(Batch) Scanning index cards
I bought an hp officejet 4215 last week, because, as a laggard, I finally wanted to have a fax machine so I could improve turnaround time on closing some deals and starting work. I wanted to have another machine, but that was sold out, so I took this one. It has an ADF (Automated Document Feeder). I was expecting it would eat only A4 (or Letter, for those of you living on the other side of the pond). As it happens, it feasts on index cards as well (about ten index cards at a time though). As I was working with Rob on some alternative choreographies for eXperience Agile, we made a bunch of index cards with modules. To archive it and mail the results to Rob, I wanted to scan a batch of index cards. Marc suggested to show, not tell how scanned index cards work (I typed the text of the stories, acceptance criteria in alt tags, in case your aggregator doesn’t show pictures, or you can’t read my handwriting… 
):
Installing the scanner was a no brainer ‘apt-get install sane’ (sane is the universal scanner package in linux) and printer and scanner were both autodetected.
To get value from the first story, I scanned the 17 index cards for Rob in a couple of minutes (I was doing other things meanwhile). The scanner takes about 10 cards at a time. I made two small scripts (about 4 lines in total 
) to cut the cards in the correct size (10×15 centimeter) and convert everything to jpeg. I chose to use ‘scanimage’, a command line tool, since that was less work than xsane (a graphical front end, more suitable for incidental scanning). I made a zip file of the cards and sent them away. That was cool.
Now I was missing one feature from a table with story cards – shuffling them around. We wanted to make three choreographies, and had made markers on the cards for that. I didn’t quite know what to use for that, so I left it for a couple of days. Then it dawned on me, that OpenOffice Impress ( a presentation package) has a slide sorter that makes it very easy to move slides around. Importing the scanned cards one by one was very cumbersome though. Time for the next story:
Messing with open office xml turned out to be a bit error prone (I didn’t bother to read the spec either. I unzipped the sample presentation I made by hand, looked where the images were and manipulated the xml with rexml ( a ruby library for working with xml as a tree representation). I still officially dislike xml, but used this way it was very simple for me to make my openoffice more valuable to me. To see how it looks and feels, you can download these stories as Impress 2.0 (OpenDocument Presentation format) or stories as PDF.
Scanned index cards are handy and fun for sharing course layouts, and possibly also for archiving user stories – with other forms of electronic storage (except digital photos, but scanned cards are easier to read) I miss the visual blips and seeing the cards makes it easier for me to relive bits of a planning meeting when necessary .
Maybe there are more applications . If you’re interested in trying out the script, let me know. It might be fun to release this as open source, but I need to do some work on packaging it then – that would go best with some feedback from early users.
