Category Archives: Product

Google Transliteration: Type Indic languages in any text-box

Type in English, Save as Marathi
Type in English, Save as Marathi

Last week I stumbled upon this amazing service called Google Transliteration that can be accessed through a bookmarklet (jargon explained at the bottom). You can use this to type in one of the Indic languages in any text input box on the internet! (whether it really gets saved depends on the website 🙂 ) Language currently supported: Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu & Urdu.

Update (21-Feb-10):
After reading this post, one my valued readers questioned the utility of this service! And this is what I wrote back:
Few years back acquiring Indic fonts, and learning to use Indic keyboard layout was a challenge. Google eased that with a web service which takes away reluctance to reply in local languages.
With such a service, an application developer need not provide for transliteration as a feature (its a feature in Gmail). Creating a database with double-byte storage is enough to record input in any language.

Also, Transliteration can help people understand how words are pronounced when they are familiar with a different script. However, this may not work when the same word is spelled in multiple ways. eg. Mohammed [Read more]
With CJV languages, transliteration will often yield only an approximate result.

Continue reading Google Transliteration: Type Indic languages in any text-box

Jargon: Plug-and-Play

In computing, ‘plug and play’ describes the joint capability of  plugging devices to a computer and getting them running without configuration effort. Its a feature that, both, the hardware (the device) & software (usually a driver or operating system) The software is capable of discovering & getting the hardware ready to use; and to do this the hardware provides necessary information. USB devices are a classic example, but the term was more popularized by Microsoft to market the ability of its Windows OS to configure devices.

This term is also used by sales teams to market software and emphasize its ease of installation/deployment, configuration/implementation and quicker Go Live! However, this is not always the case! My boss once told a vendor that not matter what sales calls it, to customers its usually ‘Plug-and-Pray’ 🙂

Face Tagging in Picasa

After uploading a few pictures last week, I spotted the ‘Add Name Tags’ link on my Picasa page. I knew this had to do with mapping faces to people, but what I had wrongly assumed was the simplicity. It took me less than a couple of hours to map about 2500 faces. I thought of sharing the accuracy of the tool & conditions that baffled it.

Unlike Orkut, where you have to mark faces yourself, Picasa automatically extracts faces. It took less than 5 minutes to extract some 5500 faces from about 3800 pictures. Another differentiator in the approach is that instead of mapping many faces on a photo (like Facebook, Flickr, etc), faces from many photos are brought together to be mapped to a person. This is what really saves time & effort and retains interest. Statistically speaking, atleast 60% of all my photos (about 1800 Nos) feature one from my family of four. So in the ideal case, I will finish mapping 1800 photos in 4 clicks instead of 3600 clicks (assuming 2 faces per photo). That makes Google what it is: not just an applications company, but a technology company.

I don’t know if people tagged by me will be suggested a priori to others in their photos.

The tool started off with my photos, possible because the count was the highest. I showed me about 12 full sets (x16) of my pictures. A couple of photos in the first set were quite old – about 12 years back. Soon, it started suggesting my name for all my photos.

Started suggesting my name after a couple of sets

Continue reading Face Tagging in Picasa

Nokia E71: Missing & Suggested Features

After a fortnight with my new Nokia E71, I realized that there is a lot of feature addition possible with basic features. Despite of the E71 being feature rich, it has a great number of issues with basic functionality. If you know Pareto’s Law, these issues are in the 20% of all applications, which are used 80% of the time. I have listed down these issues in my ‘After a week with my new Nokia E71’ post, have a look. Here are a few suggested/missing features… Continue reading Nokia E71: Missing & Suggested Features

Jargon: pubsubhubbub

pubsubhubbub is an open-source protocol that establishes a Publisher-Subscriber agreement between feed servers (pub) and subscribers (sub) via a broker (hub).  It is thus an extension to the existing RSS & Atom protocols for feeds. With this, subscribers will no longer have to keep polling the feed URL, but instead will be notified of updates. Publishers will specify a hub address as part of the feed specification, and all subscribers will register themselves with the hub (instead of the feed itself). The publishing tool will notify the hub of updates, which will in turn efficiently multicast the update to all subscribers. Continue reading Jargon: pubsubhubbub

A week with my new Nokia E71

A new cell-phone had been on the top of my wishlist ever since I had full-filled the wish to have a website. I have been evaluating phones forever, but for over a year now, the intention has been to buy one 🙂 Last Diwali I had haunted for HTC Touch, a PDA that I had decided on buying. Unfortunately, it wasn’t readily available anywhere. At one store, I had seen the new Nokia E66 and E71 that made me rethink on Symbian phones. From that time to now, I had been saving money for a E71 that I finally got last Sunday. Here’s a quick review… Continue reading A week with my new Nokia E71

Jargon: Local Direct Dial (LDD)

Local Direct Dial (LDD) is an operator-enabled service that helps you save on your mobile phone bill when you call an international visitor in your country. Such a person, often called an inbound roamer, can be dialled locally, instead of having to make an overseas IDD call. The only known country where this feature is currently available is Singapore. Continue reading Jargon: Local Direct Dial (LDD)

Jargon: Code Obfuscation

Code obfuscation is the technique used to make source code elusive. Advantages of doing this are protecting intellectual property, reducing security exposure, size reduction or minification and library linking (to avoid DLL Hell). It is also considered a form of security. Types of obfuscations include simple keyword substitution, use or non-use of whitespace to create artistic effects, clever self-generating or heavily compressed programs, and programs that are valid and operate similarly in multiple programming languages. Continue reading Jargon: Code Obfuscation

Jargon: Farm-shoring

Farmshoring refers to a specific variety of outsourcing where, apart from services being sourced outside of the contracting company, they are outsourced from urban to rural locations. Governments, especially in the US, offer incentives for shifting employment from offshore to rural communities. It is conceptually similar to onshoring (also referred to as domestic outsourcing). Continue reading Jargon: Farm-shoring