October 2011 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

see how they play their little game?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Oct '11

28 Oct '11

ok, all you new people, see how my antagonists play their little game? one by one, they come, all calling me names and insulting me, and throwing mud on me, until eventually it all cumulates in a mess... you tire of the thread, get sick of the drama, and soon stop reading. pretty clever, hunh? meanwhile, because i had to do a response to each of these twits, they manage to make me look like the one who flooded your box. that's why wolves operate in packs... and they think you're too stupid to notice... too stupid to notice their blatant hypocrisy by calling me "mean" and "disrespectful", when _they_ are the parties guilty of that. they call me "a troll", as if i were the one who was responsible for them sending in their nasty messages... pretty slick, eh? they accuse me of "going off-topic", but they seem to think the topic here is bashing bowerbird. quietly ask yourself how many of them have a history of adding value here? it's all very amusing, don't you think so? and now you have seen it for yourself, so you too know just how they play their little game... -bowerbird p.s. for the winner of this iteration, i pick walter hoist. his accusation that i'm suffering from a "persecution complex" was simply brilliant. after all, why would i feel "persecuted" just because all of these people are calling me names? must be something wrong with me... the other finalist, finishing in second, was lee passey, with the good old classic "crazy uncle" charge. it's well-used, sure, but that's because you can't dispute it without becoming "the crazy uncle", so it's fool-proof! and yes, i _have_ stopped beating my wife. finally. at least i think i've stopped... maybe. for a while, anyway. well, i'm trying... last night was just an accident.

1 0

Re: [gutvol-d] Fwd: Re: epubeditor.sourceforge.net
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

jimmy said: > they did quite a lot of work to bring the engine itself up > to modern standards, and have been relatively successful jimmy, that's fantastic news! i myself don't do too much scanning, not books -- more interested in _birthing_ digital-books -- but the people over at d.p. will love to hear this... they've really tried to use tesseract in the past -- and i mean they truly _wanted_ it to work! -- but it just didn't perform at the level required... so they keep using finereader. (and, for anyone out there wondering about it, no, they don't use the o.c.r. from archive.org... even when archive.org stuff isn't fatally flawed, the d.p. people have found they can usually get better results from their own scanning efforts. don't know why that's true, but it's interesting.) so i hope d.p. people from here spread the word. (they usually erect a big cone of silence around this listserve, because they don't want the people from over there to know about me, or hear me... they banned me over there, where i'm now known as he-who-cannot-be-named, a.k.a., voldemart.) > It got a huge shot in the arm > when the Android guys took notice ok, that makes sense. because i've definitely noticed that it's now being incorporated even at the level of apps these days. and i must be honest that one thing which i had never anticipated is how it would be paired with _translation_ software, for some _killer_ synergy. my word! those apps, where you point your phone at a sign and it is translated in real-time, are stupendous! and when you think how they could be improved with some crowd-sourcing and mechanical-turk, the realm of possibilities gets truly staggering! > is due to be released around Thanksgiving? > I'm not American, so I only have a vague idea > of when that is :) the 4th thursday in november. 4 weeks from today. -bowerbird

2 1

sometimes i despair
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

the other alex said: > Egomania in action. It's always "me, me, me you know, dude, i would find it _much_ easier not to talk about "me, me, me" if _you_, alex, would stop talking about me! i'd guess _half_ the posts you've ever made to the list -- ever! -- have been directly _to_ me or else _about_ me... how about you stop posting about me? how about you leave me alone? stop your stalking. -bowerbird

2 1

Re: [gutvol-d] Fwd: Re: epubeditor.sourceforge.net
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

