Ryan Christensen drawcode

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

Problem

I have two Github accounts: oanhnn (personal) and superman (for work). I want to use both accounts on same computer (without typing password everytime, when doing git push or pull).

Solution

Use ssh keys and define host aliases in ssh config file (each alias for an account).

How to?

Generate ssh key pairs for accounts and add them to GitHub accounts.

Orthodox C++

What is Orthodox C++?

Orthodox C++ (sometimes referred as C+) is minimal subset of C++ that improves C, but avoids all unnecessary things from so called Modern C++. It's exactly opposite of what Modern C++ suppose to be.

Why not Modern C++?

Don't use VPN services.

No, seriously, don't. You're probably reading this because you've asked what VPN service to use, and this is the answer.

Note: The content in this post does not apply to using VPN for their intended purpose; that is, as a virtual private (internal) network. It only applies to using it as a glorified proxy, which is what every third-party "VPN provider" does.

A Russian translation of this article can be found here, contributed by Timur Demin.
A Turkish translation can be found here, contributed by agyild.
There's also this article about VPN services, which is honestly better written (and has more cat pictures!) than my article.

Strictly Frameworks

Mobiledoc - github.com/bustle/mobiledoc-kit - framework to build editors with a standardized JSON structure
ShareDB - github.com/share/sharedb - framework to sync any JSON document using operational transforms, add real-time collaborative editing to anything else
Bangle.dev - github.com/bangle-io/bangle.dev - toolkit built for building editors, based on prosemirror

Abstracted Editors

These use separate document structures instead of HTML, some are more modular libraries than full editors

Instructions for making a Neural-Style movie

The following instructions are for creating your own animations using the style transfer technique described by Gatys, Ecker, and Bethge, and implemented by Justin Johnson. To see an example of such an animation, see this video of Alice in Wonderland re-styled by 17 paintings.

Setting up the environment

The easiest way to set up the environment is to simply load Samim's a pre-built Terminal.com snap or use another cloud service like Amazon EC2. Unfortunately the g2.2xlarge GPU instances cost $0.99 per hour, and depending on parameters selected, it may take 10-15 minutes to produce a 512px-wide image, so it can cost $2-3 to generate 1 sec of video at 12fps.

If you do load the

	#pragma once

	// This provides a library for stubbing and mocking C++ code as is. It works by requiring
	// explicit hooks to be inserted into the code that is to be mocked. In a regular build,
	// these hooks will do nothing. In a testing build, they will expand to calls into the
	// framework here to allow the code being executed to be hijacked from outside.
	//
	// NOTE: Thread-safety! Arranging fakes must be done on a single thread. Using fakes can
	// be done from multiple threads concurrently.
	//

	using Newtonsoft.Json;
	using System;
	using System.Collections.Generic;
	using System.Configuration;
	using System.IdentityModel.Tokens;
	using System.Linq;
	using System.Net.Http;
	using System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates;
	using System.Text;

	/*
	* When developing the UI system we came across a bunch of things we were not happy
	* with with regards to how certain events and calls could be sent in a loosely coupled
	* way. We had this requirement because with a UI you tend to implement widgets that receive
	* certain events, but you don't really want to have lots of glue code to manage them
	* and keep track of them. The eventing interfaces we developed helped with this. One of
	* the interesting things, is that they are not justfor the UI system! You can use this as
	* a type-safe, fast, and simple alternative to SendMessage (never use SendMessage!).

	* So how does it all work?

	/* bling.js */
	window.$ = document.querySelector.bind(document);
	window.$$ = document.querySelectorAll.bind(document);
	Node.prototype.on = window.on = function(name, fn) { this.addEventListener(name, fn); };
	NodeList.prototype.__proto__ = Array.prototype;
	NodeList.prototype.on = function(name, fn) { this.forEach((elem) => elem.on(name, fn)); };