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 the outcome is Wordza.

Continue Reading »

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 has its uses.

The Alexa rank script

You can find out the Alexa rank for any site by using this page. However, if you want to programatically get the Alexa rank, you can do it using this script.
Continue Reading »

I have come across more than one instance when I had to select a random record from a table in a MySQL database. Here is how to do it.

Continue Reading »

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 us name a domain!

http://www.domaintools.com/

DomainTools takes a concept as input and comes up with domain name suggestions. Let us say you are starting a website about “Vacations in Mexico”. Go to their website and type in “Mexico Vacations” in the text box and click on the button to get suggestions.
Continue Reading »

The MPEG4 video encoding process makes use of block motion compensation to achieve compression. The motion compensation process serves to produce the intra frames which are the frames between keyframes. I’ve always been fascinated by this process and was delighted to find out that my favorite video player, mplayer, allows one to visualize this process. I tried it and it is wonderful!
Continue Reading »

Generating thumbnails/screenshots of a video is useful in many ways. Youtube and many other video sites use this to show a preview of the video as a small thumbnail. Google video captures a series of thumbnails from a video at various time intervals to show a better video preview.
Continue Reading »

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 really grok how simple the interface is.
Continue Reading »

I am a huge fan of the science fiction genre. Arthur C Clarke is one of my favorite science fiction writers after Isaac Asimov. It saddens me to have learnt that he has passed away. Most people get reminded of “2001: A Space Odyssey” when they hear the name Arthur C Clarke. I get reminded of “Rendezvouz with Rama“, a brilliantly conceived novel that set my imagination on fire. For all the Clarke fans out there, “Rendezvouz with Rama“.
Continue Reading »

A couple of weeks back, I went shopping looking for a TV tuner card that is compatible with Linux. Googling had told me that “Hauppauge” card was known to be compatible. However, I could not find it anywhere in the market (SP Road, Bangalore, India). On going to one of the shops, I found a “Pinnacle PCTV 50i” card. I had heard from many people before that Pinnacle was a good card for Windows both in terms of quality of decoding and software provided. I checked in google to ensure that Pinnacle card would work on Linux. I found that the card uses Philips’ SAA7134 chipset for which drivers are available in Linux. I went on and bought the card for Rs 2000 ($50).

The card is available through Amazon.com.
Pinnacle PCTV Analog PCI 50i - TV / radio tuner / video input adapter - PCI - SECAM, PAL
Continue Reading »

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. Navigation pages have also been generated to help browse through the books easily. You can access this dump here.

The crawler code is here.
Continue Reading »