Recent web

• Query Wikipedia from your terminal

  I refer Wikipedia frequently. I use this BASH function to help me do that from the terminal. For explanation of how this works head over here.
  BASH function

  # wiki

  # eg: wiki India
  # wiki Apple_Inc
  # wiki Anglo_Saxon
  wiki()
  {
  dig +short txt $1.wp.dg.cx
  }

  Example usage

  prashanth@prashanth-desktop:~$ [...]

  August 23rd, 2009

• Command-line language translation

  Here is a simple utility created using Python for translating text from various languages into English. It uses the Google AJAX API to do this.
  Usage

  prashanth@prashanth-desktop:~$ translate bonjour
  hello
  prashanth@prashanth-desktop:~$ translate guten morgen
  Good morning

  August 18th, 2009

• Extracting relevant text from HTML pages

  Some time back I had done some work on extracting topics from an arbitrary piece of text using Wikipedia data. Recently I thought of a concept to put that algorithm to work. As a part of this project, I need to extract relevant text from an arbitrary HTML page. By relevant I mean the “meat” [...]

  July 27th, 2009

• Look who’s downloaded Firefox 3!

  Firefox 3 has been getting rave reviews ever since it got in to beta. The blogosphere was abuzz with reports on how much more efficient and snappier FF3 is compared to its earlier incarnations and more so with respect to the competition (Opera, IE7, Safari).
  Features like “Places” (Bookmarks on steroids), Cairo for rendering and OS [...]

  June 18th, 2008

• Wordza – A Smart Word Quizzer

  I’d thought of making a word quizzer as a web application to improve my vocabulary when I took the GRE test a couple of years back. I’d written one in Visual Basic 6 when I wrote SAT , but desktop applications are boring!
  I got inspired to bring my long standing idea to fruition and [...]

  April 27th, 2008

• Alexa rank: A script to get the rank for any site

  What is Alexa rank?
  Alexa collects statistics about visits by internet users to websites through the Alexa Toolbar. Based on the collected data, Alexa computes site ranking. By examining the Alexa rank of a site, you can get a rough idea of how popular the site is. Many argue that Alexa rank is misleading but it [...]

  April 22nd, 2008

• How to generate domain names, place names … product names ?

  One of the trickiest and enjoyable parts of starting something new (be it a website, project, band) is naming it! Sometimes a good name can be quite elusive and cause more than the deserved share of brain ache. Here is a list of automated services around the internet that will help you get name suggestions.

  Let [...]

  April 3rd, 2008

• Songza – music search engine and jukebox

  Every once in a while, someone comes up with a way of doing things in an extremely obvious and simple way. When this happens, a zillion others say, “of course that’s the way to do it!”. Songza is a music search engine and jukebox that is dead simple to use. You should try it to [...]

  March 27th, 2008

• All NCERT text books!

  I recently came to know that NCERT was providing all the text books (class 1 – 12) for download. However, I found their interface hard to use for browsing through. So I wrote a crawler in python to get all the books to my webserver.
  Along with storing the books, I generated thumbnails for every chapter. [...]

  February 6th, 2008

• Google’s Knol – A new Wikipedia?

  KNOL
  Google has announced “Knol”. In their words

  a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.

  December 15th, 2007

• DreamHost: My wonderful web host

  I was hosted with “routhost” until April this year when I decided I needed more features like SSH access, build environment so I would be able to download and compile applications and most of all more disk space. After much hunting around I discovered DreamHost. The feature list is astounding. Here are a few to [...]

  October 13th, 2007

• Embed vTap in your page

  The vTap widget is finally out!

  October 3rd, 2007