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Audio Recognition in NodeJS

I live in a small town that occasionally broadcasts announcements over the radio. For the past few years, I’ve been building a small Raspberry Pi appliance to transcribe these broadcasts to text. However, there are many broadcasts that don’t contain spoken content, so I wanted a way to recognize the kind of broadcast and make a decision whether to send it to the speech-to-text service or not.

Here’s what I have right now:

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My Great Language Hunt -- Elixir

Edit 2016/4/29 I have written a follow-up piece to this blog post.

As many of you probably know, I am a professional programmer. I started my professional career with WordPress and PHP development, and now I find myself doing a lot of Ruby work. I am still in the very early stages of my professional career – I have only been doing this for about 5 years. There are people who are much more experienced than I am, and there is a whole world of things that I have yet to learn and experience.

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Amazon IAM Policies: Granting one user access to a S3 bucket

It may be easy to use the same master Access Key and Secret Access Key for all your apps using Amazon AWS, but it’s definitely not secure and recommended against.

That said, I had a little trouble writing the IAM policy granting a single user access to a single S3 bucket. I finally had time to sit down and figure it out today, and turns out - it’s pretty easy. Up to this point, I’m assuming that you’ve already created your user, but if you haven’t - the IAM management console is located here: https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?#users.

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LocationMatch and ProxyPass

Want to mix LocationMatch and ProxyPass? Not so fast.

<LocationMatch ^/(regex/here/.*)$>
  ProxyPassMatch http://backend/$1
</LocationMatch>

Don’t forget to use ProxyPassReverse if you need it (it shouldn’t be inside the LocationMatch directive, though).

References:

Anchor Links inside Facebook Apps

If you haven’t noticed, you can’t use anchor links:

<a href="#hello">Go to id="hello"</a>

Inside Facebook Apps (Page tab, Canvas app, etc). So I wrote a little snippet that emulates this behaviour by using FB.Canvas.scrollTo(x, y);

/*
anchorlinks-fbcanvas.js

Enables anchor links (<a href="#hello">Go to id="hello"</a>) in
Facebook Canvas (page tabs, canvas app, etc)

Requires: jQuery, Facebook JS SDK
*/

jQuery(function($) {
  $('a').filter(function() {
    return $(this).attr('href').match(/^#/);
  }).each(function(i, el) {
    $(el).click(function(e) {
      e.preventDefault();
      var elementId = $(el).attr('href').replace(/^#(.*)/, '$1');
      var $goTo = $(document.getElementById(elementId));
      FB.Canvas.scrollTo(0, $goTo.offset().top);
    });
  });
});

Thoughts about App.net

I’m sure you have heard of App.net by now. The paid, non-advertisement-supported “live social stream” (read: Twitter). They set a $500,000 goal, and raised more than $800,000 - a clear indicator that some level of demand is there for such a service.

There are two levels of membership, the $50 “User” level and the $100 “Developer” level. A developer account will give you the necessary API keys to build apps that connect to App.net. I was very interested in how these prices were chosen, and thankfully App.net published their logic (“How did you come up with the pricing tiers?” in the FAQ).

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Retina

Been wondering how to simply retina-ize your website? Put this at the end of your site:

$(function() {
  try {
  if (window.matchMedia('(-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2), (min-device-pixel-ratio: 2)').matches) {
    $('.autoRetina').each(function(i, e) {
      var orig_src = $(e).attr('src');
      var new_src = orig_src.replace(/^(.*?).(png|jpe?g|gif)$/i, '$1@2x.$2');
      $(e).attr('src', new_src);
    });
  }
  } catch (e) {}
});

If you’re on a Retina-equipped device, your images with the autoRetina class will automatically be replaced with their Retina counterparts. If you’re familiar with iOS development, you’ll feel right at home. If you have no clue what I’m talking about, just append @2x at the end of the filename (before the extension).

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