

My BNC currently runs on my FreeBSD server, which I use for my IRC activity as it has plenty of IPs and lots of Vhosts.

mIRC can connect to an IRC Server through a Socks4, Socks5, or Proxy firewall.

In mIRC the fields the Firewall/Proxy dialogue box are as follows: Firewall Support <None|Server|DCC|Both>; Protocol <Socks4|Socks5|Proxy>; Hostname; User ID; Password; Port.

Judging by this, what I need is some kind of Socks daemon/server that has the ability to allow for a username or user id and a password.

I had a look at using OpenSSH’s Socks compatible dynamic forwarding by doing the following:

ssh -D<port> user@hostname

However, I discovered that the hostname was required, and I could not connect to any host on demand as expected.

So I decided to look at FreshPorts for Socks software, there are a few options…

• 3proxy – russian software, not a fan of this, it lacks documentation and support
• csocks – i386 only, no good on x64 machines
• nylon – seems pretty neat, tested it out, it has no options for username/password auth
• p5-Socks – a perl module, not a daemon
• proxy-connect – lacks proper maintenance
• prtunnel – poor documentation, doesn’t appear to do the task I want
• socks5 – “NEC has a funky license for this software”
• ss5 – bingo!
• tsocks – “Allow non SOCKS aware applications to use SOCKS without modification” — not what I want.

ss5 appears to be what I am looking for…

cd /usr/ports/net/ss5/ && make install clean

Based on the ss5 manual page I decided to create a ss5.conf file, which looked like this:

set SS5_SOCKS_USER hm2k
set SS5_SOCKS_PORT 33333
set SS5_SOCKS_ADDR rofl.name
set SS5_PASSWORD_FILE ~/ss5/ss5.passwd
set SS5_CONFIG_FILE ~/ss5/ss5.conf
set SS5_LOG_FILE ~/ss5/ss5.log
auth 0.0.0.0/0 – u
permit u 0.0.0.0/0 – 0.0.0.0/0 – - – - -

Once I’d done this, I tried to run it. I found that I wasn’t able to specify a config file meaning I probably wasn’t able to run this under anything other than root.

One thing I didn’t understand is that the ss5 configuration documentation say one of the variables (which the manual says to put into the config file) allows you to specify a config file. Which does not make sense!

So I decided to take a different approach, and coded my own SOCKS5 Server Script in perl…

I call it Simple Socks Server for Perl (sss.pl).

I hope someone else finds my script useful, and with any luck user feedback will drive me to develop it further.

Enjoy!

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I was provided with a 30 day cd preview slideshow of wedding photos, and was asked very kindly to attempt to extract the photos from it so they could be viewed beyond the trial period.

I agreed to the challenge, and that was that…

At first I decided to take a look at the application, and soon discovered (using PEID) that it was ASpacked, and so I used aspackdie to unpack it.

However, this is where I got stuck. I tried loads of different (windows) resource software and none of them were able to extract the photos.

I went onto programmerstools.org to try and see if there were any more tools, and just before I was about to give up I noticed an application entitled “MultiExtractor” sitting in their “Highest rated” list on the front page. I now see why.

MultiExtractor is a brilliant application.

I successfully managed to extract 878 photos from the packed exe on the CD.

The exe was packed using ASpack, nothing else seemed able to extract the files, even when I used aspackdie first.

It’s simple and easy to use. It’s not some cheap ‘hacker’ tool, or a complex hardcore programmer tool, it just works!

The maximum price for this application is $100 (~£55), if I have the pleasure of using this application again, I am very likely to pay for the privilege.

Great work Maciej Drobinski, keep it up!

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The problem is the moment that I use another application the focus is taken away from the Firefox window and it goes into the background. This is no good as I can no longer see the video.

I decided to investigate a solution that could keep the Mozilla Firefox window “Always on Top”…

Like most people my first port of call was the Mozilla Firefox community, I made a post called “Always on top“, which asked if there was javascript or a plugin somewhere that can force the window to always be on top.

I quickly discovered that there wasn’t going to be any kind of easy way to achieve this using Firefox alone.

What I needed was a third party application, ideally something freeware, or even better open source.

