2006

Ev of Blogger argues that pageviews are obsolete. Number of unique visitors and time spent on a site are better measures.

I’ve built a simple Sanskrit transliterator. You can type in words in English and it will spell them out in Sanskrit. You can copy-paste the Tamil above into Microsoft Word, etc. Browse through my Javascript to see how it works. Feel free to reuse. Comments ND 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Real good and absolutely quick! Saurabh 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Good work, wonder how many use Sanskrit these days though! One more thing, specific to Mac users, is that Indic support is still not mature for Firefox. Safari, the inbuilt browser does a decent job though. There was an extra “S” that was appearing after each letter in Safari. Madhu 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Awesome, again what ur doing at Infy consulting, u shud be developing products at google:) KK 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: It is really awesome vikram 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: i cannot see any translation in firefox 1.5.0.12 version Animesh 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Good tool, but the transliteration scheme should be replaced by more standard one. Ashwin (you know me!!) 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: nice one buddy!!although how would you deal with ambiguities like “om” ? Anand 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Hmm, I wonder…can you please check if the small ‘‘i’’ maatra works fine? I gave the word ‘‘janani’’ and the ‘‘i’’ gave me the maatra AFTER the second ‘’na’’, while it should be BEFORE. The big ‘‘ii’’/‘‘I’’ works fine. Also words like ‘‘chithram’’ etc - basically wherever there is a small ‘‘i’’! Rama Krishna 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Really Good. Keep up the good work mohana 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: try this swami neelkanth 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: thanks

I've built a simple Tamil transliterator. You can type in words in English and it will spell them out in Tamil. You can copy-paste the Tamil above into Microsoft Word, etc. You may need to turn on tamil scripts to see the Tamil fonts above. If you have Windows 98, it may not work well. If you've visited this page recently, you will need to refresh this page as well (press F5). ...

Here are words from the middle of 10 songs. Can you guess which movie they are from? (Films are NOT repeated) Don't worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green. Comments anonymous 3 Sep 2006 5:10 pm: got 7 rite.help wth 2,3 and 8.3rd seems to be damn familiar. S Anand 3 Sep 2006 9:53 pm: More lyrics as hints. 2. naNbar uNdu pagaivar illai, naNmai uNdu theemai illai 3. aaththigam pEsum adiyaarkkellaam sivamE anbaagum 8. thaay paravai midhiththaal sEy paravai nOvadhillai kaayam aavadhillai Anonymous 15 Sep 2006 5:09 pm: struggling wth 2nd and 8th still.2nd almost got it.8th no idea at all. S Anand 15 Sep 2006 5:47 pm: 2 stars Kamal and Jayapradha. 8 stars Kamal and Roshni. Anonymous 19 Sep 2006 8:05 am: hey thanx.wonderful.at last found out everything.but the worst part, cudnt find what song is the second one though got the movie name right. Sri 9 May 2007 8:28 pm: awesome one. got them all. lakshmi 27 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: I have got 9 out of ten. priya 27 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: nice mamta 1 Jan 2009 1:53 am: Hi, I wish to read Tamil lyrics in Tamil Script.. Please help Jo 17 Sep 2009 7:58 am: I got only 7…. chirp 1 Jan 2011 1:05 am: good one Shobhana 29 Sep 2011 9:29 am: I got 10/10!!! nice one work man :) Venkat 1 Aug 2012 10:38 pm: Migavum Arumai.. Super..I did 8/10. Expecting more!!! Thanks much Shiva 22 Nov 2012 2:47 pm: WoW … Got 5/10.. Similarity is our Ulaga Nayagan Special

Jeff proposes a Programmer’s Bill of Rights. Every programmer shall have two monitors Every programmer shall have a fast PC Every programmer shall have their choice of mouse and keyboard Every programmer shall have a comfortable chair Every programmer shall have a fast internet connection Every programmer shall have quiet working conditions

Code search within O’Reilly books.

Seth Godin’s Web 2.0 traffic watch list.

Google Talk, Not Just An Instant Messenger. It’s used in Gmail, Google Desktop and Google Spreadsheets already. Google plans to use it in more of its services.

Recently, I was helping a bank define Basel 2 requirements. For every dollar a bank lends, at least 8 cents should come from its own pocket, and the rest from its depositors. But a risky $1 loan may be like a $1.5 loan, whereas a $1 Government loan may be like a $0.5 loan. This is the "risk-weighted asset" (RWA) value. Basel 2 says 8% of risk-weighted assets should come from the bank's pocket. ...

Calvin and Hobbes has some recurrent themes, like Hobbes pouncing, snow art, polls, letters to Santa, … Over the last 5 years, I’ve transcribed the Calvin and Hobbes comics, and tagged them manually by theme. But can I generate themes automatically? One way is to use Amazon’s statistically improbable phrases. It’s a list of words that occur a lot in a book, but rarely occur in others. It gives you a good feel of what topics the book is about. ...

We feel fine analyses blog posts, and determines the current mood by gender, age and location. So you can see check if the mood of teenagers in London has improved this week. Amazing visualisations.

Top 10 cameras on Flickr. Topping the list is Nikon (D50 and D70), followed by Canon.

Google’s master plan.

Facts in Software Engineering People The most important factor in software work is the quality of the programmers. The best programmers are up to 28 times better than the worst programmers. Adding people to a late project makes it later. The working environment has a profound impact on productivity and quality. Tools and Techniques Hype (about tools and techniques) is the plague on the house of software. New tools/techniques cause an initial loss of productivity/quality. Software developers talk a lot about tools, but seldom use them. Estimation ...

Decisions are usually based on multiple criteria. You have to trade off between criteria. I’ve been involved many such decisions over the last 5 years. Example 1: A conglomerate wanted to identify industries for growth. We shortlisted 19 industries, identified 12 criteria for the attractiveness of an industry, researched each one and plotted them on spidergraphs like below. The intention was that, to identify the most favourable industries, you’d just pick the ones with the largest filled area. ...

I was travelling on the Jubilee line, just pulling into Stratford (the last stop), when I heard this announcement. “The next station is Stratford, where this train terminates. Thank you for travelling on the Jubilee line, and I hope you have a very pleasant evening.” (pause) “Unless, of course, you were the person who pulled the passenger alarm at Westminster, in which case I don’t care what kind of an evening you have.” ...

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Juice analytics has some Excel graphing tips. You can make charts like below without using charts, using just text. These are useful because the charts are aligned with the data. I once used a similar technique to display people’s staffing position. The sheet below lists people, projects they’re on and how long they’ll be on. The coloured cells to the right are a calendar display of the same stuff. Makes it easy to read. ...

How iPods work: how the wheel and the software inside Apple’s iPod work.

The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4 by Donald Knuth. Pre-fascicles are available for download.