Year: 2018

Friday links 252

  1. BuzzJob:  Open Doors Wipro
  2. PostSharp Blog | New in PostSharp 4.3 Preview – An alternative to NuGet
  3. Introducing Regulazy: Point & Click Regular Expression – Blog – Osherove
  4. Here are the most well-designed apps of 2016, according to Apple | TechCrunch
  5. How some mentors take advantage of startups they are meant to be helping — Tech London — Medium
  6. 99.5% of startup fundraising advisors are crooks and charlatans — Kima Ventures — Medium
  7. What Microservices Is Not | Jimmy Bogard’s Blog
  8. Tools – Osherove
  9. C# SmartBuilder- A Tool to auto generate Classes (Info,Controller, Provider) – CodeProject
  10. Announcing Video OCR Private Preview on Azure Media Analytics | Blog | Microsoft Azure
  11. Wikipedia Alternatives: 47 Websites You Can Use Instead
  12. Grafana – Features
  13. Your job will never be done – Cindy Potvin
  14. How to Master ASP.NET Core Web API Attribute Routing | mobilemancer

License plate number from image

One feature to implement is to have the plate number recognized from image – the user, instead of entering the number, take a picture of the plate and sends to the application. So I decided to do this. Roxana Beloiu pointed me to https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr   –  that can recognize the plate number. I have had some problems with the application in .NET- the latest releases are better than the source code. However, this was done in .NET 4.6 – and my site has .NET Core. First idea: having a mix between those frameworks – no!

Second idea: why not port from .NET 4.6 to .NET Core ? No – too many things that are not yet into .NET Core( e.g. Image)

Third idea: why do not make a serverless function in Azure ?

And this struggle me for 4 hours . The problem? The .NET Dll alpr depends on C libraries and other data – that are copied in the bin folder when you are making a reference from  a console application – but not when you are making a reference from a VS Azure function project.

Solution? Old times to the rescue

Making a console application that receives the file name and send as output the plate number

Uploading this console application and all the necessary dlls with Kudu

Receiving a base64 array in the Azure function, converting to byte, write to file, running the console, delete the file, sending text back.

Not the most advantageous, but hey,. it works.

Friday links 251

  1. paulbatum/WebSocket-Samples
  2. LINQ: Enhancing Distinct With The PredicateEqualityComparer – CodeProject
  3. graphviz – Create Image From .dot file in C# – Stack Overflow
  4. Six ways to declare JavaScript functions
  5. 15 Ways to Write Self-documenting JavaScript
  6. perf_scale_cheatsheet.pages
  7. Bimodal IT
  8. smore-inc/clippy.js: Add Clippy or his friends to any website for instant nostalgia.
  9. Adding Facial Recognition to Your Mobile Apps | Xamarin Blog
  10. pierceboggan/smarter-apps: Learn how to build smarter mobile apps using Microsoft Cognitive Services & Xamarin.
  11. torch/torch7: http://torch.ch
  12. » 5 jQuery plugins you need now – Web Designer – Defining the internet through beautiful design
  13. 15 Ways to Write Self-documenting JavaScript
  14. Downloads
  15. The Key To Delegating Work

Making IsThisTaxiLegal–evolving from Proof of Concept

What we need first is automating some tasks – like downloading the authorizations pdf ( and parsing after) from http://www.pmb.ro/adrese_utile/transport_urban/autorizatii_taxi/autorizatii_TAXI.php .

For this I want to use R – because C# I know already and is a good occasion to learn R.

The file is on https://github.com/ignatandrei/IsThisTaxiLegal/blob/master/applications/RDownloadFile/Script.R 

Some ideas from here from a C# developer:

  • Very easy to work with R – as soon as you grasp the concepts
  • Nuget from C# = CRAN from R
  • Does not provide in VS something like nuget, but pacman is perfect

if (!require(“pacman”)) install.packages(“pacman”)
pacman::p_load(‘XML’, “magrittr”, “RCurl”, “rlist”, “rvest”, “pdftools”, “dplyr”, “devtools”)
#if (!require(XML)) install.packages(‘XML’)
#install.packages(“magrittr”)
#install.packages(“RCurl”)
#install.packages(“rlist”)
#install.packages(“rvest”)
library(stringr)
library(magrittr)
library(XML)
library(RCurl)
library(rlist)
library(rvest)

