I got A+ and A in all the non-academic areas, as a result of which grades were upgraded in two of the academic subjects (english and science in my case).

Integrating GlotPress & LimeSurvey

Assuming you already have a LimeSurvey install, whose user table you want to use.

1. svn checkout http://svn.glotpress.org/trunk/ glotpress
2. Download the three custom files found in the root folder (or clone the repository) and put them in the glotpress folder.
3. Edit gp-config.php for the database details, you can also regenerate the salts on your wish. Scroll down below to check if CUSTOM_USER_TABLE constant shows the correct user table name (check the table prefix lime_).
4. Open the folder location in the browser to run the GlotPress installation process. Write the generated .htaccess.

1. Make all superadmins in LimeSurvey administrators in GlotPress – put the plugins/permission.php file in plugins folder.
2. Make only some people in LimeSurvey administrators in GlotPress – run this query -
   INSERT INTO `gp_permissions` (`id` ,`user_id` ,`action` ,`object_type` ,`object_id`) VALUES (NULL , ’1′, ‘admin’, NULL , NULL);
   (assuming gp_ is the prefix you’ve chosen) where the corresponding `user_id` is the user id in lime_users table whom you want to make the admin in GlotPress.

Integrating GlotPress & Any Software

Now that I have written about how to integrate GlotPress with LimeSurvey, I also wanted to write about how you can actually integrate GlotPress with any other software which has a user table which GlotPress could use. There are basically four modifications you need to make. These modifications to the original classes were done on GlotPress r683. Refer to this commit to see how the core files were modified to suit the needs, explanation below.

User class (class.ls-users.php)

You need to make GlotPress aware of your user table by editing the WP_Users class.

1. Find/replace all the user table column names with yours. Also edit the _put_user() method.
2. Disable (and here) search by user_nicename if no such column exists and you can do that with username instead (similarly with other columns).
3. Correct set_password()
4. Make appropriate mapping/addition of values

Password Hashing (class.ls-pass.php)

It is likely that your software would be using a password hashing algorithm other than PHPass, that is used by GlotPress. If not, you can skip this step but if that’s the case, you’d need to edit the hash_password() method in WP_Pass class with your hashing algorithm.

Making GlotPress aware of the changes (gp-config.php)

Refer the lines 54-60 - you need to tell the GlotPress to not use its own user table and user/hashing classes and instead use yours.

Permissions (plugins/permission.php)

GlotPress uses a gp_permissions table than the user meta table to store permissions, making our work easier. As described above, you have two options for permissions – you can either run the sql query to convert a particular user into an administrator or if your user table contains a column which differentiates the administrators and you can use that, you can just edit and activate this plugin.

Bonus - Plugins!

Hope this helps you. You may ask your queries below.

Without Keyboard Marks - Note that the F & J bumps have been left, and there's another one on 6

I added another bump on the number key 6 in the image, to help guide the fingers in the number area (might need more research, for its repositioning or even if there’s no need to add it). Since I’m a programmer, I frequently use the special character keys, thus the removal of them too – I just think and my fingers press that key. But I still do not use the function keys much, thus not blacking them out.

Think of people asking you for your laptop and you don’t want to give it and if they’re not good at typing like you are, they would not be able to use it.  Another point is that there would be no need for back-lit keyboards. Think of a thinner MacBook Air.

I hope this comes into practice some day, and no, I’m not going to patent the idea (even if I’m not allowed to patent this), it just hampers development.

This would help me go on with my plans of Android App development, so look forward to see some Android hacking from me.

What is Google Code-in and what does it have to do with me, again?

Google Code-in is basically a programming competition organized by Google for high school students within the ages 13-17. Open Source organizations appoint some mentors who create byte-sized tasks for the students. The tasks could be anything, ranging from programming to translations to documentation to research and so on.

Quick Statistics for this year

• 542 students from 56 countries
• 307 mentors from 51 countries
• An astounding number of 3,054 tasks done by the students, 449 being done by the top 10

Unlike last year, I’m 16 this year (obviously, and would probably be eligible next year too, but I would not probably participate as a student ) and owing to awesome experience of the trip I had last year, I was already looking forward to it this year.

What all did I do in it?

This year, I mainly contributed to the OSS organization LimeSurvey, which is a tool for creating surveys written in PHP. The tasks were mainly to port it to the Yii framework from CodeIgnitor due to licensing issues. I also did some OpenIntents tasks as I had acquired some Android Application Development experience too. In addition to that, I helped in finding libav (under VideoLAN) bugs and styling there doxygen docs.

I completed a total of 40 tasks, acquiring 116 points, which positioned me on the sixth place on the leaderboard (as compared to 112 points and 36 tasks last year getting me on the fifth). You can see the list of tasks done by me here.

And what all did I achieve?

1. Knowledge & expeience in abundance – This year, I had absolutely no experience with Limesurvey or Yii or concept of MVC for that matter. Nor did I know anything about libav or zzuf (thanks to Shitiz for getting me started with all of this). Plus, I only have had a little experience with Android. The two months have changed all of that, I’ve got to work on awesome pieces of softwares, collaborating with cool people and I look forward to contributing to the projects in the future too.
2. Trip to Google Headquarters, Mountain View, California!
3. A Google Code-in sticker & tee and 500 dollars (more details about the prizes here).