jimmy, thanks for your input. it's cool. but i'm guessing you must be new... very new... because some of these things we just went over. i'll run though them again, but only very quickly, because i'm afraid of boring the lurkers... :+) > It could be a "Field of Dreams" ploy - > if we provide it, they will come (and fix it). nope. almost all of my requests were targeted at _creating_ a system for users to correct their text. but i couldn't get the minimal cooperation necessary from the archive.org folks to _build_ such a system... they don't seem to care in the least to have it "fixed". > Maybe there just aren't enough of them in general. there seems to be no shortage of them when it comes to making the mess in the first place. only in cleaning it up. > I'm not a data scientist, and I don't play one on the internet, > but if they were trying to do it the right way, I imagine they > would collect a representative sample of their collection, > test on that, and if the results were 1) positive and > 2) statistically significant, they would then (and only then) > attempt it on the entire collection. well, yeah, that would be "research methodology" level 101. unfortunately, archive.org is still stuck back in kindergarten. as i have gone over recently, the o.c.r. has _correctable_ stuff like spacey commas -- literally commas preceded by a space. you don't have to "do research" to know how to correct those. you just need to do a reg-ex across the entire text collection. like i said, jimmy, kindergarten. nap time and everything. > so if they had tried, without considering language, > they could easily have come up with a negative result even in kindergarten, it's easy to tell if a book is in english. but it doesn't matter, because what you are describing is _way_ over their head. it's _miles_ over their head. really. to bring the discussion back to the level of actual reality, consider that the text for _many_ archive.org books lost its em-dashes. the em-dashes were accidentally deleted sometime _after_ the o.c.r. and the text-file was posted... for an example of such a book, look here: > http:// ia700303.us.archive.org/10/items/booksandculture00mabirich/booksandculture00 mabirich_djvu.txt go down to page 30, and then compare the text to this: > http://z-m-l.com/go/mabie/mabiep030.jpg voila. you'll see that the em-dash has simply vanished... (ditto with the end-of-line hyphen, as well as a couple of apostrophes, but we'll just focus on em-dashes for now, because that glitch can't be solved by software algorithm.) this problem has been exceedingly common at archive.org. i pointed out this glitch to them many _years_ ago... and they didn't care! they simply didn't care. i'm not kidding. it took me years -- literally _years_ -- of pestering them before they "agreed" to fix this flaw. and -- as we see -- years after they promised that, things _still_ ain't fixed... i mean, seriously, jimmy. if they are unwilling to fix a bug that's _this_ serious -- across tens of thousands of books -- they certainly won't do the type of stuff you're talking about. kindergarten, jimmy. kindergarten. that's where they are. and every year they keep being "held back" to _repeat_ it... > Have you tried reporting that as an individual bug? you make me chuckle, jimmy. :+) if they won't replace missing em-dashes, you can bet your very last dollar they don't care about pagebreaks. when i initially reported the em-dash glitch, i was very nice, as i thought they would be very appreciative, and thank me for the error-report, and be embarrassed by the lapse in their quality-control which allowed such a grievous problem to _exist_, let alone be widespread... instead, they turned _me_ into "the bad guy", and they ignored me, and when they could no longer ignore me, they demonized me, and eventually they _banned_ me. they are not being interested in "bug-reports", jimmy... as far as i can tell, that's the last thing they wanna hear. > Specific issues like that are more easily acted upon > than general issues, and maybe they can > add up to a general improvement. well, it's hard for me to imagine something more "specific" than tens of thousands of books missing their em-dashes. (not to mention the end-of-line dashes and apostrophes.) and i am sure this problem could be "easily acted upon"... somewhere along the line, they made an encoding error, and it couldn't be all _that_ difficult to track down where. (just look at every change, and see where they disappear.) but i can't describe to you the stunning immensity of their total, complete apathy about solving this specific problem. except, perhaps, to point out that -- years later -- i can still give a u.r.l. that points you directly to a book with the issue. (and i assure you with great confidence it's not the only one.) > I haven't used Finereader for quite some time, > but I do remember that it got the image segmentation > quite badly wrong from time to time, so perhaps it was > safer to trade some gibberish for missing text? they had to get the picture locations to clip the pictures. > Well, that's just bizarre. > Maybe the other hand was holding a crack pipe? you funny. :+) but on a serious note, running one of their scanners is an extremely challenging job, because it's both boring _and_ demanding of attention. takes a special person. so errors like that happen. they are to be fully expected. what's _wrong_ with this picture is that those mis-scans should have been discarded, not included in the final set. that's a problem with workflow. not the person scanning. > Are you referring to another XML file here? > The excerpt you posted was of Finereader's own XML, > which is more or less just a dump of its internal state. right. finereader took a "dump", and archive.org archived it. whole. and now suggests we trawl it, to find any good stuff. including all of those em-dashes which their workflow "lost". i mean, if there were _diamonds_ in this dump, i'd do it... but em-dashes? um, no thanks. in many cases, it would be quicker just to re-do the o.c.r. > The OCR project I'm loosely affiliated with, Tesseract, > is also a Google product. I was aware of that, and > I was told a few things about it, but as I can't remember > which I was asked not to repeat, I'd just prefer to > stay on the safe side and not mention anything about it :) i'll save you the trouble. tesseract is a piece of crap. :+) but its lousy performance will mean that google has to do a lot of very hard work to write the routines that can correct the lousy output turned out by that piece of crap. which will turn out to be a _great_ thing in the long run. but hey, i would _love_ an open-source o.c.r. program. love love love... so if you can turn it into a worthy app, i'm sure a lot of people like me will heap praise on you. ok, yes, i admit it, i haven't actually evaluated tesseract in the last year or so, so maybe it improved immensely. _maybe_. but i really doubt it. it needed a lot of work. but hey, let me know if i'm wrong, ok?, and i'll review it. > Now that I didn't know. Seems counterproductive. if my enemy buys my friend, my friend is no longer my friend. > The XML data is quite poor for that purpose, as > it lacks word coordinates, so I chose not to mention it. > (I think they made public the scripts they use to > convert the data into a usable form for that purpose, > but I'm not sure). hmm... i guess i'll have to take another look at that. as soon as i work up the nerve; i'm allergic to x.m.l. -bowerbird

