Daniel Pink danielpi

Using Python 3 + Google Cloud Vision API's OCR to extract text from photos and scanned documents

Just a quickie test in Python 3 (using Requests) to see if Google Cloud Vision can be used to effectively OCR a scanned data table and preserve its structure, in the way that products such as ABBYY FineReader can OCR an image and provide Excel-ready output.

The short answer: No. While Cloud Vision provides bounding polygon coordinates in its output, it doesn't provide it at the word or region level, which would be needed to then calculate the data delimiters.

On the other hand, the OCR quality is pretty good, if you just need to identify text anywhere in an image, without regards to its physical coordinates. I've included two examples:

####### 1. A low-resolution photo of road signs

System Design Cheatsheet

Picking the right architecture = Picking the right battles + Managing trade-offs

Basic Steps

Clarify and agree on the scope of the system

User cases (description of sequences of events that, taken together, lead to a system doing something useful)
- Who is going to use it?
- How are they going to use it?

These links no longer work. Springer have pulled the free plug.

Graduate texts in mathematics

duplicates = multiple editions

A Classical Introduction to Modern Number Theory, Kenneth Ireland Michael Rosen

How Do I Into Git?

a helpful primer for users sick of git's poorly-named commands

I've used Git since 2011, and this is the stuff that I've always had to Google to remember. I hope it helps you not hate Git so much.

Learning About the Repo

Learning About History

Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 was released today.

As part of this this release, a C# Interactive tool is provided. This is a read-eval-print loop for C#. It can be opened via the 'View -> Other Windows' menu:

Below is a screenshot demonstrating the computer algebra library Symbolism in C# Interactive:

Project Title

One Paragraph of project description goes here

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

Prerequisites

Let's solve the following physics problem using Symbolism, a computer algebra library for C#.

One strategy in a snowball fight is to throw a first snowball at a high angle over level ground. While your opponent is watching the first one, you throw a second one at a low angle and timed to arrive at your opponent before or at the same time as the first one.

Assume both snowballs are thrown with a speed of 25.0 m/s.

The first one is thrown at an angle of 70.0° with respect to the horizontal.

	void Main()
	{
	// LinqPad script that downloads all PDFs/etc from Bret Victors worry dream refs page.
	var targetPath = @"PATH_TO_WHERE_YOU_KEEP_YOUR_EBOOK\eBooks";

	//These filenames were extracted from http://worrydream.com/refs/ -- using NimbleText.
	//(TODO: Use regex or html agility pack to find them programmatically)
	var refs = new string[] {
	"Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEngineering.pdf",
	"Licklider-IntergalacticNetwork.pdf",

	import Cocoa

	class MyAppDelegate: NSObject, NSApplicationDelegate {
	let window = NSWindow()
	var didFinishLaunching: NSWindow -> () = { _ in () }
	func applicationDidFinishLaunching(aNotification: NSNotification) {
	didFinishLaunching(window)
	}
	}

	import Cocoa

	enum CoroutineState {
	case Fresh, Running, Blocked, Canceled, Done
	}

	struct CoroutineCancellation: ErrorType {}

	class CoroutineImpl<InputType, YieldType> {
	let body: (yield: YieldType throws -> InputType) throws -> Void