2007

The technique of Web lookups in Excel I described yesterday is very versatile. I will be running through some of the practical uses it can be put to over the next few days TO generalise things beyond just getting the Amazon price, I created a user-defined function called XPATH. It takes two parameters: URL of the XML feed to read Search XPath list string (separated by spaces) This function can be used to extract information out of any XML file on the Web and get it out as a table. For example, if you wanted to watch the Top 10 movies on the IMDb Top 250, and were looking for torrents, an RSS feed is available from mininova. The URL http://www.mininova.org/rss/movie_name/4 gives you an RSS file matching all movies with “movie_name”. From this, we need to extract the and <item><link> elements. That’s represented by “//item title link” on my search string. ...

Now that I'm well on my way to watching the Top 250 movies on IMDb, I'm slowly turned my attention to fiction. My interest is mainly in the Fantasy & Science Fiction area. Unfortunately, I don't know of any list like the IMDb Top 250, but there are a few awards that could take the place of the Oscars for books. That's probably a good place to start. The most popular awards in Science Fiction are the Hugo award and Nebula award, followed by the Philip K Dick award, John W. Campbell award, Arthur C Clarke award and other awards. I collated a list of all the awards (from LocusMag) into the spreadsheet below ...

The Internet has a lot of tamil song lyrics in English. Finding them is not easy, though. Two problems. The lyrics are fragmented: there's no one site to search them. And Google doesn't help. It doesn't know that alaipaayudhe, alaipaayuthe and alaipayuthey are the same word. This is similar to the problem I faced with tamil audio. The solution, as before, is to make an index, and provide a search interface that is tolerant of English spellings of Tamil words. But I want to go a step further. Is it possible to display these lyrics in Tamil? ...

Ivory sculptures at the Guangzhou Chen Family Temple. The first two, especially, have spheres within spheres within spheres… which looks impossible to carve.

I often need to extract words out of sentences. It’s one of the things I used to build the Statistically Improbable Phrases for Calvin and Hobbes. But splitting a sentence into words isn’t as easy as you think. Think about it. What is a word? Something that has spaces around it? OK, let’s start with the simplest way to get words: split by spaces. Consider this piece: "I'd look at McDonald's," he said. "They sell over 3,000,000 burgers a day -- at $1.50 each." High-fat foods were the rage. For e.g., margins in fries were over 50%... and (except for R&M & Dyana [sic]) everyone was at ~30% net margin; growing at 25% too! Splitting this by spaces (consider new lines, tabs, etc as spaces too.), we get the following: ...

John Resig has written a Sparklines library. Here’s an example. I wrote that HTTP download speeds not linear 182,315,313,319,314,459,441,445,453,525,567,552,577,587,580,581,590,663,639,658,616,705,720,695,739,750,720,741,803,800,800,818,800,856,796,816,866,841,836,828,861,893,859,905,881,885,946,944,943,984,1003,1012,994,979,977,986,1010,1017,1027,1000,1035,986,1006,1006,996,1022,1003,1053,1046,1061,1002,1064,1014,1039,1061,1023,1076,1081,1019,1064,1072,1089,1101,1069,1128,1125,1092,1155,1170,1067,1094,1082,1178,1211,1154,1169,1133,1161,1193,1167 and that they flatten out over time. A linear line would look like this: 180,190,201,211,221,232,242,252,262,273,283,293,304,314,324,335,345,355,365,376,386,396,407,417,427,438,448,458,468,479,489,499,510,520,530,541,551,561,572,582,592,602,613,623,633,644,654,664,675,685,695,705,716,726,736,747,757,767,778,788,798,808,819,829,839,850,860,870,881,891,901,912,922,932,942,953,963,973,984,994,1004,1015,1025,1035,1045,1056,1066,1076,1087,1097,1107,1118,1128,1138,1148,1159,1169,1179,1190,1200 The little red line here is a sparkline that’s based on real data. John’s javascript converts the data into a graph. Sparklines were introduced by Edward Tufte.

In some of the Web projects I'm working on, I have a choice of many small files vs few big files to download. There are conflicting arguments. I've read that many small files are better, because you can choose to use only the required files, and they'll be cached across the site. (These are typically CSS or Javascript files.) On the other hand, a single large file takes less time to download than the sum on many small files, because there's less latency. (Latency is more important than bandwidth these days.) ...

(If you don’t get it, see what All your base are belong to us means) via This is my pizza. Comments Grant Carpenterk 17 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: LOL, that comic was made of pure awesome! Well done on your adaptation! Grand Carp 1 Oct 2008 12:24 pm: Awesome (no I’m not Grant Capenterk, I’m making fun of his name) Carpe Grand 1 Oct 2008 5:31 pm: May I join in the fun? S Anand 1 Oct 2008 5:32 pm: Hmm… comments are going a bit off-topic here…

7 little known ways to improve learning. Comments Rishi 17 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: how can i read them?

MessenPass recovers passwords for instant messengers – GTalk, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Messenger included. These passwords are the same as their corresponding e-mails (GMail and Yahoo Mail at least). via Amit. Comments Sumit Dhar 11 Apr 2007 4:36 am: While on the topic of Passwords, search for Elcomsoft Password Recovery software on any Torrent site. Awesome set of applications that crack Office, PDF and many other password protection schemes.

