Monday, July 16: Fed up of clearing the clutter on your office desk everyday? How does the idea of a ‘paperless office’ sound? Yes, that’s true. Since a long time it has been believed that we are fast moving towards a paperless office where everything right from the paper to your microfiche, and microfilm documents for use on the Web will be digitised.

But again this is easy to dream but hard to conceptualise. There is a complex process that takes careful preparation and the right tools. Scanning -- making a digital picture of a physical object -- is straightforward compared to the other gyrations the data may need to undergo. These include conversion into the most suitable file format, pouring it into a database, optical-character recognition (OCR) to convert those graphics files to editable text, and indexing to make it searchable. There are decisions to make at every turn and no right answers -- the choices depend on your particular needs.

Take the case of File Formats. The format you choose to store the scanned data depends on many factors like:

• Do the pages need to be represented as graphics or text?
• In color, grayscale, or black-and-white?
• Are small files, for quick transmission over the Internet, important?
• What computing platforms will viewers be using?

If making data available to Internet users running a diverse variety of platforms is a priority, consider saving images in one of the Web's standard graphics formats, such as JPG, GIF, or PNG. You can also make files available in Portable Document Format(PDF) for use with the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

If your primary concern is reducing download time, you might want to consider a specialized viewer such as MrSID. These tools produce small files that can be scrolled and scaled from within the browser. However, they only work with Windows and require a proprietary plug-in.

If searching the full text of the data is necessary, or you want to make the data available as HTML or XML, you'll need to use OCR to convert the graphics files to text.

But like a library without a card catalog, your digitalised data is useless if you cannot find the information you need. That's why the scanning process is usually accompanied by manual indexing -- entering information about the documents (for instance, author, date, and subject) into a database. That database can then be linked to a Web form for online searching. But the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative offers a framework for creating a resource-description index, or "metadata," which works especially well for information shared on the Web. The Dublin Core includes 15 basic categories of resource-description information, including title, creator, subject, and language. If your goal is to publish the information on the Internet, storing metadata in a standard format such as Dublin Core makes it easier to share the information with other sites and search engines. Building a quality index often takes more time than the scanning process. Experimental systems that perform automated classification and description exist, but are not by any means perfect.

Scanning

Scanning can be done in-house, given the right equipment and the manpower to use it, or outsourced to an imaging service. As for scanning Microfilm And Fiche the Microfilm and microfiche scanners are relatively complex and expensive machines. Production scanners, high-capacity machines for large-scale conversion, cost tens of thousands of dollars. The simplest option -- black-and-white graphical scans -- is also the least expensive. But at Deines, a 16-mm microfilm scanning runs from 7 cents to 20 cents per image. 35-mm microfilm starts at 20 cents per image. According to a company representative, the factor that most influences cost is the amount of indexing involved.

No doubt, transferring information to digital format can mean significant investments of time and money, but the results can be well worth the effort. For eg. Ancestry.com recently digitalised the entire 1790 and 1920 U.S. Federal Censuses, which were formerly available only on microfilm. The site makes the data available on a subscription basis, creating a new revenue stream while helping genealogists.

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Monday, July 9: You must have heard a lot about WAP and WML by now. But, do you know that you can actually create pages for wireless users as well! Again, if the answer is yes, then it is no doubt, good, but you should be aware that you can still run into problems on the server side. While standard Web server packages can deal with WML pages with few issues, there are a few crucial settings that must be configured appropriately for these kinds of pages to work.
But, before proceeding with this there are some changes required in both the Apache Web server and Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) to work smoothly on this principle. As a quick overview, recall that WML content gets served to wireless users in a slightly different fashion than regular HTML to desktop users. Wireless WAP devices communicate directly to a WAP gateway over a cellular network, and it is this WAP gateway that connects to the IP-based Internet and passes on the client requests to content servers. These content servers can be specialized applications just for mobile devices, but they can also be standard Web servers. br /> When a Web server sends out content based on a request, it also sends out the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) type information. Typically, the extension of the requested file is related to a specific MIME type, and servers use this to send the appropriate MIME type, and browsers use this to know what to do with the file. When it comes to serving WML pages on a Web server, the primary concern is that the server software must be configured to allow for the new MIME types that will be used for wireless applications.
That's really all it should take to get a standard Web server set-up to serve your WML and WMLScript pages. Of course, the proof is in the pudding, and obviously the next step is to test viewing a WML file, one with a ".WML" extension, from your server with either a WAP emulator or a WAP-enabled device.

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Monday, July 02: Concerned about online privacy? From spam to identity theft to the prowling eye of an employer or law-enforcement agency, there are many ways our online privacy can be violated. It's not unusual to not want your boss to know about every website you've visited but the law is clear: if you're on work time using employers' computing resources, they can look at exactly what you're doing and what websites you visit. What’s more, if you’re thinking that e-mail account is secure then think otherwise. E-mail is far from a private mode of communication unless you are using serious encryption tools.

No doubt, there have been many encryption programs and services around for a while, but most have been difficult to use and not widely accepted. A new player has entered the web security market called safeweb.com has entered. It is the only one of the bunch that offers an easy-to-use and free encrypted browsing service. That's right, free! And, that’s not all it even manages your cookies, disables applets and more.

With SafeWeb there is no software to install, and all you have to do to make use of SafeWeb's encryption technology is to visit the site and surf from there. Once you arrive at SafeWeb, you'll see an address bar where you can enter in any valid Web address. SafeWeb will then request the page for you and deliver it to your browser window using its proprietary PrivacyMatrix encryption technique. It really couldn't be any easier.

SafeWeb's encryption means that if you are browsing the Net using someone else's system, he or she will not be able to see which websites you are visiting. It also means the websites you visit will not be able to get any information about you or your computer, unless you specifically give it to them. Another upside to SafeWeb is that it will work perfectly well with Web-based e-mail systems like YahooMail and Hotmail. If you visit these sites using SafeWeb, your e-mail communications will be encrypted as well.

But, despite all the pluses there is a flip side as well. There is a slight decrease in the speed at which Web pages will appear on your display when using SafeWeb. When you consider what's actually going on behind the scenes, however, this is understandable. Your initial request is going to SafeWeb's servers and then to the requested Web server, and the requested page is encrypted and compressed at SafeWeb, then sent on to your browser where it is unencrypted. The speed difference may be negligible with a high-speed connection, but it is definitely noticeable over an analog modem.To really get into all the privacy features SafeWeb provides, you must take a look at the advanced-security options on the SafeWeb toolbar.

Thus, by setting all of SafeWeb's advanced security options you can create a browsing experience that is truly private. Of course, if plug-ins, Java applets, and cookies are all blocked, you will probably notice decreased functionality at some websites. But, despite all this SafeWeb's default settings provide a good answer to all those online security issues.

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