  • R is supports normal programing and  functional programming  and magrittr helps

Code example:

print(head(splitData))  # normal

splitData %>% head(10) %>% print # showing data # function

  • Some WTF ( paste function is concatenate strings  ,  return in function must have () )
  • Many , many WTF when you try to make something in R until you grasp it. ( partially)
  • CRAN have many libraries free – someones requires java on your PC …. C# has a good point here , because he has now Linux + Mac + Windows natively and self contained

You will find code at https://github.com/ignatandrei/IsThisTaxiLegal/blob/master/applications/RDownloadFile/Script.R

Friday links 250

  1. Justine Musk’s answer to Will I become a billionaire if I am determined to be one and put in the necessary work required? – Quora
  2. An Introduction to the Microsoft Bot Framework – CodeProject
  3. Gigaom | Meet Node-RED, an IBM project that fulfills the internet of things’ missing link
  4. One weird trick that will change the way you code forever: JavaScript TDD
  5. Don’t Code Tired | Creating Your Own Custom Dynamic C# Classes
  6. F# gotchas for C# developers
  7. Implementing a Markdown Engine for .NET | xoofx
  8. One does not simply learn to code — Free Code Camp
  9. Certificate Expiration in ClickOnce Deployment
  10. How to extend an existing certificate, even if it has expired | RobinDotNet’s Blog
  11. mbdavid/LiteDB: LiteDB – A .NET NoSQL Document Store in a single data file – www.litedb.org
  12. The High-Governance of No-Framework – Part 1 – CodeProject
  13. 10 Lessons from a Long Running DDD Project – Part 2 | Jimmy Bogard’s Blog
  14. security – How to prevent your JavaScript code from being stolen, copied, and viewed? – Stack Overflow

Making IsThisTaxiLegal–thinking about Proof of Concept

It can be improved so many ways:

  1. Making OCR ( to recognize the plates number)
  2. Making application Android / iPhone
  3. Making Windows (Store ) application ( not really necessary, but anyway)
  4. Finding if another cities have taxi licenses available
  5. Publicity
  6. Improving with ratings for taxi drivers
  7. Find a lawyer that knows what to do next
  8. Improving the documentation
  9. Passing from csv to sql lite
  10. Downloading automatically the pdf with licences from www.pmb.ro/adrese_utile/transport_urban/autorizatii_taxi/autorizatii_TAXI.php
  11. Making all this points on https://github.com/ignatandrei/IsThisTaxiLegal as issues
  12. Running the test automatically

And it is a small application!

If someone wants to help / or come with new ideas, p[lease leave a message here or on https://github.com/ignatandrei/IsThisTaxiLegal

Friday links 249

  1. How Not to Choose a Framework
  2. Why Introverts Are Introverts? Because Their Brains Are Different
  3. Speaker’s Checklist: Before and After Your Talk – CSS Wizardry – CSS, OOCSS, front-end architecture, performance and more, by Harry Roberts
  4. hemanth/awesome-pwa: Awesome list of progressive web apps! (PR welcomed ;))
  5. http://mattwarren.org/2016/06/20/Visualising-the-dotNET-Garbage-Collector/?utm_source=DNK-152432&utm_medium=DNK-152432&utm_content=DNK-152432&utm_campaign=DNK-152432 is not available
  6. Bing Maps V8 Web Control Released | Maps Blog
  7. z
  8. Microsoft Cognitive Services – Documentation
  9. Arduino Blog – FarmBot is an open-source CNC farming machine
  10. Fody/Fody: Extensible tool for weaving .net assemblies
  11. Wikipedia:Unusual articles – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  12. andrei-cacio/jsdom-tdd: A simple POC of how you can unit test jQuery using jsdom
  13. tmpvar/jsdom: A JavaScript implementation of the WHATWG DOM and HTML standards, for use with node.js
  14. CaptureManager SDK – CodeProject
  15. Jordan Hall on Twitter: “The one true #JavaScript exception handler. 😉 https://t.co/Zwoi3VlluD”

