It’s the last day of 2006, there are 100,000 people expected in the centre of Edinburgh for the Hogmanay celebrations … weather permitting. As usual, we’ve been using the Christmas holidays to look back at the domestic finances and tidy up the paperwork. Last month I read What’s on Jason’s Hard Drive, where Jason Hunter explained how he had started replacing all his paper files with scanned images. This struck me as an excellent idea, especially as I have all the necessary toys:

• an Epson Stylus Photo RX600 all-in-one printer/scanner
• a left-over 40Gb 3.5inch hard drive
• an EYE-T external USB HDD enclosure for the disk

However, Jason’s method of just using files and directories to store images – even with a version control system – didn’t strike me as user friendly enough. Surprisingly, a quick search through Freshmeat didn’t throw up any suitable open-source document managing systems, so I decided to DIY using LAMP tools.

I’ve now ended up with a hybrid solution which works for me:

• a BASH script which makes scanning batches of documents into the archive as painless as possible
• a php/MySQL tool to classify and retrieve documents from the archive

The only piece I’m missing is a painless way of encrypting the external hard drive – I’ve seen some HOW-TOs, but they scare me to death

The BASH scripting proved how little BASH I knew – the result is a (I hope) handy BASH Quick Reference Card to help others in the same situation. I’m now waiting for approval from the SourceForge admins to put my software there for general use.

That would be a good start to 2007 – make a New Year Resolution to contribute one new project back to the open-source community, and achieve it within the first week

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 31st, 2006 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Open-source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.