Recommended Reading for the First-time Visitor

Below you should recognize a list of hyperlinks. These are a series of what I shall call my Current Favourites. You may call it crap, if you wish, or the good sh*t, or whatever your sweetness so desires. It is my plan (see heading, below, re: SEO and Temptation) to update the content here, frequently, although it’s more likely to be infrequently updated, in fact. You dig, right?

Check-out these Awesome Cool NoviceNotes™ Resources!

Example Stuff

Anything here should get you going. If not, try one of the more specific links below. (This is a pre-fab search, but even I’ve found stuff I forgot existed, read it, and thought, “…wow, that’s pretty cool, really…”, so it’s worth a shot.)

Flip Out, Man!

The title says it all. Try it. You’ll be flippin-out, with amazing results, in no time.

On the Panel

An article devoted to various, old-school web browser sidebar panels. These are the sort of things everyone used, essentially, before the advent of the “browser extension” (i.e. mozilla .xpi addons, etc.). Don’t knock it, yo. These things are great!

@font-face and The Standard US ASCII Keyboard

For anyone who is curious about what characters a chosen font may or may not display on-screen, but tired of typing qwertyuiop, check out this bit of plain text. To test for basic English (i.e. US-ASCII characters) support, wrap it in a <pre> tag and viola!

For jEdit Users

The official NoviceNotes™, jEdit Toolbar icon designed for use in customizing the jEdit toolbar to include one-click, toolbar button access to the Word Wrap state.

On Habari, the Web Log platform (CMS)

Habari weblog: innovation vs integration

XHTML vs HTML

The ever boring, somehow enduring story, er… discussion; comparison; waste of time: XHTML vs HTML / HTML 5, etc. blah, blah

I, Robot

On authoring content for the public forum, and the accountability thereof.

Chillax, yo! It’s an epic blast!

Right?

Web Content Publishers: Why SEO, and such Temptation to “Google-it”?

Dig this scenario, Holmes. You’re sitting there with the Search Engine in front of you, and you sense a desire to research something. Whatever your reason for landing at the Search Engine Query field, you feel the irresistible temptation to submit a new search engine query– not for research purposes, as usual– but to discover just exactly where your web site content media ranks amongst the billions of other potentially similar URL’s. It was this very activity which inspired the creation of this entry, which I intend to make sticky, here in WordPress– what, with the new ability to do so and all!^†

As I author this text, I wonder over the relevancy of it: consider Windows XP Scanner and Camera Wizard was released, as intended for the general (likely, unskilled) home computer user, nearly a decade ago. Nevertheless, because of my infrequent use of any Document / Image Scanner, and the time (otherwise spent on more productive tasks) I tend to waste in experimenting with various combinations of the Scanner and Camera Wizard options for brightness and contrast, feeling the need to make note of my most recent session with the software, I believe the information below may be of use to others who might bewilder over any unsuccessful attempts to create a viable image (or document) from an original document with an image scanner device.

Specifics of The Activity

The Hardware Device

Although I am not a professional publisher, because of my professional employment history in entertainment publicity, mass media, professional photography, marketing and advertising, I probably have more experience with the PC device equipment necessary for image and document scanning than the average user. To ensure that the reader understands precisely what process is described here, the following is a list of the equipment I used just before writing this article.

Personal Computer

Mine is a typical PC, albeit built in recent years. I’m using an MSI Mbox 945GM3-F^[1], which I built with an Intel Pentium D processor, and other required basic Intel PC parts obtained through NewEgg.com. The processor is rated at 3.00Ghz, and it’s got 2GB RAM and I’ve got ample Gigabytes of hard-drive storage space wherein I maintain at least 15% free at any given time, the recommended standard for desired performance. At the date of this text, the system is likely rated as approaching obsolescence, with a relative performance rating of medium-fast. Street-lingo would claim, †it’s not a gamer’s box‡

As the title of this article implies, my Operating System is Windows XP SP3. However, this article likely to be relevant to Windows Vista, and Windows 7 users as well.

.

Document / Image Scanner

I’m using an old scanner (I do not know its date of production). Mine is a UMAX Astra 3400, given to me by a friend. Perhaps he didn’t know it’s value, as it seems to perform as well as other scanners I’ve used (i.e. I’m able scan at DPI levels far above my needs, and the bay is large enough to accept US Legal-size original documents).

Of Thumb, Consider These Rules

It’s Not All Digital

Clean That Thing!

Take a good look at the physical surfaces of the Scanner device. What do you see? Dust? We hope there are no considerable scratches, but what about smudges? Have you touched it anytime after indulging in your favourite brand of corn-chips? Do you eat cookies near your workstation, such that a few crumbs might have fallen between the scanner lid, and the glass surface where a document is placed?

