- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

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.)

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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

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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.

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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

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

27 Oct '11

jimmy said: > if you're only interested in the text content, it's quite useless. that's right. > It is useful for OCR research to have that data that's right too. i'm not saying they shouldn't make that data available. but there's a huge middle-ground they're ignoring. they provide dirty o.c.r. as their "text", and this bloated x.m.l. and when they are confronted about their dreadful o.c.r. text, they respond with "well, you could trawl our x.m.l. instead...". as if throwing _all_ of the data at us is an acceptable answer to our reasonable request for _better_ text in the first place. (and again, i love that alex actually provided a script to us, or at least the location of a script we can run against every book. like i said, i wish there were more people like him over there. he is an excellent example of the way that they _should_ be.) > so I'm glad they provide it i'm glad they provide it too, for the one-tenth-of-one-percent of the population who _might_ be expected to make use of it... but i'm not glad they're ignoring the needs of the much-larger percentage of people who would make use of cleaned-up text. why are they just now, after having collected 3 million books, bothering to develop a script to give people "useable" output? > not as useful as corrected text, granted let me be clear that i'm not asking for "corrected text"... i am asking for text without any globally-replaceable flaws. i am asking for text that has some reasonable resemblance to the structure that finereader can _easily_ give its output. look at the o.c.r. that is offered for "the art of the book" -- with faults that are typical of _all_ of the archive.org books. there's no clear indication of pagebreaks, for crying out loud. yes, the pagebreaks have 3 blank lines, and that's consistent. but there are many other places in the book with 3 blank lines, places which are _not_ pagebreaks. so you can't count on that. really, if they can't even get _that_ right, what are we left with? (coincidentally, it's _possible_ for them to get it right, because the .djvu file itself, which produces the text-file, gets it right. just have abby put a formfeed at the end of each page, stupid.) or consider that, where there were illustrations, this text is littered with nonsense characters. why weren't they filtered? again, it's not as if finereader has no knowledge of pictures... many of the illustrations are saved out specifically, so abbyy had to know the locations, and could've ignored those areas. but the people who devised the workflow simply did not care. they made garbage. and now we have to live in their garbage. or try this on for size. here are two scans from the scan-set: > http://z-m-l.com/misc/artofbook00holm_0108.jpg > http://z-m-l.com/misc/artofbook00holm_0109.jpg ok, i understand, mistakes happen, yadda yadda, and i note that the pages did get rescanned, except without the hand... my question is this: why were these 2 scans still included in the scan-set which stands as the representation of this book? why weren't they simply discarded? and since they didn't get included in any of the output that was generated by archive.org, that means that archive.org has in its workflow a mechanism that says "ignore these"... which seems to my mind like an unnecessary complication, a grafted-on non-solution to a problem that _should_have_ been solved by addressing its cause, not one of its effects... and now every other developer who wants to "add value" to that scan-set is going to have to build in an "ignore these". it's true. the more you know about the archive.org workflow, the more you realize that it's just one jerry-rigged _disaster_. it's all dressed up, in the emperor's new x.m.l. clothes, but the guys who designed it obviously have little competence. or i dunno, maybe their main priority was on "job security" -- nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what i mean? -- but if that was the case, boy, are they in for a surprise, because archive.org laid off more people than they hired in 2011, if my guess is correct, and as the economy gets _worse_ -- which it certainly will -- they will "let go" even more... and we will be left with a complex mess that no one can even _understand_, let alone _fix_ so it works _correctly_. we might as well not even bother spending the money to create a cyberlibrary, if all we're going to do is waste it... > but I think the clearest example of > the value of such data is reCAPTCHA, > which (in part of its operation) > compares the output of two OCR systems, > and extracts images from > the coordinates where they disagree. you might not know that google bought recaptcha, shortly after which internet archive stopped using it. but yeah, that's one example of using coordinate data. the _clearest_ example, for archive.org, is using the data to highlight a hit found if you search in their flip-books. which, by the way, reminds me about this screenshot: > http://z-m-l.com/misc/prime-example.jpg oops! there's a prime example of a search fail! go ahead. try it yourself: > http://www.archive.org/stream/booksculture00mabiuoft#page/236 the stupid. it's everywhere. (but jimmy's point was good.) -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] sometimes i despair
by Greg M. Johnson 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

