Bhardwaj Rish

I'm not going to talk about how to scrape. Google web-scraping blogs . You'll find a million amazing blogs and articles. Honestly, a million, and they're pretty good. I'm going to talk about how amazing web scraping is, and how I've used it so far. But before that, if you've scraped in the past, do check out... *drum roll* Jaunt-API I've used Selenium, Beautifulsoup, Mechanize, and a couple others, but none are as easy as Jaunt. It truly is brilliant. Plus, the creator, Tom Cervenka, is super quick in replying to emails. Alright. Coming back to the super awesomeness of web-scraping. It's just an alternative to the API. A hack of some sorts. Want to apply machine learning, and need a data set? Scrape the web. See hundreds of cute cat images you'd like to download off a webpage? Scrape the page. Want to automate a login system? Scrape. Here's a list of projects where I've used web-scraping, and in most, less than 100 lines of code...

Quick jot. Not very well thought through, just a thought. Does God Understand English? Or for that matter, Hindi, German, Urdu, or even the near-perfect, Sanskrit? My mother visits the temple everyday, along with hundreds of millions of other Indians. Man. Hundreds of millions. Suddenly that seems like a very large number of God-believing Indians to me. Anyway. Whenever I'm at home, she takes me a long with her to our society's temple, and I have a casual conversation with Him , where only I speak in my mind, in English, not knowing if there's anyone there, listening on the other end. And that's what made me think. We all pray in some or the other language, right? A Sardar is most likely to pray in Punjabi. A French, in French. An Italian, in Italian. An Egyptian, in Arabic. But does God really understand the billions of prayers He listens to? Yes, we all think God is a super power, the creator of all, who understands everything, whose decisions are what g...

This is about uploading your application to the playstore, with tips as to how to make the entire process easier. Google Play requires you to make icons/banners of very specific sizes, take screenshots, and a whole lot of drama. It isn't something you can avoid, so you might as well just follow these guidelines to make the entire process easy and fast. Alright. I'm going to start the cheesy way, quoting a line so correct, Mahatma Gandhi would shy away. Okay that was crap. I'm sorry :P But this line isn't. In fact, if you have never developed any kind of application before, you will experience ecstasy, so exultant and euphoric that you will want to enthusiastically practice more and build something—anything, like a hungry chef discovering a furnished kitchen with every tool, every utensil, and a stocked refrigerator. - From the guy who started javascriptissexy.com If you've ever built something using your own creativity, your own hands, whether it's a ta...

This is about what happens once you've created your app's store listing, created keystore keys, designed icons of the very specific sizes Android requires, taken screenshots, and you're really happy about having uploaded your app. Oh the joy of making an application :D You feel proud, because you've actually built something. Something with your very own hands. ( Fingers to be precise :P - We're not craftsmen anymore, that actually build a tangible structure carving wood or welding metal - everything most humans create now is for a world we've created - the virtual world. Ah but I'll leave this for another blog. )  You've spent days, if not weeks( months, maybe? ) on developing your application from scratch, planning, implementing, and finally making it Google-Play-Ready. Now believe me, that isn't easy. Creating a bare-bone app with zero UI and crap code for extremely fast prototyping is easy, and I am usually done with the skeleton in 2 days. B...