Set yourself up for success straight away, by ensuring all surfaces are clean, and free of debris. Use a safe household cleaning agent, and paper towels (to avoid leaving any fabric residue behind). If you have photographic lens cleaner, then use it, but otherwise, the aforementioned supplies should do fine. Do your best to remove anything which might distort the surface of the document or image to be scanned. For example, during this most recent scan job, I found that most of my first few test scans were rendering with a curious distortion in one of the paragraphs of the page text. Disappointed, I examined the original document to find the inconsistency did not exist there.

I had forgotten to do my preliminary cleaning! Sure enough, when I inspected the Scanner device, i found debris in precisely the area where I noticed the distortion in the test scans I’d rendered.

Had I performed the cleaning steps, as recommended above, before rendering the test-scans, I would have been one-step ahead, but instead I had wasted time to recall that cleaning is necessary. It was a case of trial-and-error, and basically extra work for the process because I’d forgotten a simple, but essential preparation. This very incident was the first inspiration for writing this article. As the saying goes: “Hind-sight is 20/20”. As one plans to avoid devastating break-down on an extended road-trip with a discriminate routine maintenance (i.e. vehicle dependability is critical to the success of any extended road trip, so the operator best practice for trouble-free engine performance a well-known, best practice for trouble-free engine performance best practice for trouble-free engine performance when the dependability of the vehicle is critical to the success of a trip, preparing a vehicle for lengthy travel, the road-worthy operator will ensure it passes a set of check-points, such as to confirm motor oil, transmission fluid, and coolant-system fluids are at appropriate levels, and stocks refills for preparedness if any of those levels change, or in the event of a break-down), If I can come back and read this in preparation for some scan job in the future, I will know to clean the device first. It may seem obvious, but any reminder is worthy when dealing with a process which can be time consuming, such as scanning several documents.

[1]Microstar International (MSI™), Barebones MSI Mbox 945GM3-F

Grep (and Grep for Windows)

Depending upon the nature of the search I want to perform, I often use grep, a GNU Operating System application, common to the Linux operating system. grep is available for Windows, so I use it there when I can for its unique ability to scan file contents. Not only does grep provide a means of locating a desired string of text from a collection of files on the filesystem, it is also an exercise in the use of regular expressions, and Command Line syntax.

When executing grep, one has the option to use basic, extended, or Perl compatible Regular Expressions. As there are several options for executing a search, I often reference the --help option on the command line, or the included HTML help files. The following excerpt from section 5.5 of the Grep [for Windows] HTML help manual explains the difference between the default grep behaviour (basic regex), and that of egrep^†

egrep | grep -E: grep manual section 5.5

In basic regular expressions the metacharacters `?’, `+’, `{‘, `|’, `(‘, and `)’ lose their special meaning; instead use the backslashed versions `\?’, `\+’, `\{‘, `\|’, `\(‘, and `\)’.

Traditional egrep did not support the `{‘ metacharacter, and some egrep implementations support `\{‘ instead, so portable scripts should avoid `{‘ in `egrep’ patterns and should use `[{]‘ to match a literal `{‘.

GNU egrep attempts to support traditional usage by assuming that `{‘ is not special if it would be the start of an invalid interval specification. For example, the shell command `egrep ‘{1” searches for the two-character string `{1′ instead of reporting a syntax error in the regular expression. POSIX.2 allows this behavior as an extension, but portable scripts should avoid it.

Note: I apologize, I do not recall precisely where I obtained my DOS / Windows cmd.exe compatible version of grep (grep.exe), but I believe it is the same as that which is bundled with several other useful applications in the GNU utilities for Win32 distribution. I recommend following the link, near the top of this entry, which points to the official Free Software Foundation web page for grep.

Readers, I realize the Sidebar (here at NoviceNotes.Net) is, for lack of a better phrase, a bit messed up! I’m in the process of fixing it, but I’d like to explain briefly what is causing it.

Word Press Widgets and Theme Compatibility

A few months ago, I changed the appearance of NoviceNotes.Net , by simply changing the theme of the blog software. Since I had last modified the NoviceNotes™ theme in 2006, features have been added to the core software. There was no problem in switching to the modern theme, recently, because it is up-to-date and compatible with the current version of the blog software. However, I decided I didn’t like that theme, and I’ve switched back to the old one– but not without problems– obviously.

The sidebar is here, but it’s not on the side where it’s supposed to be! For now, just page all the way to the bottom if you need to access links from the sidebar. This problem will be fixed soon. I apologize for the inconvenience.

A few technical details about NoviceNotes.Net

NoviceNotes™ is powered by WordPress, a relatively versatile, pre-fabricated content management system, running on the common LAMP web server model, the tried and true HTTP server model. LAMP refers to four Open Source projects which, combined, make up the most popular server model^† on the web: Linux (the Operating System), Apache (the HTTP server), MySQL (the database / database server), and PHP (the Hypertext Preprocessor; the server-side scripting language which makes it possible to display dynamic or real-time content, as it performs several complex procedures including querying the database for text to display in appropriate areas, and responding to user input as received via HTTP Request transmitted through the combination of various input from the client-side, as submitted by the web browser according to user interaction with the HTML which PHP itself also renders, ultimately).

