How much should I charge for fixed-price software contract?

[Ben Pfaff]

There are various command-line utilities. Search for "pdf2ascii",
"pdf2html", "pdftohtml", "pdf2txt" etc. Maybe your shell account
already has one of these available.

To my knowledge, none of these utilities do any form of OCR.
They only work with PDF files that render text characters with a
font. They will not produce useful results for PDF files that
just encapsulate a scanned bitmap.

 

[Pascal Bourguignon]

There are various command-line utilities. Search for "pdf2ascii",
"pdf2html", "pdftohtml", "pdf2txt" etc. Maybe your shell account
already has one of these available.

But a megabyte PDF that reduce to 30K text will containt the text as
scanned bitmaps, not as PDF text. On these file, pdf2ascii doesn't
work, you need real OCR.

Happily, it's not too difficult to find free OCR software with google...

--
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/

 

[Sylvain]

Why Ubuntu Linux?

it is actually a pretty good distribution (imagine
Debian, except that they get it right -- running
for cover -- seriously, installation and update
is a bit more user friendly than Debian) *and* there
is an Ubuntu bootable CD that you can try without
having to install the thing.

--Sylvain

 

[Patricia Shanahan]

I don't have access to any such library, unless the San Jose public
library would have it (the new Martin Luther King library on campus of
San Jose State University). I suffer motion sickness riding the bus all
the way to San Jose, so I don't go there often, and when I do go there
it's to go somewhere else where I'm busy until 5PM or 7:30 PM, and the
library closes at 6PM so there's no time to sign up for an InterNet
terminal to find your reference then try to find the journal.

According to its web page, the library is open 8:00 AM - 10:00 PM Monday
through Thursday.

Like most large libraries, it makes its catalog available on-line,
searchable from anywhere using http://mill1.sjlibrary.org/search/

They say they have volumes v.11 (1971)-v.73 (1997) of Biophysical
Journal, location "King Periodicals Lower Level", call number "QH505.A1
B537". You need pages 103-117 for October 1978, in volume 24.

Patricia

 

[Shiro Kawai]

If you require me to do that, you'll have to provide the money to buy
it for my Macintosh with only 17 megabytes unused disk space, or for my
laptop with no working modem or diskette drive or CD-Rom drive, hence
no way to install it without first fixing the modem.

I browsed your 'situation' document:
http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/NewPub/mySituation.html
and suspected you have an external modem connected to your Mac, right?
I wonder if you've tried to connect that modem to your laptop's
external
serial port. Didn't that work?

 

[Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

From: (e-mail address removed)

That's one hell of an achievement.

I find your comparison of my actual achievement with a mythical place
of eternal torture to be offensive. Please re-phrase whatever you
intended to say in a less offensive form.

Robert, how did you sink so low?

What are you talking about?? I've never done anything criminal or
abusive or anything else where the word "low" would apply to my morals.

Drugs?

Only the ones Donald Kennedy must have been using when he diverted
government research funds for his private yacht and summer home,
thereby throwing my place of employment (Stanford University) into
discrace in the eyes of all research funding agencies. When Stanford
got fed up and fired him, Science (journal of AAAS) did a really stupid
thing: hired him as their chief editor. That lowered Science as a
reputed journal in my eyes, and I cringe every time I see one of his
stupid editorials in that now-tainted journal.

Trauma?

No. When I got laid off because Stanford had no more research funds, I
assumed that since I had 21 years computer programming experience I'd
be able to get another job very soon. It took a long period of
unemployment to convince me little by little that the whole world had
stopped being decent to nice guys like me.

Insanity?

No. I worked hard on writing a quick resume, and then worked even
harder on an even better resume, and spent long hours, until about 4AM
every night, scanning job ads and documentating all job leads of any
kind and everything I did such as when I responded to a job ad etc. I
accumulated appx. nine (9) megabytes of such notes before I finally got
burned out from exhaustion and couldn't continue at that pace any
longer. Part of my exhaustion was that my wife was beating me up
several times a week in 1993, and abusing our children several times a
day, and I was helpless to convince her to stop the abuse, and the
police refused to ever do anything until early 1994 when they finally
took her away on psychiatric hold making me a single parent. Yes,
insanity, hers. She was totally bonkers. Apparently our not having
money to buy lots of expensive stuff was beyond her coping skills.
Did you see the desperate pleas I posted in mid-late 1993 and early
1994 trying to find anyone who would help me get her out of our lives
so her abuse of us would finally stop? For example, she destroyed her
clock radio, and tried to destroy my color TV, because she truly
believed the neighbors had planted voodoo control devices in them to
eavesdrop on everything she did. While I was in my room scanning job
ads etc., and she was supposed to be watching our children, she gave
our 3.5 yr old son an electric iron, plugged in and turned on, to play
with, and then just left him unattended while she went in the kitchen.
She was totally bonkers, and a danger to everyone around her.

 

[Randy Howard]

Sylvain wrote

it is actually a pretty good distribution (imagine
Debian, except that they get it right

almost.

Kubuntu gets it right.

 

[Chris Uppal]

almost.

Kubuntu gets it right.

Kugh....

;-)

-- chris

 

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

Does anybody know of a free program that does OCR on PDF files and
keeps track of layout so as to convert to reasonable HTML or plain
ASCII? Or if I wrote such a program myself would anyone think it was a
good thing and pay me money for all that effort? Or am I the only
person who thinks that converting a megabyte PDF file to a 30K text
file would be a useful utility?

