Archive for the ‘code’ Category

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Recycling: a Scratch game for Code Club

Sunday, April 19th, 2015

Grace and Faith have been helping me work on a new project for Code Club. It’s not quite finished yet (Excuse: Thanks to the holidays, it’s still over a week till my next Code Club class!), but it’s close enough that I thought it’s worth sharing the work-in-progress.

The basic idea (more than a little inspired by an old Mega Drive game we’ve played) is that you have to catch falling bits of rubbish and put them in the correct recycling bin.

A playable version is embedded here if you’re using a Flash-friendly browser. Press the green flag to start, use the arrow keys to run left and right, and press the space bar to throw what you’re carrying. (If the embed isn’t working, you can also get to it on the Scratch website.)

I’ve started writing up how we made it, using Code Club’s lesson format tool. (A tool that reads Markdown with a few Code Club-specific extras).

The write-up is still a little rough around the edges, but the source for what we’ve got so far is on github.

And I’ve used lesson_format to create HTML and PDF versions in the Code Club style.

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How to use the IBM Watson Relationship Extraction service on Bluemix

Sunday, January 25th, 2015

Before Christmas, I wrote about how I used the Watson Relationship Extraction service on Bluemix to pick out the things mentioned in news stories, as part of a mobile app we built on a hackday. I’d still like to do something more with that app, but in the meantime I should at least share how I did the Relationship Extraction bit.

From the official doc for the service:

From unstructured text, Relationship Extraction can extract entities (such as people, locations, organizations, events), and the relationships between these entities (such as person employed-by organization, person resides-in location).

This is provided as a hosted service on IBM Bluemix where any developer can sign up and give it a try.

It’s available as a documented REST API, but as part of using it in the hackday, I needed to write a bit of code around that, just to prepare the request and parse the response. I think it’ll save me time to reuse this the next time I want to build something with the API, so I’m sharing it as a standalone package.

In this post, I’ll walk though how you can use it, with a small app that grabs the contents of a BBC News story and picks out the names of people mentioned in the story.

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Watson News Companion

Friday, December 12th, 2014

newscompanion screenshotWe recently ran a hackathon at work: people within IBM were invited to try building a mobile app aimed at consumers using Watson services. It was a fun chance to try out some new ideas, as well as to build something using our APIs – dogfooding is always a good thing.

I worked on a hack with David which we submitted on Wednesday. This is what we came up with, and how we built it.

The idea

A mobile app that will help users to digest the news by explaining references in stories and providing greater context.

Background

It’s difficult to find the time nowadays to properly read and understand what’s going on in the world. We rarely have the time to sit and read through a newspaper. Instead, we might quickly read news stories online from our smartphones and tablets. But that often makes it difficult to understand the broader context that a story is in. There might be references in the story to people, places, organisations or events that are unfamiliar.

Watson could help. It could be an assistant as you read the news, explaining unfamiliar references and the broader context.

Features

Our Watson News Companion demo is a mobile news reader app that:

  • anticipates questions and suggests areas where it can help improve understanding
  • provides answers to questions without needing the users to lose their place in the story
  • allow the user to dig deeper with their own follow-up questions


A video walkthrough of the hack

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Comparing XML files ignoring order of attributes and child elements

Monday, October 6th, 2014

I need to diff some XML files.

For these particular XML files, order is not important. The XML is being used to contain a set of things, not a list – the order of the elements has no significance. Similarly, the order of the attributes within each element isn’t significant.

For example, for my purposes, these two XML files are equivalent:

<myroot>
    <mychild id="123">
        <fruit>apple</fruit>
        <test hello="world" brackets="angled" question="answers"/>
        <comment>This is a comment</comment>
    </mychild>
    <mychild id="456">
        <fruit>banana</fruit>
    </mychild>
    <mychild id="789">
        <fruit>orange</fruit>
        <test brackets="round" hello="greeting">
            <number>111</number>
        </test>
        <dates>
              <modified>123</modified>
              <created>253</created>
              <accessed>44</accessed>
        </dates>
    </mychild>
</myroot>
<myroot>
    <mychild id="789">
        <fruit>orange</fruit>
        <test hello="greeting" brackets="round">
            <number>111</number>
        </test>
        <dates>
              <accessed>44</accessed>    
              <modified>123</modified>
              <created>253</created>
        </dates>
    </mychild>
    <mychild id="123">
        <test question="answers" hello="world" brackets="angled"/>
        <comment>This is a comment</comment>
        <fruit>apple</fruit>
    </mychild>
    <mychild id="456">
        <fruit>banana</fruit>
    </mychild>
</myroot>

I needed to compare some large XML files, which have big differences in the order of elements, and I couldn’t find a tool that would do the job. So I wrote a bit of Python to do it for me.