I would like to thank Google for organizing this competition, open source organizations for participating and the mentors who spent a lot of their time and energy in guiding the students. I’d also like to congratulate my fellow grand prize winners (see you soon in CA ) and all the other students for being a part of the competition. Also, two of my classmates participated this year – they did translation and documentation tasks (one did 15, and the other 12).

Adiós! – G.

Recognizing text using your Android phone. Not exactly the end result of this blog post, but what you could achieve.

Note: These instructions are for Android SDK r19 and Android NDK r7c, at least for the time being (written at this tree). On 64-bit Ubuntu, you may need to install the ia32-libs 32-bit compatibility library. You would also need proper PATH variables added (see Troubleshooting section below).

1. Download the source or clone this git repository. This project contains tools for compiling the Tesseract, Leptonica, and JPEG libraries for use on Android. It contains an Eclipse Android library project that provides a Java API for accessing natively-compiled Tesseract and Leptonica APIs. You don’t need eyes-two code, you can do without it.
2. Build this project using these commands (here, tess-two is the directory inside tess-two – the one at the same level as of tess-two-test):

   cd <project-directory>/tess-two
   ndk-build
   android update project --path .
   ant release

3. Now import the project as a library in Eclipse. File -> Import -> Existing Projects into workspace -> tess-two directory. Right click the project, Android Tools -> Fix Project Properties. Right click -> Properties -> Android -> Check Is Library.
4. Configure your project to use the tess-two project as a library project: Right click your project name -> Properties -> Android -> Library -> Add, and choose tess-two. You’re now ready to OCR any image using the library.
5. First, we need to get the picture itself. For that, I found a simple code to capture the image here. After we have the bitmap, we just need to perform the OCR which is relatively easy. Be sure to correct the rotation and image type by doing something like:

   // _path = path to the image to be OCRed
   ExifInterface exif = new ExifInterface(_path);
   int exifOrientation = exif.getAttributeInt(
           ExifInterface.TAG_ORIENTATION,
           ExifInterface.ORIENTATION_NORMAL);
   
   int rotate = 0;
   
   switch (exifOrientation) {
   case ExifInterface.ORIENTATION_ROTATE_90:
       rotate = 90;
       break;
   case ExifInterface.ORIENTATION_ROTATE_180:
       rotate = 180;
       break;
   case ExifInterface.ORIENTATION_ROTATE_270:
       rotate = 270;
       break;
   }
   
   if (rotate != 0) {
       int w = bitmap.getWidth();
       int h = bitmap.getHeight();
   
       // Setting pre rotate
       Matrix mtx = new Matrix();
       mtx.preRotate(rotate);
   
       // Rotating Bitmap & convert to ARGB_8888, required by tess
       bitmap = Bitmap.createBitmap(bitmap, 0, 0, w, h, mtx, false);
       bitmap = bitmap.copy(Bitmap.Config.ARGB_8888, true);
   }

6. Now we have the image in the bitmap, and we can simple use the TessBaseAPI to run the OCR like:

   TessBaseAPI baseApi = new TessBaseAPI();
   // DATA_PATH = Path to the storage
   // lang for which the language data exists, usually "eng"
   baseApi.init(DATA_PATH, lang); baseApi.setImage(bitmap);
   String recognizedText = baseApi.getUTF8Text();
   baseApi.end();

7. Now that you’ve got the OCRed text in the variable recognizedText, you can do pretty much anything with it – translate, search, anything! ps. You can add various language support by having a preference and then downloading the required language data file from here. You might even put them in the assets folder and copy them to the SD card on start.

To make things easy, and for you to have a better understanding, I have uploaded a simple application on OCR that makes use of Tess Two on Github called Simple Android OCR (for beginners). If you want a full-fledged application, that has a selectable region while capturing the image, translating the text, preferences etc., then you can checkout Robert Theis’ Android OCR application (for intermediate+)!

Updated: 7 October 2012

References

1. Using Tesseract Tools for Android to Create a Basic OCR App by Robert Theis
2. Simple Android Photo Capture by MakeMachine
3. tess-two README

Troubleshooting

• About updating PATH - You need to update your PATH variable for the commands to function, otherwise you would see a command not found error. For Android SDK, add the location of the SDK’s tools and platform-tools directories to your PATH environment variable. For Android NDK, use the same process to add the android-ndk directory to the PATH variable. Linux users should check Setting proper path variables by Harsha Dura for more information.
• Maven-ising – Check this post by James Elsey. He also mentions that he got it working on Windows without any problems.
• You may also try Ctrl+F-ing your problem on this page, someone might have already encountered it and posted a solution in the comments.

Translations

1. Japanese by datsuns

Projects Made By Users

People have made a lot of projects using this tutorial, some of them are:

1. DatumDroid by Aviral, Devashish and me
2. MachineRetina by Salman Gadit

If you have made one too, do tell us in the comments below!

ps. Doesn’t necessarily need to be Siri, but that’s an interesting piece of software.

Write easy. Write often.