How to Extract Text from image using Laravel and Amazon Rekognition API
I'm currently working on a project that requires extracting text from images of variable quality. I'm doing quick prototypes using PHP and Laravel, but I've found the documentation for accomplishing this a bit lacking. After working on it for a bit, I figured out a really simple solution and am sharing in case it helps anyone else.
This sample will send the image to the API as a blob instead of using a URL. I had tried Base64 encoding it without any luck. I discovered that using Imagick was the easiest way to make this work so the sample relies on that.
Fire up terminal and add a requirement for aws/aws-sdk-php:
How to get shape type in Visio using VBA?
I'm working with a Visio 2016 file with over 100 tabs and need to extract the data (mainly text, connector from/to, and shape) for data processing for a processing engine. I was trying to figure out how to get the shape type name in Visio using VBA. For example, in a flowchart, I'm trying to figure out how to tell if a shape is a process, decision, data, etc. The
How to remove wrapping tags in PHP Storm
How often do you code something and need to delete a wrapping link or div? I was using PHPStorm and had grabbed some code from another file that had links in the tags which weren't needed in the new file. I didn't want to manually remove each link and after a quick look around PHPStorm's menus, discovered that PHPStorm has a really useful command to remove the wrapping element for you.
Select the element, then from the menu, choose Code > Unwrap/Remove... or use the keyboard shortcut, Command + Shift + Backspace and then choose the appropriate wrapping element to remove.
Chrome Anchor Link Not Working Fix
One of my single page sites that had been live for months with no changes suddenly had the menu stop functioning in Chrome only. I can't find an exact reason for the break, but I did find a cross-browser JavaScript solve that fixes the issue nicely. Just add the snippet to your site and the links should work automatically. Note that this fix requires jQuery but can be converted to VanillaJS.
How to use Teensyduino to send cmd + enter
Recently we purchased a bunch of Teensyduino powered buttons for a trivia game we were building for a client's convention as a fun learning experience. Now that the conference is through, the buttons are sitting unused, and my boss asked me if I could reprogram one of them so he could use it to send emails through Outlook on Mac. It was a fun little exercise since I've never worked with programming Teensyduinos before. It turned out that this wasn't so complicated to accomplish. I figured I'd share the script in case anyone else would find it useful.
How to test email sending in Laravel 5.3 using artisan tinker
I'm building a Laravel app and ran into an error when trying to send mail but wasn't getting an error back since the request was posted through ajax. If you're trying to troubleshoot it, artisan tinker app is very useful to get more information on the error.
Fire up terminal/command line and run:
Regex to parse date formats when unknown
I'm working on an app that will parse different file sources and aggregate it for a report. Of course, each format has a different date format and trying to parse it all has proved to be a pain. I wrote a regex that'll parse out just about every datetime format I've run into that I am sharing in case someone else finds it useful. I've put it on a Github gist along with a sample of the various dates I've tested it against and confirmed to work. If you find a format not covered by the regex, post a comment and I'll update the gist. Just a note that I haven't finished parsing the timestamp (e.g. 1997-07-16T19:20:30+01:00) format. The date portion does get extracted correctly so I left it in.
Copy File Context to Clipboard via Command Line, Git Bash (Mingw64), or Terminal
I've been spending more time switching from SVN to Git and learning the command line options. I'm finding a lot of the Mac Git terminal commands I run aren't the same in Git Bash (Mingw64). One of the commands I use is the pbcopy command to copy the ssh key to the clipboard to paste into Github and Bitbucket accounts. I'm starting to use it more as I am learning managing Linux servers and adding my key to login. I'm adding it here as a cheatsheet for myself but I thought others may find it useful. On Windows, you can run this command to copy your ssh key to the clipboard:
How to Copy and Paste into the Digital Ocean VNC Console
I recently signed up for Digital Ocean to test droplets for my development and linux management testing. I was securing the server and setup fail2ban, disabled the root login, and created a user account but forgot to change the user name from root to the user name I selected in my SSH client profile. I ended up locking myself out of the server and had to resort to logging into the admin panel on Digital Ocean's website and use their browser embedded VNC client to restore my access. I quickly discovered that one of the downsides of using this panel is that you can't copy and paste commands. Luckily there's a workaround and you can use the browser console to do sendkeys through Javascript.
Bring up the console in the browser developer tools. Here's a cheat sheet for keyboard shortcuts:
ASP.NET MVC Model Generator
In making the switch to ASP.NET MVC, I've moved away from using my old Data Access Layer that I've used for years and have opted to use Dapper as my ORM of choice in the quest for optimal performance. My DAL was actually pretty optimized for WinForms and WebForms (using straight SQL Queries and SQL parameters) but mapping it to models wasn't something I had in mind when I created it. I'm finding Dapper takes some getting used too but it is still pretty fast. The downside is that writing the code for Models to wire it up is proving to be a little tedious. To that effect, I wrote a little application that has helped me generate the models from a database dynamically. It's in it's infancy stages and something I cobbled together in less than 8 hours but it works. I'll add more features too as time goes on if there's enough interest or to satisfy my own needs. In the meantime, I'm open sourcing the project as it may help others and I'd love to see it become something grander if others are willing to contribute to it. There's also some useful bits of code that others may find useful to reference like dynamically reading fields from a database, pluralization/singularization of words, amongst others. You can find the repository on Github: https://github.com/gregvarghese/MVCModelGenerator