Posts on Blog | Jonas Neubert

So you think this library can validate email addresses

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s add some validation for this email address form field!

I usually write software for automation, but like every software developer I’m not immune to email address validation.

So you think you can validate email addresses

The FOSDEM 2018 talk “So you think you can validate email addresses” by Stavros has become a canonical reference for expressing the futility of all attempts to validate email addresses. You can watch it on Youtube. In the talk, Stavros shows a series of email addresses and asks the audience to shout “valid” or “invalid” for each one. After 26 examples (that include 32 @ symbols) Stavros recommends a two step process for email address validation:

Migrating Projective Set from AngularJS v2 to VueJS v3

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Today I updated a small web app that I created a decade ago and haven’t touched since then.¹

The tech stack of the old version was this:

Bootstrap 2.3.2 (minified version included in repo)
AngularJS 1.2.16 (embedded from http://ajax.googleapis.com CDN URL)
jQuery 1.8.3 (also from CDN)
Github Pages for hosting (using legacy deployment method)

In total there were five files in the repo:

CNAME # config for Github Pages hosting
README.md # to make something show up on the Github repo page
bootstrap.min.css # minified Bootstrap
controller.js # all logic, 152 lines including whitespace
index.html # template and inline CSS, 156 lines incl. whitespace

There was no build step. Just put these files into a web server directory and done.

How not to get Google Fiber in Salt Lake City

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post is my (not sponsored) writeup of the experience of not getting a Google Fiber internet connection in Salt Lake City. Spoiler: I published this in March 2023 over a Comcast Xfinity connection.

We moved to Salt Lake City in the middle of last year and in January we bought a house here. Salt Lake City is one of the 25 or so cities in the US where Google Fiber internet service is available. It’s impossible not to know about that when you live here. While living at our previous address, we received Google Fiber flyers in the mail almost weekly, saw annoyingly frequent repeats of their Youtube ads, so many online ads, full-page ads in the free local newspaper, billboards, etc.

The Best Python Packages for Reading Barcodes

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Three years ago I published a blog post on how to generate barcodes using Python. It’s one of the most visited posts on the blog! Occasionally a reader emails to ask: “But what if I want to read/decode/scan¹ a barcode, not write it?”

Here is the answer:

Don’t use Python for Barcode Decoding!

You really shouldn’t be using pure Python to decode barcodes from images or videos or, worse, from camera streams.

List of US National Parks Twitter Accounts

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Apropos of nothing, here is a list of the official Twitter accounts of each US National Park. It’s also available as a Twitter List.