Making Is This Taxi Legal–Proof of concept

This werer the steps for making a Proof of concept for Is This Taxi Legal application http://isthistaxilegal.apphb.com

Finding PDF about taxi licence for Bucuresti : PDF at http://www.pmb.ro/adrese_utile/transport_urban/autorizatii_taxi/autorizatii_TAXI.php

Thinking about application + web site about this -with a simple search and possible OCR ( take image of the car plate and recognizing number) . Also for international ( GPS for phones to know the city). Also IOT for monitoring the illegal taxi movement( could be also illegal to do this)

The Proof of Concept: A WebAPI + WebSite( that can be accessed also by mobile) to enter a plate number and find if it is legal. Maybe later an Android App.

Step 1 : acquiring data from http://www.pmb.ro/adrese_utile/transport_urban/autorizatii_taxi/autorizatii_TAXI.php

. Download situatia_autorizatiilor_taxi_20171208.PDF

Step 2 : cleaning data – read with Word and transform into CSV.

Trying <table>. ConvertToText – not good, it preserves the return character and data can not be read safely after that.

The solution: read row by row and replace CR/LF with empty for each cell.

After this, problem with Bell character – replace this also the 7 character

After this, problem with repeating headers for each table in the csv

This is the VBA code

( maybe doing same in R : https://datascienceplus.com/extracting-tables-from-pdfs-in-r-using-the-tabulizer-package/ )

Step 3 : Making objects to support

First creating objects to support this . Car, City, LicenseState, Licensee, TaxiAutorization.

Creating test – the City should be unique – even if Bucarest is multiple times, the City object should be the same.

Step 4: Consolidating data from CSV to objects

Creating objects to mimic CSV data . Return to step 2 and put separator | instead of ,

Problem with parsing data

– a date could not exist, so it will be nullable

– could be either dd.mm.yyyy , either d.mm.yyyy either 27.02.202

Separate the lines with errors from the lines without errors . And return the result as a tuple

Making test in order to see the errors

Step 5: Application Web + WebAPI to display data

Making WEBAPI for seeing all and some taxis

See that valid taxis are not parsed correctly ( Validat vs Valid) . Modify test

Discover there are some licenses with state…

Step 6: Deploy sources to GitHub

Easy to do – create and submit at https://github.com/ignatandrei/IsThisTaxiLegal

Step 7: Create an application visible on internet

You can create an account at appharbor.com , integrate with GitHub and deploy there : http://isthistaxilegal.apphb.com

 

Step 8: Document the API

Swagger / Swashbuckle is the easy way to do this. Deployed at http://isthistaxilegal.apphb.com/swagger/

Step 9 : Remake the documentation

Mention all the documentation in all places ( API, GitHub, others)

Mention the contact name if something is wrong

Add API for enums

 

This was a work of 8 hours –  and it is just a proof of concept .

Friday links 248

  1. 10 Tips When Considering Open Source Software – Page 3
  2. ILMerge – Microsoft Research
  3. Freebie: Creativity & Learning Icon Set (PSD, AI, SVG, PNG) | Codrops
  4. How one announcement destroyed the .NET ecosystem on Windows — The Startup — Medium
  5. Top 10 Best Free Keylogger Software to Monitor Keystrokes in Windows • Raymond.CC
  6. Decoding Symmetric Cyphers with Crypto-JS « EclipseSource Blog
  7. daveaglick/Scripty: Tools to let you use Roslyn-powered C# scripts for code generation
  8. .NET Foundation – Free as in Cake
  9. This Parody Of Every TED Talk Ever Is Absolutely Perfect – Digg
  10. WideWorldImporters: The new SQL Server sample database | SQL Server Blog
  11. The Codist: My Biggest Regret As A Programmer
  12. Software has bugs. This is normal. — Signal v. Noise
  13. Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software
  14. Free Microservice and webhook hosting – Hook.io – Coding is Love
  15. tomdionysus/foaas: FOAAS (Fuck Off As A Service) provides a modern, RESTful, scalable solution to the common problem of telling people to fuck off.

Andrei Ignat weekly software news(mostly .NET)

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