Google does give you a link for each PDF to view that PDF as html. I
don't know how those pages look in lynx, though. I'm not sure how to
let it convert your own PDF, maybe you need to put in online and wait a
few weeks for Google to index it, or maybe you could try to see what
google does with the URL and direct it to your PDF file. But then I've
also seen PDFs for which Google didn't show the "show as HTML" link.

 

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

The amount of money necessary to start a business depends on the type
of business, among other things. You may only need a few thousand US$
to build a small prototype, but you may need far more to build out an

You don't need anything to *build* software, as long as you can pay the
rent and feed yourself (and all other developers). Of course that's a
problem not to be neglected , but if you can stay at your parents' for
instance it might be cheap.

infrastructure to support a client base of substantial size. Your
ability to attract investors may depend on being able to support the
substantial client base.

That's true. But server resources are cheap anyway, and hiring support
people wouldn't kill a (working) business, either, so I guess it depends
on how much support you'd have to do all by yourself (since I'm afraid
you don't scale ).

 

[Sylvain]

Kubuntu gets it right.

hey! Ubuntu with KDE, thanks for the pointer!

--Sylvain

 

[Christophe Rhodes]

[ note f'ups: this is offtopic on all of these groups ]

it is actually a pretty good distribution (imagine
Debian, except that they get it right -- running
for cover -- seriously, installation and update
is a bit more user friendly than Debian)

I don't believe this is true any longer. The first release of Ubuntu
(4.10, almost a year ago) based its installer on the then-unreleased
"sarge" version, and consequently shone when compared to Debian's
released 3-year-old "woody" installer. However, now that "sarge" has
released, its installer is essentially the same as Ubuntu's: neither
has a particular advantage over the other.

*and* there is an Ubuntu bootable CD that you can try without having
to install the thing.

This is true: there are no official Debian live CDs (though Knoppix is
mentioned on <http://www.debian.org/CD/faq/>)

Christophe

 

[Chris Sonnack]

I find your comparison of my actual achievement with a mythical place
of eternal torture to be offensive. Please re-phrase whatever you
intended to say in a less offensive form.

That is an.... interesting way to respond to a compliment.

 

[Guest]

That is an.... interesting way to respond to a compliment.

Psychopathology is manifest.

 

[gds]

You don't need anything to *build* software, as long as you can pay the
rent and feed yourself (and all other developers). Of course that's a
problem not to be neglected , but if you can stay at your parents' for
instance it might be cheap.

Well, I was thinking of the cost of a few computers, a LAN, UPC, net
connection, web site (or putting a server in a colo), printer, etc.
Add rent if you can't start the business somewhere where you don't
have to pay for the use of the space.

--gregbo
gds at best dot com

 

[Andrew Thompson]

.....
This has strayed far off topic for c.l.j.programmer.

Please cease cross-posting these (interminable) threads
to this group.

[ F'Ups set to comp.programming only. ]

 

[Monique Y. Mudama]

How do I let potential employers know I'm looking, and able to start
work immediately, without letting them know I'm currently
umemployed?

Why even mention it? If they're interested, they'll ask you when you
can start.

I have no idea how to express my qualities of work in buzzwords that
the junior staff member filtering resumes into trash can would
recognize as a reason to select mine to stay out of the can. Do you
have any ideas to help me, or do you just like kicking people while
they are down and I shouldn't expect you to offer any useful ideas?

Seems to me you do a great job of kicking yourself; no outside help
required.

I have had lots of friends out of work for a long time, and none of
them were half as whiny, negative, or unwilling to consider new ideas
as you are. Think that might come through in your resume and cover
letter? (Btw, seriously, if you don't have a cover letter, you need
to have one, tailored at least a bit for each job application.)

You say that you've been fooled before, thinking things were going
well. So what exactly are you living for? What's the point, if
you're afraid to even dare to hope for a brighter future? You may be
poor, you may not have a car, you may have a learning disability ...
and so what? The sun still shines bright, the grass is still green,
and you still have kids (if I recall your previous posts properly) who
depend on you ... so if you have no other reason to think happy
thoughts, imagine how they feel with their only remaining parent
spewing negativity all the time. Do you want them to grow up to be
just as negative as you are?

 

[gds]

[edit of previous post]

You don't need anything to *build* software, as long as you can pay the
rent and feed yourself (and all other developers). Of course that's a
problem not to be neglected , but if you can stay at your parents' for
instance it might be cheap.

Well, I was thinking of the cost of a few computers, a LAN, UPS, net
connection, web site (or putting a server in a colo), printer, etc.
Add rent if you can't start the business somewhere where you don't
have to pay for the use of the space.

--gregbo
gds at best dot com

 

[alex.gman]

Part of my exhaustion was that my wife was beating me up
several times a week in 1993, ...

Kinky. A little more information than I wanted to know though.

What I was asking is this. To be one of the top 5 math undergraduates
country-wide (do you have a link proving this BTW?), you have to be
very capable of both learning (required math) and problem solving. At
what point did you feel that your abilities deteriorated and what
caused it?

 

[Ray Dillinger]

I'm not proposing that it is. But theres not much alternative to
something like that when both the hardware and software are being
developed.

Forgive me for asking, but if you are part of a team that is
developing both specialized hardware *and* software to run on
it, don't you have an accurate emulator in the first place in
your HDL file for the new hardware? I mean, if you're
designing the hardware, you've got the design in a Hardware
Description Language (such as VeriLog) and your HDL
development environment will support some excruciatingly
exact simulations that you can test software against.

At least, I've never seen a Verilog environment that didn't
have a simulation mode you could test software against.

Bear