The List

	Twitter Account	Twitter verified?	Followers	Tweets	Established in	Visitors in 2021
Acadia	@AcadiaNPS	✓	42343	2348	1919	4069098
American Samoa	@NPamericansamoa	✓	2565	528	1988	8495
Arches	@ArchesNPS	✓	131174	3885	1971	1806865
Badlands	@BadlandsNPS	✓	187772	4547	1978	1224226
Big Bend	@BigBendNPS	✓	14905	895	1944	581220
Biscayne	@BiscayneNPS	✓	20552	2723	1980	705655
Black Canyon of the Gunnison	@BlackCanyonNPS	✓	33491	1422	1999	308910
Bryce Canyon	@BryceCanyonNPS	✓	116597	2439	1928	2104600
Canyonlands	@CanyonlandsNPS	✓	90092	1711	1964	911594
Capitol Reef	@CapitolReefNPS	✓	64018	1689	1971	1405353
Carlsbad Caverns	@CavernsNPS	✓	13251	2677	1930	349244
Channel Islands	@CHISNPS	✓	7076	1574	1980	319252
Congaree	@CongareeNPS	✓	202269	15438	2003	215181
Crater Lake	@CraterLakeNPS	✓	37952	2329	1902	647751
Cuyahoga Valley	@CVNPNPS	✓	12562	2238	2000	2575275
Death Valley	@DeathValleyNPS		97930	1740	1994	1146551
Denali	@DenaliNPS	✓	94631	5907	1917	229521
Dry Tortugas	@DryTortugasNPS	✓	27006	1454	1992	83817
Everglades	@EvergladesNPS	✓	58393	5698	1934	942130
Gates of the Arctic	@GatesArcticNPS	✓	21831	193	1980	7362
Gateway Arch	@GatewayArchNPS	✓	4238	638	2018	1145081
Glacier	@GlacierNPS	✓	317622	5877	1910	3081656
Glacier Bay	@GlacierBayNPS	✓	59158	1629	1980	89768
Grand Canyon	@GrandCanyonNPS	✓	215701	14529	1919	4532677
Grand Teton	@GrandTetonNPS	✓	142194	1834	1929	3885230
Great Basin	@GreatBasinNPS	✓	47894	1612	1986	144875
Great Sand Dunes	@GreatDunesNPS		788	84	2004	602613
Great Smoky Mountains	@GreatSmokyNPS	✓	100729	2698	1934	14161548
Guadalupe Mountains	@GuadalupeMtnsNP	✓	7360	284	1966	243291
Haleakalā	@HaleakalaNPS	✓	11511	1263	1961	853181
Hawaiʻi Volcanoes	@Volcanoes_NPS	✓	39934	1669	1916	1262747
Hot Springs					1921	2162884
Isle Royale					2019	25844
Indiana Dunes	@IndianaDunesNPS	✓	5984	1624	1940	3177210
Joshua Tree	@JoshuaTreeNPS	✓	108247	7251	1994	3064400
Katmai	@KatmaiNPS	✓	109981	3853	1980	24764
Kenai Fjords	@KenaiFjordsNPS	✓	35446	2380	1980	411782
Kings Canyon	@SequoiaKingsNPS	✓	142693	3265	1940	562918
Kobuk Valley					1980	11540
Lake Clark	@LakeClarkNPS	✓	39274	3638	1980	18278
Lassen Volcanic	@LassenNPS	✓	47704	1387	1916	359635
Mammoth Cave	@MammothCaveNP	✓	12503	1405	1941	515774
Mesa Verde					1906	548477
Mount Rainier	@MountRainierNPS	✓	76662	7887	1899	1670063
New River Gorge	@NewRiverNPS	✓	6673	1297	2020	1682720
North Cascades	@NCascadesNPS	✓	31836	810	1968	17855
Olympic	@OlympicNP	✓	38985	1669	1938	2718925
Petrified Forest	@PetrifiedNPS	✓	66885	6604	1962	590334
Pinnacles	@PinnaclesNPS	✓	31280	1712	2013	348857
Redwood	@RedwoodNPS	✓	69059	1707	1968	435879
Rocky Mountain	@rockynps	✓	71208	18248	1915	4434848
Saguaro	@SaguaroNPS	✓	37957	2971	1994	1079786
Sequoia	@SequoiaKingsNPS	✓	142693	3265	1890	1059548
Shenandoah	@ShenandoahNPS	✓	40479	2457	1935	1592312
Theodore Roosevelt	@TRooseveltNPS		13966	2008	1978	796085
Virgin Islands					1956	323999
Voyageurs	@VoyageursNPS		300	25	1975	243042
White Sands	@WhiteSandNps		48	4	2019	782469
Wind Cave	@WindCaveNPS	✓	3185	226	1903	709001
Wrangell–St. Elias	@WrangellStENPS	✓	21377	2233	1980	50189
Yellowstone	@YellowstoneNPS	✓	903759	6598	1872	4860242
Yosemite	@YosemiteNPS	✓	764114	8922	1890	3287595
Zion	@ZionNPS	✓	173459	3945	1919	5039835

What’s not included

If you go on Twitter and search for National Parks lists, you will find many lists that contain many more entries than the 54 shown above. What causes the discrepancy?

Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines

Sun, 10 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Sections of this post were co-authored by Cornelia Scheitz. Noah Leidinger created a German translation. Piotr Kwapin created a Polish translation. Last updated on February 7, 2021.

Bert Hubert’s excellent and widely shared article about Reverse Engineering the source code of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine is all it took to turn hundreds of software engineers and other Silicon Valley types into armchair vaccine experts overnight! Jokes aside, the article explains the 4284 base long mRNA inside the Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for those who are more familiar with software than molecular biology.

