Manage reference and eprints like we manage media files

update:
Check these out:
http://mekentosj.com/papers/
http://www.smileonmymac.com/PDFpen/
http://www.sintraworks.com/

We have all kinds of applications now to help us manage media files, picasa(windows), digikam(KDE) and F-stop(Gnome) for digital photos; i-Tunes(windows), amarok(KDE) and Banshee(Gnome) for music files. These applications are quite similar, basically, you have a database at the back storing all the metadata(tags) of all the files, then in the front you have a nice GUI to manage this information, moving, deleting, renaming and tagging. Digital photos will have info like time and place it’s taken, the camera and setting used. Music files on the other hand have info like title, artist, album, year, genre and so on. And as an graduate student, here is my idea, why don’t we have an application to manage the papers(pdf or ps files, maybe other formats too) we are interested, we’ve read. They have metadata too, author, journal/conference, year, title and so on. We have bibtex and other things like Endnote, but we don’t have something as good as what we have for media files. Work is as serious as fun stuffs, right? 🙂

update: Apparently somebody had the same idea before I did. Check it out.
http://freelancepropaganda.com/themp/
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-metadata/2003-October/000189.html

Google Earth + SketchUp + Photos = ?

Google release SketchUp, a 3D modeling tool, for free, and provide the possibility that home owner can draw their home in 3D and put it on Google earth for everybody to see. This extend Google earth’s 2D flat view, and open up door to interesting applications. One draw back though, not many people are capable of building nice 3D structures, and even if they are experts, this is not an easy task. Also as everybody in 3D modeling business know, the key to a realistic model is texture. Google earth provides the terrain data and texture, but what about the building? You don’t want a build that only the roof is textured, right? Here I have an idea, what if we take pictures of the house from various angles and then a “magic” algorithm kicks in, with help of the users (correspondence, etc.) textures of the building will be mapped onto the 3D model. It will be even better if given a video clip from DV, the approximate 3D structure will be created automatically. I am not day dreaming, am I? 🙂

CamStream+GREYCstoration

一直想看看CamStream的代码，并在它的基础上写一个简单的WebCam图像处理程序，今天看到GREYCstoration，想起我的WebCam有很多CMOS噪音，如果把这两者结合起来，不知道会不会大幅度提高WebCam的效果。唯一的问题是GREYCstoration好像不够快，不知道能不能处理实时的图像，要能达到10帧每秒。

Paper Organizer

现在Music Organizer是众所周知了，iTunes, amarok等等。如果有类似的软件来管理论文，会相当不错。需要考虑bibtex输入输出，和Amazon.com的集成，加上Google Scholar。论文使用PDF格式，作者，标题等等信息存在PDF文件里，这样比较简单干净。用Acorbat Reader打开一个PDF文件，在File->Document Properties里可以看到文件里至少可以储存Title, Author, Subject, Keywords和其他一下信息。

现在Linux没有类似Adobe Acrobat的软件，使得编辑PDF文件比较麻烦，而且GPL Ghostscript 8.50才刚刚Release（它支持了PDF 1.4和PDF 1.5的新特性，Adobe Acrobat 7里面使用了），旧的版本可能会与Adobe Acrobat 7产生的PDF文件有兼容性问题，还需要一点时间让各个Linux Distro升级它们的gs-gpl包(Fedora还在用7.07)。Debian里gs-gpl和gs-eps已经是8.15，下一次升级可能就是8.50。

一些PDF信息网站：
推荐，pdftk的家: http://www.accesspdf.com/
Adobe, PDF技术信息: http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/
比较商业化的两个网站: http://www.pdfzone.com/, http://www.planetpdf.com/