From: a(a)aboq.org > I asked you many months ago why you -- as the only person here, > to my knowledge -- insist on contributing to this list in ugly, > bloated HTML emails, instead of in plain-text, which is the gold > standard of mailing-lists, especially (!) tech lists. Constantly > posting in HTML makes you look like a perpetual clueless > newbie. Also, I made you aware many months ago that your > cr*ppy AOL email software -- again, as the *only* contributor's > here -- incessantly breaks the proper threading of messages > from this list. With every contribution you send to this list using > AOL, you break a discussion thread, creating havon on (for > example) my iPad and iPhone, etc. If you don't give > a damn about messing up other people's inboxes on a daily basis, > you can't be surprised at the lack of civility you're experiencing, > or the lack of interest in your innumerable projects. Completely agreed on every point. I cannot read pg emails on an ipod touch. I also subscribe to a Linux User's Group which appears to be using exactly same email software, and I can read them. -- Greg M. Johnson http://pterandon.blogspot.com

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barbara freethy owes michael hart a large pizza
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 26 Oct '11

26 Oct '11

barbara freethy. nope, i've never heard of her. have you? she is an oft-published and award-winning author, with novels from pocket, n.a.l., and harper-collins, 30 of them all told, constituting a hefty backlist... but no, sorry, the name doesn't ring a bell with me. however, according to the sacramento bee, which quotes a vice-president from barnes&noble digital, ms. freethy has sold a lot of e-books of her backlist. > http://www.sacbee.com/2011/10/25/4005206/author-barbara-freethy-sells-over.… over a million e-books. of her backlist. just in 2011. (which, according to my calendar, is only 10/12 over.) her e-books are priced at $3-$6, which means freethy is taking home $2-$4 on each one. times one million. thank you, michael, for setting writers like freethy free... -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] Fwd: Re: epubeditor.sourceforge.net
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 26 Oct '11