Using pymodbus to communicate with a PLC

Sat, 02 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post is part 4 of a series covering material I presented in a talk at PyCon 2019.

In the previous parts of this series, I covered what a PLC is, and how PLCs are programmed. In industry, the Python developer is usually not involved in the purchasing, installing, and programming of a PLC. If you find yourself working with PLCs in academia or for a hobby project, you might actually be the one doing these things yourself. Either way, I assume that you somehow found yourself with a programmed PLC and now want to connect to it using Python.

Ladder Logic‽

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post is part 3 of a series covering material I presented in a talk at PyCon 2019.

Most software engineers are used to writing text-based code using a text editor of their choice. Things work a little bit differently in the world of PLCs. To program a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), you can’t just open up your favorite text editor and start typing away PLC code. First, PLC logic isn’t programmed in text (exceptions apply, see below). Second, you can’t use your favorite programming software; instead you will be using the one programming software that the vendor of your PLC provides.

What is a Programmable Logic Controller?

Mon, 28 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post is part 2 of a series covering material I presented in a talk at PyCon 2019.

I have prepared three different conference talks about PLCs for Python programmers. Annoyingly, you can’t assume that every Python programmer knows what a PLC is, so I always have to sacrifice a few minutes of my time slot¹ to convey the basics before diving into my actual topic. This blog post is the content I have settled on for those first five minutes of my talks.

What is a PLC and how do I talk Python to it?

Sun, 27 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post is part 1 of a series. Scroll down for a table of contents.

If you’ve found your way to this blog, chances are you already know that I’ve given a few conference talks about using Python in automation. You are right now reading the blog post version of content I presented at PyCon 2019. I started my talk there by answering the question: Why do I keep talking about this topic?¹

List of PLC brands and products

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

tl;dr: Here’s the link to the spreadsheet.

I’ve been thinking about Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) again recently, not least because I am preparing a conference talk about them. While putting together the presentation I thought to myself “Why not make a list of PLC products out there, I wonder how many there are‽”

Turns out, there are quite a few! After three evenings of research I had a spreadsheet of 144 product lines. That number shouldn’t be a surprise given that this is a 50-year-old technology that is ubiquitous in factories, infrastructure, and machinery.

My US Travel Map

Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I have wanted to create a visualization of some of my travels for a long time but always got stuck procrastinating the details: Which arbitrary geographical divisions to use? Countries? Cities? Do transfer airports count?

This random Reddit post¹ gave me the motivation to finally do something. Following the example of the Redditor who posted this, I used mapchart.net to color-code the counties² of the US according to whether I had been there.

The Best Python Packages for Generating Barcodes

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Barcodes are a cheap and ubiquitous way to add machine-readable information to an object. I think of barcodes as the real-world equivalent of browser cookies: For example, when you arrive at airport departures, the airline hands you a boarding pass with a barcode (the cookie). From that point onward you’re asked to show your barcode at every interaction: at security, the duty-free shop, and the boarding gate. And just like the information stored in browser cookies, the information in barcodes isn’t in plain sight but easily made visible.

Hiking in Vall de Boí

Sun, 23 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I travel to Germany to visit family approximately once every 18 months. This year, I mixed things up a little bit and asked my mother and my sister to meet me in Spain for a hiking vacation. We ended up spending five days in Vall de Boí, a dead end mountain valley in the Pyrenees. One valley to the west is the border between Catalonia and Aragon, 50 miles to the north is the border to France.

The PyCon Speaker Experience (is phenomenal)

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The PyCon 2018 website is up and the January 3rd deadline for talk proposals is approaching steadily. Could there be a better time than this to reflect on my experience as a first-time speaker at PyCon 2017 and maybe encourage someone else to be a first-time speaker in 2018?

I’m not a seasoned public speaker by any measure, but I have talked in front of audiences while waving my arms at slideshows a hand-full of times, and somewhat regularly go to events where others do the same. I’ve also been humbled by how hard it is to stage even a small speaking event while co-organizing Ignite Ithaca.

