Open Source Legal Systems Project is Go!

Faced with a monumental list of to-dos, I'm moving ahead with some open source projects.  I'll be randomly posting tidbits along the way.

Tonights check-offs:

1. Learn a bit about VI - just enough to get by in editing various .conf files.  Thanks to Unix Manuals.
2. Set up directories on the Ubuntu Testbox with a refresher on CHMOD.

Immediate to-dos (the tip of the tip of the iceberg)

1. Resolve remote connection issues for MySQL - I'll need this on a cloud instance and maybe just go ahead and provision that now rather than mucking around on the tester.  If phpmyadmin is the way to go perhaps I should just go there rather than MySQL workbench (though I love the GUI).
2. Resolve FTP access and config issues on the tester or skip right to the cloud on that as well.  Need to be able to reach out with Netbeans and the other assorted tools.

It may be time to start spending money.  Happily EC2 is remarkably affordable.  Need to look a Google's cloud offering as well.

PDF: Foxit Reader is good stuff

I confess that the Lab (my mad scientist space at the house) has too many computers. Between the Lab and the rest of the house there are around 10 computers in some state of use at any given time. Represented operating systems include 5 versions of Windows, Mac OSX, Ubuntu and FreeBSD. With so many machines of varying vintage and configuration to support, I'm always watching for free, inexpensive and easy applications to deploy.

While Adobe has consistently made Acrobat Reader available free of charge, and for some files, that application may be irreplaceable, there is an alternative that has yet to let me down. Foxit Reader is available without charge for Windows, Linux and some mobile platforms.

Foxit is small, very quick to launch and provides a nice tabbed interface for having multiple PDFs open at one time. I use it on both Windows and Linux machines.

In addition, Foxit looks poised to offer a legitimate and affordable alternative to the 'full' Adobe desktop PDF products for those of us in offices (Acrobat can have lots of advanced features for those in the printing business, depending on version). Check out their other product capabilities and pricing (topping out at $129) here.  Adobe's full feature desktop PDF products range in price from $299 to $699.  At an initial glance  

I am encouraged to note, perhaps as a result of competitive pressure, that Adobe recently enhanced the functionality of the free Acrobat Reader to allow markup by reviewers without the need for a paid product provided that the PDF author has allowed it.

In a move dear to my heart, Foxit makes their PDF iFilter available free of charge for desktop use.

Some Nice Press for Yours Truly

This year's annual meeting of the Association of Corporate Counsel in Boston was enjoyable as always.  I presented a lively session on Inexpensive/Free Applicarion for Your Law Department.  The session was well attended despite the 9:00 am time slot on the last day.

Highlights of the meeting overall included meeting Andrew Sinclair, Legal Counsel at Canonical, makers of my favorite Linux distro - Ubuntu, and presenting wilth Joel Green of Altova, maker of great XML and modeling tools.  As always, the vendors and law firms represented were gracious, generous and a pleasure to meet and it was great to see old and new friends.

Thanks to Ari Kaplan for for a great write up my session at Law.com.

Is it time to give Paperport another chance?

Interesting article at Law.com regarding the features of version 12 of the venerable Paperport.  I was a Paperport and OmniPage advocate from about Version 5 of Paperport through the early Nuance acquisition when both products began to show a plague of reliability issues.  Versions 6 through 8 or 9 were a core component for small workgroup paperless toolkits at the time.  I supplemented select users with OmniPage when stronger capabilities were needed.  Starting with Paperport 9 and OmniPage 12 or there abouts, I noted a trend of reliability problems and crash reports from users, some of which could not be solved even with a reinstall.  I even experienced them myself.  Since, my recommendation has been Readiris Pro for heavy OCR lifting, but I have yet to find a tool as useful as Paperport for scanning, pulling and reordering pages from PDFs of any type or easily reducing the color depth or dpi of scanned docs.  I've essentially just been doing without - keeping a single copy of Paperport installed at the lab for opening old .max files that appear from time to time and the occasional other chore.

I'm wondering if it might be a good time to take another look at Paperport, as living with the severely limited  Adobe Acrobat Organizer is pretty limiting when it comes to reshuffling the pages of electronic docs.

Interesting that their marketing gets a nice lift from the greening of public thought....

Cases and Journals via Google Scholar

...Noted over at ABA Journal that Google Scholar has full-text cases (and apparently some journals) indeed and available.  I'll take a look at coverage as time allows and update as to scope. 

Nice recap and further links here - myshingle.com.

Beginnings...

Instead of offering hints, tips and fun to select groups or every few years at conferences, it is probably a good time to do something with this space I've been sitting on forever.  Here we go!