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Using Node.js to create a REST API around a SQL database

Sunday, June 15th, 2014

A few code snippets for how you can quickly stand up a SQL database, and provide a REST API for DB read/writes

I was helping out a team at a hackday hosted at Hursley last week. One of the things they wanted for their hack was a SQL database to put sensor data in, which they could access via a REST API. And they wanted it in node.js.

I’d never used Node before, so I used this as a chance to give myself a first crash-course.

I’m not saying this is the way to do this in Node, as it’s the result of my first hour’s tinkering. But it worked, and I mostly wanted to share how quick and easy it was.

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Text analytics in BlueMix using UIMA

Sunday, April 13th, 2014

In this post, I want to explain how to create a text analytics application in BlueMix using UIMA, and share sample code to show how to get started.

First, some background if you’re unfamiliar with the jargon.

What is UIMA?

UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) is an Apache framework for building analytics applications for unstructured information and the OASIS standard for content analytics.

I’ve written about it before, having used it on a few projects when I was in ETS, and on other side projects since such as building a conversational interface to web pages.

It’s perhaps better known for providing the architecture for the question answering system IBM Watson.

What is BlueMix?

BlueMix is IBM’s new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, built on top of Cloud Foundry to provide a cloud development platform.

It’s in open beta at the moment, so you can sign up and have a play.

I’ve never used BlueMix before, or Cloud Foundry for that matter, so this was a chance for me to write my first app for it.

A UIMA “Hello World” for BlueMix

I’ve written a small sample to show how UIMA and BlueMix can work together. It provides a REST API that you can submit text to, and get back a JSON response with some attributes found in the text (long words, capitalised words, and strings that look like email addresses).

The “analytics” that the app is doing is trivial at best, but this is just a Hello World. For now my aim isn’t to produce a useful analytics solution, but to walk through the configuration needed to define a UIMA analytics pipeline, wrap it in a REST API using Wink, and deploy it as a BlueMix application.

When I get a chance, I’ll write a follow-up post on making something more useful.

You can try out the sample on BlueMix as it’s deployed to bluemix.net

The source is on GitHub at github.com/dalelane/bluemixuima.

In the rest of this post, I’ll walk through some of the implementation details.

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Creating an iCalendar from online timetables

Sunday, January 19th, 2014

I’m a member of my local swimming pool, Fleming Park. I’m trying to swim a lot at the moment (as it’s a big help for my back).

I don’t have a regular schedule, I just try and squeeze in time for a swim any time I can spare. This means I’ve not learned the pool’s schedule and frequently have to check their website to find when the pool is available.

I’m checking it so frequently that it’s one of my Most Visited thumbnails in Chrome.

This isn’t efficient, particularly as it’s normally on my phone making me switch between the browser and Calendar apps. It’d be quicker and easier if I had the timetable in my calendar alongside my appointments, so I could easily see when I’m free and the pool is open.

The leisure centre doesn’t provide a feed so I can subscribe and add their schedule to my calendar.

So I made my own.

dalelane.co.uk/…/swimflemingpark.ics

If you use the Fleming Park pool, import this in your Calendar app (or subscribe to it from Google Calendar) and the next week’s pool timetable will be kept up to date in your calendar.

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A scheduler for Remember The Milk

Saturday, January 4th, 2014

A quick tool I made for setting due dates of tasks in Remember The Milk by dragging them onto a calendar

I’ve mentioned Remember The Milk (RTM) before – the online to-do list manager. I’ve been using it for years.

My workflow has settled into:

  1. Capture
    Any time I think of something that I’ll probably need to do, it gets thrown into RTM. Then I relax knowing it won’t get forgotten.
  2. Plan
    Periodically review everything in RTM, working out what needs to be done soon, what can wait, and so on.

The RTM web application interface doesn’t suit my approach to scheduling tasks. I need a different view for planning and triaging.

So I made one.

Remember The Milk scheduler

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