Publishing your First PyPI Package by/for the Absolute Beginner

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The process for packaging and publishing Python packages is subject to much community discussion and frequent change. That leads to a lot of outdated information about it floating around the interwebs.

As part of my PyCon 2017 talk preparations I wrote a driver for a barcode reader that was part of the live demo in my presentation. Having never published a package to PyPI before¹, I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn about the Python Package Index (PyPI) and how to use it.

PyCon 2017 Talk

Sat, 10 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The PyCon talk which I’ve been preparing for with steadily increasing stress levels since February happened three weeks ago at PyCon 2017 in Portland. Time to post a quick retrospective!

The recording of the talk is up on Youtube. Huge props to the PyCon organizers for posting all talk recordings publicly every year. This year the videos were up less than 24 hours after the talk!

I also put together Github Gist with links and notes to go along with the talk, and the slide deck is up on Speakerdeck (although the slide deck only covers what was on screen for half of the talk, the other half consisting of the demo).

PyCon Talk Progress Update: Hindsight is 80/20

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The high level update on my PyCon talk prep is that I’m currently making the transition from making steady deliberate progress to a more panic-driven hair-on-fire style of working. Three weeks from today this thing better works–on stage, and in Portland.

On a more technical level, the status is that I have a working prototype of my demo and am confident that I can construct a good talk narrative around it. Here’s what the prototype currently looks like (cat for scale):

I took a shower on a train and I liked it

Mon, 17 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Conny and I recently took Amtrak’s California Zephyr train from Chicago back home to San Francisco. Knowing the troubled relationship the US has with railway travel, I was anxious about being on a train for 48 hours. But the small inconveniences of living on a train were far outweighed by the enjoyment of watching the countryside pass by outside the window.

Since regularly crossing Germany by train to get to an from boarding school, I enjoy trains as one of the few places where I experience boredom, albeit only in homeopathic doses. This time, I had the serendipitous idea to “tweet-storm” a series of 29 photos from the 2,438 miles long trip. Here are the tweets:

PyCon Talk Progress Update: What needs to be in a Robotics Demo?

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a month since my factory automation talk got accepted into PyCon. If you’ve been following along by means of this blog you’ve seen that I bought a barcode reader on Ebay, made an adapter for it and wasted some time figuring out how to do Serial-to-USB on a Mac.

Barcode readers are cool stuff, but when you promised a factory automation demo, reading a few barcodes doesn’t really cut it. The same goes for a lot of other automation equipment like pushers, shakers, label printers and so on: It might technically be factory automation, but nobody comes to PyCon to see tech that contains fewer transistors than the blender in their kitchen at home.

One simple trick for USB-to-Serial on MacOS X

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Call me a Luddite if you wish, but I lament the lack of serial ports in modern laptops.

My relationship with USB-to-Serial cables has been one of disappointments, crashed computers, and garbled data. The one I pulled out of a drawer this week randomly flipped the most significant bit of every character. How do I know this? Because I wasted three long nights debugging the problem.

But I’m a changed person now because I learned this one amazing trick for making USB-to-Serial just work on macOS:

MS3 Adapter for Serial Port and Power

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In last week’s post about barcode readers I mentioned that I purchased an MS3 from Microscan for my PyCon demo. What I had forgotten from last time I worked with the MS3 is that the pin-out of cable attached to the barcode reader is not just a DB9 (nine pin) serial port connector but a DB15 (VGA style) plug. Those extra pins are used for sending power to the device and to accommodate a few extra features, namely trigger and reset inputs.

Intro to Barcode Readers

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

If you read last week’s blog post you already know that I’ve got three months to put together a physical demo for a PyCon talk about factory automation. This post is the first in a series of progress updates.

In robotics and automation, the smallest realistic demo has three parts: Sensing, control, and actuation. I spent Week 1 selecting and bargain hunting for an industrial barcode reader to cover the sensing part of the demo. As I went along I wrote up my notes as an “Introduction to Barcode Readers”; if you only want to know what I ended up buying, scroll down to the end!

Tap, Tap, Tap

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

… is this thing still on?

