Tag: fun stuff

Scala: Fun with Parser Combinators

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on Scala: Fun with Parser Combinators

A couple of months ago I decided to use Scala with the Play Framework for a Bitcoin related project. The decision to use Play was motivated primarily by the goal of implementing a “pure” Bitcoin application, leveraging bitcoinj to interact with the Bitcoin network as opposed to a third party service. Overall, everything was pretty straightforward but one thing that stuck out was how the Play framework handles parsing JSON.

Coming from loosely typed PHP I knew that handling serializing and unserializing of JSON data was going to be different but Play’s approach is a completely new paradigm. If you use Play with Scala, you can handle parsing JSON input back into objects using Scala’s Parser Combinators syntax. I’m going to butcher this description so check the wikipedia entry but the idea is that parser combinators let you “build up” increasingly complex parsers by combining functions that recognize smaller inputs. If you’ve taken a compilers or programming language class, Scala’s parser combinators end up looking a lot like Backus–Naur Form for the input you want to recognize.

Anyway in an effort to learn Scala a bit better and take Parser Combinators for a spin I decided to build out a small project. What I ended up building is a really simple implementation of a Turtle Graphics system. You basically feed it a series of “turtle” commands and it’ll move the “turtle” around on a Swing window drawing some graphics.

Here’s an examples of the input and output:

Which was generated by:

Overall, parser combinators seem to be a really powerful Scala feature that would make developing domain specific languages relatively straightforward. Compared to messing around with a parser generator, using parser combinators seems to more closely mirror what the formal grammar of a language would be.

The entire project is available on GitHub. If you clone that project, there’s a runnable JAR which you can run with:

java -jar logoparser.jar /home/ashish/workspace_java/logo-parser/samples/face.txt

You’ll need to provide an absolute path for the “filewatcher” to work. Once the app starts, if you modify the file you specify it’ll repaint the canvas with your updates. Note: I’m not sure why but certain text editors don’t seem to register in the Java “filewatcher” interface so if your updates aren’t showing up try using a different editor.

Anyway, as always I’d love any feedback!

Friday Links: Obama codes, MSFT <3 BTC, and hacked k-cups

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on Friday Links: Obama codes, MSFT <3 BTC, and hacked k-cups

It rained, it snowed, but hey it’s Friday! Grab some beers and snack on some links.

Now you can exchange bitcoins to buy apps, games, and more at Microsoft

It’s a post Ballmer world and Microsoft is making big moves. Starting immediately, you can use Bitcoin to fund your Microsoft account to buy apps and Xbox content. Get the details >

Async – Cooperative Multitasking for Hack

Evaluating Facebook’s new Hack programming language? Well check out how it supports cooperative multitasking. Hint: It’s pretty sweet. Read more >

Keurig 2.0 DRM Bypass

Have a shiny new Keurig 2.0 but don’t want to pay for the premium K-cups? Well KeurigHack has you covered. Get some scotch tape and drink those cups. Details here

Obama Becomes First President to Write a Computer Program

In support of CS education and the “Hour of code” project, President Obama wrote some Javascript. Rumor has it a fist bump was also involved. Read the story >

Video: Video effects with avcon and ImageMagick

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on Video: Video effects with avcon and ImageMagick

A couple of months ago I was at Firebrand Saints and started wondering how the effects that they run on their videos work. At Firebrand, their main bar has a few flat screen TVs showing cable channels you’d expect but every now and then one of the TVs will start displaying the video through a filter. So as you’re sitting at the bar you’ll notice Sportcenter go from regular video to what looks like Sportcenter put through a pixelated filter. Unfortunately, the fall got a bit busy and I forgot to jot this down but it recently came back to me while watching the Family Guy – Take On Me skit.

So how do you programmatically apply effects to video? After some searching around, it seems like the preferred way to do this is to convert the video to a series of images, apply the effects, and then encode the images back to a video. Since we’re on Linux the weapons of choice for this are libav (ffmpeg fork) and ImageMagick. Additionally, I used youtube-dl to grab some source video from YouTube.

Playing around with manipulating videos and images is pretty CPU intensive so I decided to do this on a c3.xlarge. Once you have a machine up, just run the following to get everything setup:

Now, snag yourself a video from YouTube:

Next, you’ll want to extract the audio and then the individual frames from the video:

And now for the fun part – time to apply some effects to the image! As an fun first pass I ran the “paint” transform across the images. PS. Remember how we launched on that c3.xlarge? Well now we can run the transforms in parallel with xargs:

Finally, you’ll need to encode the images back together into a video format of your choice:

Here’s a clip of the video I ended up with:

So what else can you do with this? Well that’s the awesome part! An image manipulations you can do programmatically (ImageMagick, NodeJS, etc.) you can apply to your video.

Perhaps some Mystery Science Taylor Swift?

Unfortunately this adventure has left me with more questions than answers:

  • How do you apply filters to a video in real time?
  • Would it be possible to integrate this into a rooted (or stock) Chromecast?
  • Could you build something to support user interactivity? Maybe with Canvas/nodeJS?

I’d love any thoughts, input, or ideas!

Friday Links: A pg essay, new reCAPTCHA, and marketing inspiration

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on Friday Links: A pg essay, new reCAPTCHA, and marketing inspiration

It’s Friday, you did it! To bootstrap your weekend we’ve got some kickass links from the last week.

Mean People Fail

Did you know that mean people are unsuccessful startup founders because being mean makes them stupid. We certainly didn’t. Check out why and other reasons being mean will lead to failure. Read the essay >

You sure you’re not a robot?

Google is making life easier by revising reCAPTCHA. Instead of those pesky distorted texts that you had to type to enter a website, there’s now a “i’m not a robot” box option for you to click. Sadly, you might still need to read and type distorted texts after clicking the box, but you could also come across a new feature where you match pictures of animals. Check it out >

Here’s Crayon for your Web Page

All the web pages in the world, and we mean all, can be found at Crayon. Housing a massive collection of web pages (hence crayon), inspiration and ideas are bound to happen, culminating to an impressive web page for you. Check it out >

quaggaJS: Barcode Scanner

Written entirely in Javascript, QuaggaJS is a barcode scanner that supports real time localization and decoding of various barcodes. All you need to fire it up is a browser that supports the getUserMedia API. Check it out >