Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Image Stacks and iPhone Racks - Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

I love articles like this because they describe the thought process involved to solve a design and development problem. This particular example might be beyond the capacity of most students (or it might not!) but it serves as an excellent example of how the process works, beginning with a statement of need ("I could never find the niche memes I wanted to send folks when I needed them most") and coming up with an elegant, if off-beat, solution: using a network of old used iPhones (load balanced with nginx on a Raspberry Pi) to run Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on images or videos, storing the results in a database searchable with Elastisearch. Programming was done in the Swift language, where the author admits, "my familiarity with Swift was about on par with a golden retriever's understanding of finance." Via Chris Lott.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Nov 21, 2024 10:04 a.m.

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