I needed a way to extract basic technical specifications of electronic gadgets from plain text. This plain text could simply be a few lines of description or a full page of text outlining all the technical specifications. The idea is to be able to collect product information from various difference sources and reduce each piece of information to a well defined set of attributes that can be compared and used to calculate various statistics.

My wife recenty got me a digital SLR camrea as a gift. I’ve been going crazy taking picture of everything and anything. Although the camera and the eye see the same thing, but sometimes how you frame the picture changes the whole perspective of what you see. This is exactly what happened when I started taking pictures of ripped advertising posted in New York City’s subway sations.

The image on the left is the universal symbol used to represent the power button on almost any devices these days. Have you ever wondered why this specific symbol represents the power button? I did, and then I went around my apartment looking at the power button of everything that could be switched on and found it to be a very interesting exercise.

Apps in all shapes and sizes are all the rage these days. Various “Apps” stores count how many million apps they have and how many million are downloaded every day. We have apps for just about all kinds of gadgets, Smartphones, Laptops, Desktops and even things like TVs and Hand-held game consoles. Lets not also forget how around 6/10 startups want to make “apps” and how every 18-35 year olds out there have an idea for the next killer app and looking for a developer to partner up with. I for one believe that its just a matter of 5 years before “Apps” as something we install on our devices, will die.

I’m a previously 100% Java developer turned to a 50/50 Java/Python developer. Although I was skeptical about Python initially, but I’ve learned to love the language. Once you stop trying to program like Java in Python, it becomes much easier to see the Pythonic way. However, I do miss the explicitness of Java but have found that good documentation can make up for it to a good extent.