2 1

Re: [gutvol-d] sometimes i despair
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

carlo said: > Enforcing "no HTML" in mailman mailing lists is easy, > just an option in the content filters section. i will support a "no html" policy here... ...if we enforce it on the library as well! whaddya say, guys? can we work a deal? you don't really wanna be hypocrites, do you? > This would be fully in line with > the philosophy of Michael (only text matters) > that BB too preaches. uh, no, carlo, that's massively dishonest, and you know it. first of all, michael only insisted the text-file be present. he _never_ disallowed some other format, provided that the advocate did all the work of supporting that format... heck, michael even offered disk-space for other formats! the correct perspective is he supported format diversity... and me? i have shown all of you, repeatedly, exactly how you can use the text-file to generate many other formats. i've also released cost-free tools that do such conversions. i believe that shows that i believe in format-diversity too... so the spin you attempted here was quite clumsy as well... -bowerbird

1 0

Seeking German->English translator
by Greg Newby 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

I'm forwarding a request for the site http://www.publicdomainproject.org/ Please contact Chkristoph if you are interested: Christoph Zimmermann <christoph(a)bigbeat.ch> -- Greg ----- Forwarded message from Christoph Zimmermann <christoph(a)bigbeat.ch> ----- Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2011 22:09:11 +0200 From: Christoph Zimmermann <christoph(a)bigbeat.ch> To: Greg Newby <newby(a)arsc.edu>, Feldmahler <feldmahler(a)imslp.org> Subject: Publicdomain Project: We search a translator Hi Greg and Edward I write to you because in the past 8 month we didn't manage to find someone who is willing/able to translate our PR text to english. The text is written in german by a theater director. In my opinion he did a great job targeting this text to potential sponsors at cultural departements, foundations and others. We are looking for a person who is able to understand a german text and is willing to write a PR text about our project. It should sound attractive and should gain interest when people working in the cultural area are reading it (That's why we never try it ourself to translate such an PR text, it's just too important :-)) We can't spend the money for a professional translator here in europe. But we are able to pay something for this translation. So if you know some students, temporally unemployed, volunteers,... persons and/or someone who loves/collects/lives music and is able to read german we are really happy to hear from you. Thanks, Christoph ----- End forwarded message -----