Besides that Tumblr blog where I collect factory flicks on a NSFW domain, I haven’t produced much written content for public consumption over the past three years. Looks like they even shut down Google Reader because this blog dried up!

But things are about to change! Here’s the plan:

My talk proposal for PyCon 2017 just got accepted (via a detour through the backup talks list). The title that my pressure prompted brain came up with a few hours before the submission deadline:

Robotics Journals Comparison

Sun, 05 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I didn’t get a chance to do a lot of writing during my time in grad school. Ironically, recently I had to do a lot of writing to be formally left out of grad school.

One of the first steps of the actual writing process for a journal paper is to select a journal to publish in. Things to consider are the relevance and impact of the journal, and mechanical details such as limits on page count. None of this info is easy to find, so I set down for a few hours and compiled the following table for seven of the better known robotics journals.

Manufacturers are also just Middle Men

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Any market where unnecessary middlemen stand between customers and their successful use of a solution is about to be disrupted.

This quote is from an article by Box.net founder Aaron Levi on FastCompany.com. It got me thinking about how bad life must be as a Middle Man.

In the article, Levi mentions Amazon and Ebay as examples for simplicity through disintermediation. Both companies drastically improved processes by removing intermediate parties, aka “Middle Men”. Ebay did it with private sales, and Amazon did it with book sales, then sales of everything, then server commissioning, then book authorship, and so on. Today the trend to kill middle men keeps most of the world’s tech startups busy: Uber, Exec, Spotify, 23andMe, etc—everybody is trying to kill some sort of middle man. Who are these unfortunate people in the middle?

Why I stopped using GMail

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I am a fan of Google products. When Google Voice first came out I went around begging people to invite me and have been using it ever since as my primary number. I can't even remember how I read RSS feeds before there was Google Reader. And Gmail! I was a little hesitant when it was first released but for the past years Gmail was the first browser tab I opened in the morning and the last one I closed at night. The list goes on. According to my Google Accounts page I use 30 different Google services.

The Cubelets arrived!

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Exciting times in modular robotics land! A former coworker of mine started a company aptly named "Modular Robotics" who, over the past years, developed a modular robotic ~~toy~~ construction kit named Cubelets. After spending years finding out how hard developing a hardware product is, they finally shipped the first batch of 100 beta release kits recently shipped. Being excited about having modular robots around that (unlike my own research modular robots) function reliably, I couldn't resist shooting a short video of my first experiments with Cubelets.

How to enable developer mode on a HP TouchPad

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This might be a no-brainer for developers who developed for webOS phones in the past. But if you are getting started programming for webOS with a HP Touchpad and the (relatively) new Enyo framework like I am doing right now, you'll have a hard time figuring out how to test your app on the actual device.

Step 1: Put your device in developer mode

In "Just Type" enter webos20090606. If you happen to have a lot of time on your hands you can also enter upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart (the Konami Code). Both secret phrases will result in a otherwise hidden button appearing:

Fluidinfo API: Likes & Dislikes

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I spent the last two weekends[1] working with the Fluidinfo API (here is why). Using Fluidinfo is pretty easy, I found two weekends enough to discover most of what is possible with Fluidinfo.[2] Here’s my collection of likes and dislikes which accumulated while working with Fluidinfo. In the spirit of a true pessimist, I start with dislikes.