26 Oct '11

i'm not directing _any_ of this at you, alex... none... these are things i've said before, and will say again, here and elsewhere in cyberspace, many many times. you seem swell, alex, all reasonable and everything. i only wish there were more like you at archive.org... especially the people who _decide_ on the workflow. and yes, one-off corrections don't impress me any. until the entire library is fixed, no one can develop apps that will add value to the library qua library... just in case anyone is unclear about what i've been talking about, i've appended the x.m.l. data saved for a page in "the art of the book" that has nothing more than a heading on it that says "great britain". > http://www.archive.org/stream/artofbook00holm#page/n12/mode/1up i think we can agree that that's a whole lot of mud that we need to scrape off a page that has 2 words. -bowerbird p.s. i changed the angle-brackets to square-brackets, so as not to confuse them with any .html processing... ---------------------------------------------------- [page width="2935" height="4285" resolution="300" originalCoords="true"] [block blockType="Text" l="594" t="802" r="2082" b="966"] [region] [rect l="594" t="802" r="2082" b="966"] [/rect] [/region] [text] [par lineSpacing="128"] [line baseline="958" l="608" t="832" r="2064" b="960"] [formatting lang="EnglishUnitedStates" ff="Times New Roman" fs="44." bold="true" spacing="-16"] [charParams l="608" t="836" r="736" b="960" wordStart="true" wordFromDictionary="true" wordNormal="true" wordNumeric="false" wordIdentifier="false" charConfidence="100" serifProbability="40" wordPenalty="0" meanStrokeWidth="205"] G [/charParams] [charParams l="748" t="832" r="852" b="956" wordStart="false" wordFromDictionary="true" wordNormal="true" wordNumeric="false" wordIdentifier="false" charConfidence="100" serifProbability="100" wordPenalty="0" meanStrokeWidth="205"] R [/charParams] [charParams l="864" t="832" r="964" b="960" wordStart="false" wordFromDictionary="true" wordNormal="true" wordNumeric="false" wordIdentifier="false" charConfidence="100" serifProbability="100" wordPenalty="0" meanStrokeWidth="205"] E [/charParams] [charParams l="972" t="836" r="1096" b="956" wordStart="false" wordFromDictionary="true" wordNormal="true" wordNumeric="false" wordIdentifier="false" charConfidence="69" serifProbability="98" wordPenalty="0" meanStrokeWidth="205"] A [/charParams] [charParams l="1100" t="832" r="1232" b="956" wordStart="false" wordFromDictionary="true" wordNormal="true" wordNumeric="false" wordIdentifier="false" charConfidence="100" serifProbability="255" wordPenalty="0" meanStrokeWidth="205"] T [/charParams] [charParams l="1232" t="832" r="1304" b="958" wordStart="false" wordFromDictionary="false" wordNormal="false" wordNumeric="false" wordIdentifier="false" charConfidence="255" serifProbability="255" wordPenalty="0" meanStrokeWidth="0"] [/charParams] [charParams l="1304" t="836" r="1404" b="956" wordStart="true" wordFromDictionary="true" wordNormal="true" wordNumeric="false" wordIdentifier="false" charConfidence="100" serifProbability="98" wordPenalty="0" meanStrokeWidth="236"] B [/charParams] [charParams l="1416" t="832" r="1524" b="956" wordStart="false" wordFromDictionary="true" wordNormal="true" wordNumeric="false" wordIdentifier="false" charConfidence="100" serifProbability="100" wordPenalty="0" meanStrokeWidth="236"] R [/charParams] [charParams l="1536" t="836" r="1584" b="956" wordStart="false" wordFromDictionary="true" wordNormal="true" wordNumeric="false" wordIdentifier="false" charConfidence="100" serifProbability="100" wordPenalty="0" meanStrokeWidth="236"] I [/charParams] [charParams l="1596" t="832" r="1728" b="956" wordStart="false" wordFromDictionary="true" wordNormal="true" wordNumeric="false" wordIdentifier="false" charConfidence="100" serifProbability="255" wordPenalty="0" meanStrokeWidth="236"] T [/charParams] [charParams l="1728" t="836" r="1852" b="956" wordStart="false" wordFromDictionary="true" wordNormal="true" wordNumeric="false" wordIdentifier="false" charConfidence="100" serifProbability="98" wordPenalty="0" meanStrokeWidth="236"] A [/charParams] [charParams l="1864" t="836" r="1916" b="956" wordStart="false" wordFromDictionary="true" wordNormal="true" wordNumeric="false" wordIdentifier="false" charConfidence="72" serifProbability="100" wordPenalty="0" meanStrokeWidth="236"] I [/charParams] [charParams l="1932" t="836" r="2064" b="960" wordStart="false" wordFromDictionary="true" wordNormal="true" wordNumeric="false" wordIdentifier="false" charConfidence="82" serifProbability="100" wordPenalty="0" meanStrokeWidth="236"] N [/charParams] [/formatting] [/line] [/par] [/text] [/block] [/page]

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Re: [gutvol-d] Fwd: Re: epubeditor.sourceforge.net
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 26 Oct '11

26 Oct '11

somebody at archive.org said: > KH: It's a big file because it includes > lots of the original geometry information and > wraps each word in its own span to support corrections. just another example of their ludicrous workflow over there... the important content from the o.c.r. process -- the text -- gets muddled inside a huge amount of other data which they consider to be "necessary" solely because their major focus is on the scans. and, just in case you didn't realize it, _this_ is why the _search_ capability at archive.org is so darn slow, often to the point that the machine gives up, meaning you get no results at all, because the search routine has to plow through so much irrelevant data. -bowerbird p.s. in the rare case when one needs to know the coordinates of a word's placement on the scan, one can easily determine it. the routine for finding a line's baseline is simple, and very fast, and -- turned on its side -- works fine for locating each word. i once posted a sample graphic, but i can't run it down it now. but for heaven's sake, if you feel that you _must_ save the data, then at least have the good sense to store it in a separate file...

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Re: [gutvol-d] roger, your code _could_ scale just fine, if only you'd...
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 25 Oct '11

25 Oct '11

keith said: > Are you sure you know what a revision control system is i'm absolutely positive i do. > or how they work! do you wanna have a discussion about the relative merits of c.v.s. versus git versus mercurial? or what? (i roll my eyes.) > I am inclined to think not. think what you like. i still don't wanna discuss it with you. but if you want to inform yourself a little better, you could trot over to d.p., and see how they handle diffs over there. for tiny text files, typically with the same number of lines even after their most extensive edits, diffs are _a_breeze_. to involve "a revision control system" -- as the term has come to be known today -- would be _massive_overkill_. -bowerbird

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