1 0

Re: [gutvol-d] sometimes i despair
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

the good alex said: > Looking at BB's email, it's sent in both HTML and plain text. yeah, the other alex is confused. the reason the a.o.l. posts break the threads is because the return-headers are incorrect... (that terminology is vague because i refuse to crawl around the muck of the techno-jargon.) the .html formatting is another issue entirely. however, i _fully_agree_ legacy software sucks. how much time has the world wasted on i.e.6? it's just that the _irony_ of this is so _delicious_ -- the people who say our e-books _should_ be in .html format and not plain-text are the same people who _bitch_ because my messages and e-mails are in .html format and not plain-text -- that i just can't resist rubbing their noses in it... -bowerbird p.s. the listserve software could also be smart, and put a post into its thread using the subject. it's just too bad it's not open-source software, so that someone could make that improvement. (note for lee: yes, i _know_ it _is_ open-source. this kind of humor is called "irony" or "sarcasm". i am calling attention to the b.s. of technocrats.)

2 1

sometimes i despair
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

alex, that's exactly the type of response which my experience led me to expect... the only question was how long it would take. you came in under 10 minutes. congratulations. -bowerbird

4 3

Re: [gutvol-d] sometimes i despair
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

seriously, sometimes i fear for the future of humanity... the stupid is everywhere, and the hostility is frightening. and this listserve is just a tiny little microcosm of it all... the real problems -- politicians and bankers -- are big. but hey, i'm an old man... i'll be dead sooner than later. it's you _young_ folk who need to worry about this turn. the very people "in authority" are the stupid ones who're screwing everything up... they're gonna ruin your world! rob you of your future! if you want to have _any_ chance, you're gonna have to rip that "authority" from their hands. but once they realize that's what you are intent on doing, they will demonize you. ostracize you. make you illegal. and do whatever they can -- which is a lot -- to stop you. these are greedy guys, who can kill without compunction. which means you must operate just outside their reach... good luck, kids. you're gonna need it. i believe in you, but i can't tell you it's going to be easy, because it won't. bankers have the money, and politicians have the power. i wish i could help you. but like i said, i'm an old man... -bowerbird p.s. michael hart approved this message.

1 0

sometimes i despair
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

sometimes i despair. at the lack of intellectual discourse. you can see it everywhere. but you don't have to look "everywhere". no, you don't have to look at the money/politics nexus to see it, although the right-wingers have turned that into a bleak desert, thanks to the volume of fox news and money from the koch boys. and you don't have to look at any article on any political blog, where the racists and antiabortionists have tilted the machine, hijacking any imaginable topic back to their own hobby-horse. and you don't have to look at the comments on youtube videos, because doing so will make you wonder who raised those kids... no sir, you can look right here on this little old listserve, and see the appalling lack of brainpower behind the talk. i won't say that "no thought goes into most posts here", because the sad truth is that it _appears_ that some of these people are actually _trying_ to use their brains... it's just that it's not really working. they think, and think, and think some more, but things _still_ come out stupid... yesterday's example was keith agreeing with lee that some "revision control system" was needed to digitize our books. oh please. one person, working an hour or two, can take a book from raw o.c.r. to a copy that has less than 1 error on every 10 pages, often as little as 1 error every 25 pages. and you want to stick the text-file from each of those pages -- roughly 1k each -- in a complex revision control system? that idea is totally stupid on its face, absolutely ridiculous. yet we have people coming here, and actually suggesting it. and when i say "that's completely stupid", people accuse me of "being mean". nobody ever calls me "mean" in meatspace. people uniformly call me "a nice guy". (and yes, i'm grateful i have a long-time girlfriend, because i know otherwise that "compliment" might mean i'd be single the rest of my life.) but unless someone has the huevos to say "that is stupid" when something really _is_ stupid, and especially when it's _really_ stupid, we would be resigning ourselves to wallow in the mud of stupidity for the rest of our lives. _forever!_ so i say it, when i have to. but boy, does it ever get tiring. it seems as if it's an endless task. and sometimes i just don't feel like "being mean". so after i've written the post, i close it, without sending it. i did that early this month, with a reply i made to keith. and i did it again last week, with a reply i made to lee. then yesterday keith made another post where i had to slap him down for the sheer stupidity of it. and today, lee has just made a post where i'll have to do the same. sigh. so i've decided i'm gonna retrieve those older posts and send them. in the hope of warding off future stupidity. but i'm not hopeful that it will work. it hasn't worked in the past. why would it work now? and so i despair... -bowerbird

3 2