Dislikes

Among the very first things I learned while playing with Fluidinfo: You can delete your root namespace but you can’t re-create it. If you sign up with the username skillshelv.es your root namespace will be skillshelv.es (big surprise) meaning that all your tags will be in the format skillshelv.es/tagname or skillshelv.es/subnamespace/tagname. Because you have the ability to manage sub-namespaces under your root namespace, Fluidinfo exposes the ability to delete namespaces. When I first tried out the Python Library, the first thing I managed to do successfully was to delete my root namespace skillshelv.es. Trying to recreate it results in a permission error. That’s why all Skillshelv.es related tags now live in the alternate namespace skillshelves which I obtained after creating a second account.
There is no results pagination and no way of limiting the result count. The heading of the docs chapter on query results limits sounds promising, but only talks about hard limits imposed by Fluidinfo, not limits set in the query. Try querying for the titles and author names of all O’Reilly books stored in Fluidinfo. You get 2373 book titles and their respective authors, totaling half a megabyte of data. If you only want to show the first ten, you’ll still have to query all of them.
Fluidinfo (sometimes) is slooooooooow. The query mentioned above takes somewhere between 8 seconds and forever to return results. That’s a long time if you know that your user is waiting for a page to display. It’s an even longer time if you are using Google App Engine: GAE has a hard limit of 10 seconds on how long an outgoing HTTP request may wait for a response. On Skillshelv.es I work around long load times by running all Fluidinfo GET queries in Javascript. That way I can display a loading indicator while the Fluidinfo data is loading. This gives the user something to see and shifts the blame to Fluidinfo :-) More generally, though, it means that Fluidinfo shouldn’t be the datastore you query when generating pages. A potential solution might be allowing to limit the result count (see #2) which might reduce processing time on the Fluidinfo side and reduces the amount of data to be transferred.
Object IDs can’t be used in queries. It’s easy to get a list of all tag names that are attached to an object. It’s not so easy getting the values of all those tags. Fluidinfo only provides a clear method to retrieve exactly one tag value associated with a specific object at a time, e.g. the title of a certain O’Reilly book. If you want multiple tag values at the same time, you’ll have to use the /values API endpoint, like in this example which gives you title and price of all O’Reilly books whose title contains “PHP”. Fluidinfo gives you a pretty neat query language to define which objects are included in the response for a query to /values, but querying for an object ID isn’t part of that query language. Therefore, you can’t retrieve multiple tag values for a single object at a time, unless you already know one tag value that uniquely identifies this object. For O’Reilly books the contents of oreilly.com/id seem to be unique and Skillshelv.es uses it equivalently to a primary ID. Update: I mentioned this in the Fluidinfo IRC channel and apparently this is now a ticket and might become a feature in future.
While this Fluidinfo blog post suggests that Fluidinfo’s matches operator for text matching works like MySQL’s LIKE, it doesn’t actually. matches only matches full words. That’s not unsurprising but was a little disappointing when I tried building an auto-complete feature that pulls data directly from Fluidinfo.

Likes

First class user support! When I reported #1 of the dislikes above via Twitter, Fluidinfo’s CEO replied within a few hours acknowledging the issue. Later I figured out that most the action is going on in Fluidinfo’s IRC channel where the folks behind Fluidinfo seem to always be hanging out waiting for people to approach them with their problems. When one of my (valid) queries wouldn’t work one day, the problem was fixed in no time and on top I got a ton of useful advice.
Fluidinfo Explorer. This tool didn’t seem very useful to me at first but then I discovered the context menu and the login button :-) Once you have some data in Fluidinfo and you want to quickly check or change a few entries, nothing beats this tool.
There are ~~a million~~ lots of ways to access Fluidinfo. Libraries are available for Adobe AIR, Clojure, Go, Java, Javascript, Lisp, .NET, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Smalltalk. And Fluidinfo supports JSONP and CORS. It’s really nice to be able to hit the ground running in whatever language you like best. Compare this to some big companies who have tens of APIs, each with libraries available in another random selection of two or three languages.

Footnotes:

[1] Like every good grad student I did not devote the entire weekend but also did some ~~real~~ research work on these weekends.

Fluidinfo API Contest: Design Decisions

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I announced yesterday that I am currently working on a submission to the O’Reilly/Fluidinfo API contest. You should check out the other submissions so far:

