Just realized that all the faxes, sitting on the 6-year-old G4 Cube that serves as fax machine, DNS and (formerly) Radio server are PDFs that can be dropped into the Paperless Project queue. So, voila, done. Again, kip was good at identifying a tag that I created for one PDF in the OCR text of subsequent faxs, and auto applying same. Next up are the PDFs of HR stuff et al. that I made on the Lanier scanner at work and emailed home for record-keeping. Paperless, and kip, now contains a substantial record of my affairs in 2006, so I just did a test run of ChronoSync to back all this stuff up. Worked perfectly on its first outing…

Screenshot shows a paper document scanned to PDF, as it appears in Adobe Acrobat 7 (right) and after input into kip (left). 3 documents (out of about 100) have also showed up as black rectangles in kip. Where’s the bug report page…?
ChronoSync looks like it will handle the job of copying the scanned, OCR’d and tagged PDF from the G4 Mini to the half-terabyte array, meaning there’ll be 2 copies of everything, and a lower chance of losing the converted paper documents. One set will be indexed in Spotlight, providing a backup to searching in kip. Looked at a couple of things, but for $30 this looks amazingly full-featured…
digg’s got a kip report, calling it an ‘excellent document organizer, with integrated scanning, tagging and thumbnail zoom.’ There’s even some Windows user envy in the comments…
The folks at Addison Wesley/Pearson Education have seen to it that I shall not want for summer reading this year. A couple weeks ago Brian Goetz’ Java Concurrency in Practice arrived, and if I were thinking of putting in some Google-like infrastructure, Brian’s book would likely be required reading. Brian’s book helps Java developers understand how threading works, especially on multiprocessor machines.
I’d also want to read Anil Hemrajani’s Agile Java Development which shows how to use Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse to quickly develop a sample data-driven application using Extreme Programming and the Agile Model Driven Development method.
Also usefull would be Chuck Cavaness’ Quartz Job Scheduling Framework, which covers using the open-source Quartz job scheduling framework in everything from simple maintenace to monster, cluster-driven ecommerce applications.
Paul and Gail Anderson’s Java Studio Creator Field Guide, 2nd Edition rounds out the Java offerings, and covers rapid application development using Java Studio Creator 2. If our new infrastructure needed any J2EE apps, we’d be sure to buzz through this 700-page guide, and check out its companion web site.
With all that Java under our belt, we might want to brush up on our C++, and The C++ Standard Library Extensions, by Pete Becker would fill the bill. Pete’s book is about the TR1 library extensions to C++, which roughly doubles the size of the C++ library. All of the titles except Java Studio Creator are available through Safari, which is my favorite way of accessing Addison Wesley and other tech titles…