28 Jun 2012
REST defines a way to design an API with which you can consume its ressources using HTTP methods (GET, POST, etc) over URLs. Interacting with such an API basically comes down to sending HTTP requests.
In this article, we’ll see which python modules are available to solve this problem, and which one you should use. We’ll test all modules with this simple test case: we would like to create a new Github repository using their RESTful API.
08 Jun 2012
Tesseract is an open-source Optical Character Recognition engine, historically developped by HP and Google, allowing you to extract text information out of images. One of the great features of tesseract is the possibility of training it on a new language, a new set of characters, or even on a particular font. The training procedure is fully described here.
This prodecure is quite long and tedious. That’s why I’ve written a standalone Python wrapper that can take care of the training process for you, in the case where you want to train tesseract on a new font, or characters. This demo is intended for Unix/Linux users.
21 May 2012
In this article, we are going to see a couple use-case examples of some of the Python built-in functions. These functions can prove themselves extremely useful, and I think every Python coder should learn how to use them: they’re fast and well thought.
For each function, I will provide two snippets: one without any built-in function, and the equivalent “pythonic” snippet.
23 Apr 2012
In this article, we are going to see how to scrape information from a website, in particular, from all pages with a common URL pattern. We will see how to do that with Scrapy, a very powerful, and yet simple, scraping and web-crawling framework.
19 Apr 2012
I recently got introduced to virtualenv: a “tool to create isolated Python evironments”. It allows to have a fine grain control on the dependencies of each of your python project, and separate each project environment from the others.
01 Apr 2012
My laptop can be hot sometimes, especially when I run great python calculations while I watch a movie, tweet with Hotot, chat with a couple of friends and send a couple of emails. (Hotot has nothing to do with this article, but I just think it’s a great twitter client).
31 Mar 2012
I recently stumbled upon a weird error message when playing with class inheritance.
I declared a mother class, with some attributes and methods, and derived a child class from it, with some additional arguments and overridden methods.
29 Feb 2012
I recently joined the Strongsteam project for a 6 month internship. Our main goal is to provide some “artificial intelligence and data mining APIs to let you pull interesting information out of images, video and audio.” We will be doing a presentation at Pycon 2012, the 9th of March, during the Startup Row weekend.
20 Nov 2011
The idea of this post is to show you that if you want to implement a web-service, Python could be the way to go. The simplicity of the language syntaxis combined with some good micro-framework results into a powerful combination.
10 Nov 2011
In this post, we’ll see how the program proposed in my previous post can be optimized in term of execution time. The code can be found the project GitHub repository. For those who haven’t read the first article but are interested in code optimization, i’d then advise you to read it first, to understand the causes of the problem.
06 Nov 2011
If you always wanted to write texts in the way of Monty Python, I have what you need ! In this post, I am going to show you mathematical techniques to analyse a text, in order to randomly generate look-alike texts.