BookChirpa by Mark McSpadden is a data mashup project showing recent tweets about O’Reilly books enriched with information about these books which is pulled from Fluidinfo. There is an About page with a whole bunch of technical info. Ironically, the top entry on the Bookchirpa library page is “21 Recipes for Mining Twitter”.
David Karapetyan opts for a submission which only adds data to the Fluidinfo data store but doesn’t have a frontend. That’s legit by the contest rules. Here’s a blog post about how he added Amazon Suggestions to each book. 90% of his post are crossed out indicating that the story behind his submission isn’t exactly linear.
Eric Seidel’s submission is really similar to Skillshelv.es. Shockingly similar. Read about it in his blog. By the looks of it he’s been a Fluidinfo aficionado before because his prior project FluidCV is based on it. His submission to the contest is to let people add O’Reilly books to their FluidCV to - hold your breath - show their skills based on the books they own. Disclaimer: I hadn’t seen his project when I started working on Skillshelv.es.
Michael Hawes noticed that the books which Fluidinfo imported into their database are only those English language ones sold in the USA. But O’Reilly also publishes books in other languages in the small part of the earth known as ROTW to Americans (the acronym stands for both Rest of the World and Rim of the World). He embarked on the mission to add links to the foreign language equivalents to all existing Fluidinfo book objects. Like David K.’s entry, Michael’s has no front page, but extensive documentation on his blog.
Rachel Willmer wrote an extension to her eBook price aggregator Luzme.com to send up to date eBook pricing details into the Fluidinfo data store. She writes that she will only sync this data for the duration of the competition but I sure hope she continues to do so after the deadline on Sunday night. It strikes me how open everyone is about what their entry is and how they went about creating it. So I won’t hold back either and write up the details on my submission, predominantly in this blog and maybe later on as part of the Skillshelv.es site. Today, let’s talk about the design decision that had to be made before I started touching my keyboard.

Quick Recap

Here’s the quick technical summary of what my submission will do: Each book will be tagged with one or more skills representing the expertise conveyed in the book. Each book will also be tagged with usernames to represent ownership. Based on this info, users’ skill levels and some other derivative data will be computed.

Hello Fluidinfo API Competition

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

How does a small startup get the word out about their API? The people at Fluidinfo probably thought that a full page ad in the New York Times is a bad idea. They decided to run a contest instead. If things go well, contests are great because tens or hundreds or thousands of people (“contest participants”) create value according to your specification but you only have to pay a few of them (“lucky winners”). If all goes wrong only a few people create very little value and you have to pay all of them. That’s really all there is to know about contests.

Hello World!

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Today is the day I start text blogging. Text blogging is a new thing for me. I’ve had two photo blogs before: The Daily London Photo and The Daily Ithaca Photo (together with Conny and Alice). For most photos I usually wrote a short text, sometimes descriptive, occasionally unrelated and often completely made up. But times have changed.

Let’s quickly looks at blogs with Venn Diagrams. First, there’s the personal blog where one person writes about all the things that are going on in their head. “Personal blog” is actually a bit of a misnomer because the odd, the embarrassing and the stuff that’s actually personal doesn’t appear on most personal blogs.

Posts on Blog | Jonas Neubert

So you think this library can validate email addresses

So you think you can validate email addresses

Migrating Projective Set from AngularJS v2 to VueJS v3

How not to get Google Fiber in Salt Lake City

The Best Python Packages for Reading Barcodes

Don’t use Python for Barcode Decoding!

List of US National Parks Twitter Accounts

The List

What’s not included

Further Reading (vol 2): Research Breakthroughs that led to mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines

Further Reading: Behind the Scenes of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Supply Chains

Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines

Using pymodbus to communicate with a PLC

Ladder Logic‽

What is a Programmable Logic Controller?

What is a PLC and how do I talk Python to it?

List of PLC brands and products

My US Travel Map

The Best Python Packages for Generating Barcodes

Hiking in Vall de Boí

The PyCon Speaker Experience (is phenomenal)

Publishing your First PyPI Package by/for the Absolute Beginner

PyCon 2017 Talk

PyCon Talk Progress Update: Hindsight is 80/20

I took a shower on a train and I liked it

PyCon Talk Progress Update: What needs to be in a Robotics Demo?

One simple trick for USB-to-Serial on MacOS X

MS3 Adapter for Serial Port and Power

Intro to Barcode Readers

Tap, Tap, Tap

Robotics Journals Comparison

Manufacturers are also just Middle Men

Why I stopped using GMail

The Cubelets arrived!

How to enable developer mode on a HP TouchPad

Fluidinfo API: Likes & Dislikes

Dislikes

Likes

Footnotes:

Fluidinfo API Contest: Design Decisions

Quick Recap

Hello Fluidinfo API Competition

Hello World!