^†According to Netcraft.com, What’s That Site Running?

Web developers often encounter situations in which it is necessary to preview fonts. As technology develops and the restrictions are lifted on how fonts may be used on the web, web developers will be trying new things, which will require more testing.

For English speaking developers who have adhered to the core web fonts for so many years, a fortunate trade-off to that restriction has been the peace of mind that the MS Core Fonts support ISO-8859-1, the standard encoding for language characters of the Western European character set.

Outside of the very short list of serif and sans-serif typefaces commonly used in web design, it is not altogether uncommon that any given font-family might not contain all of the characters of ISO-8859-1, cp1252, or Windows-1252 (each, a recognized encoding of what is, essentially, an identical character set). In the context of ISO-8859-1, and the text sample below, I recall to mind the usual suspects, which include such commonly occurring characters as “brackets”– both square and curly, the “greater-than / less-than” symbols, and the octothorpe. Often it is the fantasy font-family, the highly-styled or derivative type face which we discover supports only the basic, alphanumeric symbols. While fantasy fonts may be best at adding personality in decorative placements, the omission of character glyphs commonly used in regular typed language tends to prohibit fantasy fonts, for instance, from showing up as the property value of a global stylesheet selector.

The Times, the are a Changin’

I created this text block as a quick reference cheat-sheet for identifying what characters may or may not be supported by any particular font family. The concept is simple. Use it, as is, in your own markup where different font-family values may be applied easily for testing basic character support.

  ~!@#$%^&*()_+
  `1234567890-=

  QWERTYUIOP{}|
  qwertyuiop[]\

  ASDFJKL:'
  asdfjkl;"

  ZXCVBNM<>?
  zxcvbnm,./

©2009 NoviceNotes™
©2009 J Sabarese

###########################################################################

Maintaining standards theory, the following is true of the primary text block, above:

• total lines: 11 (eleven)
• total lines containing text characters: 8 (eight)
• total lines without text [CR/LF only]: 3 (three)
• total new lines [CR/LF]: 10 (ten)

Eight Lines Equals Four Rows

Consider the eight rows of text in the sample, instead as 4 double-rows (or row pairs) to more easily correspond with the physical keyboard. Thus, each row pair (or double-row) represents one row of the standard US keyboard, where each member of a pair indicates the same keyboard row, either with or without depressing the <SHIFT> key (e.g. a single keyboard row is typed with <SHIFT> depressed, to represent uppercase characters, and likewise without for lowercase chars).

Carriage Returns and Line Feeds for Legibility

In addition to the newline^† control character at the end of every line (excluding the final line), each keyboard row pair is followed by an extra newline, so the keyboard rows are further separated visually, for enhanced legibility.

^†Note the Carriage Return, Line Feed pair which is “typed” by pressing the <ENTER/RETURN> key, may be definitively added to HTML in the Unicode, Numerical Character Reference form, &#x000A;&#x000D;

The Standard Keyboard Sample in Practice

Consider each of the four double-rows shown here as a set of characters
which represent a corresponding row of the physical keyboard.

(e.g. The topmost row of printed characters represents the topmost
row of the keyboard. The second group of characters from the top
begins with the characters “QWERT”, just as the keys in the row beneath
the top row of the keyboard, and so on.)

———–WHY ARE THE PRINTED CHARACTERS SHOWN AS DOUBLE ROWS?————

Beginning at the left, continuing from left to right, if each key of the
keyboard is pressed consecutively, only the bottom-row of each group
is printed.

The top-row of each double-row group represents the same keyboard row
as the bottom-row of its own printed group. The top-row differs from
the bottom-row, however, as the printed characters shown require
the SHIFT key be depressed while each of the keyboard keys are typed.

@2009 NoviceNotes™
www.NoviceNotes.Net

Use it

Depending upon what software utilities you might have for previewing the various fonts installed on your system, you might find it useful to copy the text sample above, and paste it into the appropriate text input field of the font preview software.

The following software programs accept text input, and provide a convenient way to preview fonts with a custom text, like the US Keyboard-row characters transposed here.

For Windows

• AMP Font Viewer
• Lav Plourde’s Font Compare
• Sue Fisher’s The Font Thing

For Linux

• Fonty Python – Python powered font preview tool, not unlike The Font Thing for Windows, it offers users the advantage of preferred fonts groups which may be installed or removal at any time, as a means to more easily maintain access to using a large collection of different fonts, without the disadvantage users might experience with traditional global installations when the selection of a custom font means the user must sort through a bloated list to find the preferred typeface, system-wide.