Here’s a short list of what I found:

• Actual Window Manager – $49.95
  • Seems rather expensive for something that should be free.
• Keep On Top – Freeware
  • Very basic, doesn’t really offer anything special
• AbstractPath PowerMenu – Freeware
  • Gives you context menus that offer: Always On Top, Transparency and Minimize To Tray.
• RBTray – Open Source
  • Offers the context menus: My Size, Always On Top, and Minimize To Tray
• WinPin – Open Source
  • Gives you a little pin to the left of your “Minimise” button that will “pin” the window on top.

All in all, I’d say WinPin does the job just fine, if you also want to Minimise to Tray too, try RBTray.

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Meaning I need a text editor that I does what I want, the way I want it.

These are the features I have in mind when looking for a text editor:

• Free or Open Source is always a bonus, but am willing to pay if it’s worth it
• Must keep running after the trial period has ended (I like to fully test before I commit myself)
• Cross-platform would be fantastic, in case I decide to move from Windows to Linux
• It must load quickly, I am always editing files, and I don’t like waiting for them to open
• Small hard disk footprint
• FTP (with portable settings)
• Syntax Highlighting (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, TCL)
• Bracket matching
• Match braces
• Markup tag matching
• Large file support – must not lock up
• Stable, must not crash
• Perl based regex search and replace
• Hex view
• Macros
• Nice looking interface
• Key mapping
• Spell checker

Over the years i’ve used the following text editors for months at a time as my primary text editor, these are my findings:

• Notepad *
  • It’s free, sort of, it comes with windows for free at least…
  • Con: It can’t handle large files…
  • Con: It can’t really do much of anything…
• Dreamweaver v4-MX
  • Not technically just a text editor, more a WYSIWYG but has a nice code editor too
  • Con: Expensive
  • Con: Huge footprint, memory and disk
  • Con: Bulky and slow
• UltraEdit v10-v13
  • Con: It’s not free, and expensive at $49.95 or $124.88 with unlimited upgrades…
  • Pro: It handles large files superbly!
  • Pro: Search and replace is fantastic!
  • Pro: Macro’s run without it locking up.
  • Yes it has FTP, but it could function better
  • FTP details are stored in the registry, which corrupt once, not happy.
• EditPlus 2
  • It’s not free, but $35 isn’t exactly breaking the bank
  • Pro: It has FTP, and they store in a portable “ftp.ini” file
  • Con: It doesn’t handle large files as well as I’d like…
  • Con: Search and replace is mapped to ctrl+h by default instead of ctrl+r, but it can be remapped
  • Interface isn’t that nice, but could live with it.
• PSPad v4.3.4 (2310)
  • Pro: It’s free
  • Pro: Under 12mb on disk
  • It has FTP…
  • Con: It can’t handle large files very well at all! Terrible!
  • Con: Search and replace is slow on large files, it locks up
  • Con: When you run macros, it locks up
  • Con: There’s no way to export your ftp list, but you can import…
  • Con: There’s lots of little bugs…
  • Con: Development is SLOW!
  • Interface isn’t that nice, but could live with it.
• UltraEdit v14
  • Pro: Very powerful hex editor
  • Pro: Interface is pretty nice
  • Pro: Search and replace is very powerful
  • Con: Seems larger than ever, with more pointless widgets
  • Con: The price is STILL expensive
• EditPlus3
  • Pro: Large file support is even better!
  • Pro: Under 2.50mb on disk
  • Pro: More than reasonable price at only $35
  • Pro: Stable, not crashed yet
  • Pro: Direct support is fantastic, no more than 48 hours so far, usually next day.
  • Con: There’s no official community support forum, just an unofficial user group and wiki
  • Con: It’s a little less organised than UltraEdit, but the features are there
  • Con: It’s not as pretty looking
  • Con: No hex editor like in UltraEdit
• e text editor
  • Pro: Usable after trial period is over
  • Supports FTP via “Remote Projects”
  • Con: No portable FTP settings
  • Con: When it loads it sometimes locks up for a good 10 seconds before it’s usable
  • Con: By default it opens all the documents you previously had open, this is an annoying feature
  • I’d rather use notepad…

People have advised me on so many other editors, such as gvim, crimson editor, text pad, ConTEXT, yet none of them offer what i’m looking for (as listed at the top).

If UltraEdit was reasonably priced for unlimited upgrades I might actually consider buying it. Never mind… Thanks SND.