Here are words from the middle of 15 old songs (before 1970). Can you guess which movie they are from? Don't worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green. Comments Meera 14 Mar 2009 1:28 am: Its just recollection… but with joy Venkatramanan 6 Apr 2007 11:54 am: Nice! Enjoyed it banu 9 Apr 2007 12:24 pm: this is good Viju 10 Apr 2007 12:50 pm: your choice of songs is awesome Anil mattoo 11 Apr 2007 9:04 am: Great! ramesh lee 14 May 2007 3:30 am: Songs-Kannamma Kannamma brinda r 14 May 2007 6:11 am: interesting hameed 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: Could you please tell me who sang the song and in what movie- ‘‘muttu pole manjal kottu pole- mulu nilavei nee piranthaai engal veetilei’’. Thank you. sambasivam 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: enjoyable. vist look forward to more such quizes Neelaram 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: Nice jana 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: its a nice one. p.lakshmi 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: very nice floranz 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: golden old songs araNmaNai aRivaan ariyaNai aRivaan 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: golden old songs T.selvarajah 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: I dunno exately all songs are right?? thanks badhu 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: what about the answers? Vetty 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: It is so fantastic that people of all ages could enjoy listening to their favourite songs. So great is your service. You should continue like the service of the Sun TV for the Asatha Povathu Yaru. Hats off! INDIAN 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: ibotu arijavan kedubokirarkal ulaha film kalai patu atai atinsum arijamalum kedukitarkal itai mata manita jatijal mudijatu orvani tavara avantan j-aj ibadigu nalam ungal j ey indian krish 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: can be much better than the before.dont mistake. geetha 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: i have sent my asnwers priya 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: very nice P.Asha 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: This is nice santha k. nayar 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: iT IS VERY VERY GOOD. gOD BLESS YOU. MUNIPRAPAKAR 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: IT IS VERY NICE SONG IT TOUCH MY HEART HAVE TO LISTEN AT NIGHT TIME OR AT THE BEACH SIDE WITH FRESH AIR AND WAVE !!!!!! subbu CBE 6 Apr 2007 12:00 pm: its very nice and time passing.though i know 90%of songs but not able to find name of movie. you should provide ans also Jagan 30 Oct 2008 11:04 pm: Nice one.. I hum these song’s but i dont know the name of Movies. Keep it up.. dilan 10 Dec 2008 1:08 am: Its coooooooooooooooooooool.Interesting. MUNIPRAPAKAR 11 Dec 2008 2:46 am: Not Bad keep it up is very Intersting and nice too YOU CAN BE ALL BY YOURSELF……..UNGGAL NANBAN DHARMAPURI RAMIYAMPATTI S.NAVEEN 14 Dec 2008 11:03 pm: this is very useful for me. keerthivasan 19 Dec 2008 4:55 am: very Interesting kalai 25 Dec 2008 2:56 am: hi thulsi raman 29 Jan 2009 8:23 am: excellent! keep it up| sambasivam 15 Mar 2009 6:54 am: good show. keep it up. made 12/15 Jaya 22 Aug 2010 11:05 am: coolllll…………… Arun 2 Nov 2010 3:06 am: Dooes anyone know the song “aadutha vettu sottha amukka nenachavan….” (Sung by Janakaraj in a movie in jail balaji 25 Nov 2010 12:10 pm: i’ve listioned all the songs but, i cant remember the name.. it’s cool.. Shobhana 17 Oct 2011 12:32 pm: Got 15/15!!!! Sarora 30 Mar 2011 10:02 pm: ya a very nice experience………..

If you just want to check if you have new mail on Gmail, use Google’s personalised home page and add Gmail to the homepage. This shows new mail and a few words as a snippet. If you want to read your mail, and don’t want to forward it to another account, use Google Groups as a backup to Gmail. Create a private Google Group and forward mails from Gmail to it. Google Groups often is not blocked, even if Gmail is. ...

Google Maps directions from California to Stockhom. Google suggests a “Swim across the Atlantic Ocean”. 3,462 miles. Estimated time: 29 days 0 hours Comments Crazyassblondechick 29 Mar 2007 9:46 pm: wow that’s really funny! nku 30 Mar 2007 2:25 am: Ha ha ha. Someone at Google taking “creativity” very seriously :) aussie desi 30 Mar 2007 10:16 pm: Someone at Google got the speed of humans in water totally wrong. In order to cover this distance, the person needs to swim 8kms an hour non stop. The FINA world record for 1500 meters is 14:34.56. Thus a person can swim only 6 kms an hour. Creativity - 10/10 Math - 0/10

Two weeks ago, I pulled together a Media PC. This has been a long-term ambition. I’ve always wanted to have a PC as the centre of all my media. To use it as a radio, TV, stereo system, CD player, DVD player, etc. I finally did it, for just under 1000 pounds. At the centre of the setup is my 42" Plasma TV (LG 42PC1D). I was debating between a plasma and LCD TV. The differences, as I understand them, are: ...

The Truman Show is on for real, on Justin.TV. Justin wears the camera 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even in the bathroom. Even on a date. This is really live. Honest. Right now. Justin will wear the camera until the day he dies. By which we mean if he takes it off, we’ll kill him. The show has been on for 9 days till date.

RIAA wins the “Worst Company in America 2007”. The RIAA is mainly EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner.

Here is the background music from SD Burman's songs. Can you guess which movie they are from? Don't worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green. Comments Kalpesh 20 Mar 2007 1:47 pm: Dude, it throws 404 (file not found). Moreover, I think it is copy-paste problem. All tje songs point to a.mp3 ;) BTW, I like your site & have subscribed to you in bloglines. Sri 9 May 2007 8:11 pm: Cool ones…. could you give me answer to the SD Burman quiz please, I only I got 3 right :(

Google filed a patent for Google Desktop last month, that hints at how they rank search results. Last access time, where the item is stored, file type and file size are mentioned as factors, but there are probably some more left unmentioned.

Creating user friendly 404 pages.

Videos of amazing physics experiments.