For now, I think I’m going to stick with EditPlus 3 as my main editor, i’ve been using it for 14 days so far, and although it’s features are sometimes difficult to locate, they do exist somewhere, you just have to find them. In additional support has been fantastic.

Side Note: One thing I’ve found with all of these applications is that FTP settings simply aren’t portable between them. Most people seem to be using Filezilla and they seem to have perfected their XML format, perhaps it would be wise if all applications that support FTP can import and export to this standardised format. Failing that perhaps I’ll code a converter.

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As part of the software installation it appears to install a piece of software called “HP Software Update”.

Unfortunately this causes me an error:

Product: HP Software Update — A newer version of this software has been found on your system. Setup will now exit.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I tried to find this, I could not, I tried to uninstall it, it kept making reference to a “HP Software Update.msi” or “HPSoftwareUpdate.msi”, which did not exist, it couldn’t find the uninstaller, then was removed from the list.

It seems this software was once installed here: “C:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\HP Software Update\HPWUCli.exe”, but not any more.

What I need to do is find the latest version of this software, install it, then uninstall it, so I can complete the install of the driver disc of the new device.

Easy right? Wrong…

I can’t find this ANYWHERE! So I tried using google on hp.com searching for “HP Software Update”.

I eventually came across a page on hp’s website entitled HP Software Update, which contained a file entitled sp34261.exe, the page says it’s version “4.0.5 A”, released 2006-12-22, but as of 2007-11-29, it’s version “4.0.5.7″.

Downloading and running this file extracts the setup to “C:\swsetup\sp34261\”. This appears to contain files such as “HP Update.msi” and “HPSU306Stub.msi”.

When running the setup sequence it asks for “HP Software Update.msi” and looks in “C:\WINDOWS\Hewlett-Packard\Setup Files\HP Software Update\{BB4EE741-CA46-4345-A3B7-1AECBFAB0AFE}\”, this does not exist.

It seems like it wants to run this first to uninstall it, but obviously it can’t as it doesn’t exist.

I cancelled, I get the following error:

“Error 1714: The older version of cannot be removed. Contact your technical support group”

The only two options I can think of are:

• Find out what version of “HP Software Update” this is, and locate that “HP Software Update.msi“
• Remove all entries of “HP Software Update” in the registry forcing the installer to think it’s never been installed.

Doing a little bit of research this is what I found in the registry:

HP Software Update 3.0.5.001 ({15EE79F4-4ED1-4267-9B0F-351009325D7D})
version: 50331653
version (major): 3
estimated size: 3882
install date: 20050418
install source: C:\WINDOWS\Hewlett-Packard\Setup Files\HP Software Update\{BB4EE741-CA46-4345-A3B7-1AECBFAB0AFE}\
uninstall cmd: MsiExec.exe /X{15EE79F4-4ED1-4267-9B0F-351009325D7D}
publisher: Hewlett-Packard
contact: http://www.hp.com/support

I guess I need to find a copy of the installer for “HP Software Update 3.0.5″, which appears to be impossible.

I was able to find another HP Software Update for version “4.0.5 B”, released 2007-02-08, which contained a file entitled sp34794.exe.

A bit more searching and I found yet another HP Software Update for version “3.0.7.014″, released 2006-06-06, which contained a file entitled sp26727.exe.

This one seemed promising as it was labelled on the install as “HP Software Update”, the version 4 is labelled as “HP Update”. However, I was soon to find it gives me the following error:

Your system does not meet the minimum requirements for this update. Update has been cancelled. (0)

Possibly one of the most useless error messages I’ve ever seen! But perhaps we can use it’s “HP Software Update.msi” to uninstall a previous version…

I wonder what HP has to say about all this… That’s right, nothing, not without registering the product which requires me to get the serial number…

So with a little help from an outsider, I managed to solve it, these are the steps I took:

1. Open “Add/Remove Programs”, uninstall “HP Update” (if listed), also try and uninstall “HP Software Update”.
2. Download, and iInstall Windows Installer Cleanup, once installed, run it and select “HP Software Update”.
3. Run “regedit” and locate “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall”, find anything under that, that says “HP Update” or “HP Software Update”, it’s usually in the “DisplayName”.
4. Download and run patch Resolves “Fatal Error 1714″ during software install (FixErr1714.exe)
5. Download and run HP Update (sp34261.exe)
6. Download and run HP Scanjet Full Feature Software and Driver (setup_full_7650.exe)

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