I didn’t realise the power of Google Coop’s custom search engines (CSE) until I watched Scoble interviewing Google’s Shashi Seth. In a nutshell, CSE lets you create a search engine that’s focuses on specific sites, like UK blogs or Photoshop sites Anyone can create these. You can edit other people’s search engines too. There are a huge number of custom search engines you can volunteer to edit. I’ve created a bunch of search engines myself: ...
I watch a lot of movies. Over the last year, I’ve watched over 250 movies (and read 50 books, but that’s another story). Other than making time to watch movies, my biggest problem is figuring out what to watch next. The IMDb top 250 is a good guideline, and I’m running my way down the list. Twofifty.org has been useful to track what I’ve seen as well. But I have interests outside of the IMDb Top 250, and I need a way of tracking these. ...
My digital camera conked off. The cover that holds the battery fell off, and I can’t use it any more. I went back to my buying principles, and prepared an Excel sheet to choose my next camera. Here’s what I was looking for: Low-light photography. Flashes are lousy. This effectively means I need ISO control. Shutter speed control. I sometimes take really long exposure (3-10s) snaps, and sometimes can’t afford the blur (1/250s). Long battery life. My current camera consumed batteries like crazy. Fast start-up. By the time I got my earlier camera out and it started, it was too late. RAW mode. Gives me more control in Photoshop. I didn’t care about: ...
When I wrote my Tamil song lyrics quizzes, I had two problems: I can't write in Tamil (not on paper, nor on a computer) I can't spell right in Tamil (ந vs ன, ர vs ற) I overcame the first using a Tamil transliterator. I write in English, and you see it in Tamil. The problem of ந vs ன was simple. ந occurs as the first letter of a word, and just before த. Nowhere else. (Is this always true?) ...
I had to screen resumes from a leading MBA school. I’m lazy, and there were hundreds of CVs. So after procrastinating until this morning, I decided on 2 principles: I will not spend more than 45 minutes on this. (That’s the duration of my train ride to office.) I will not read a single CV. (I would write a program.) The CVs were in a single PDF file. I saved it as text (it shrunk from 66MB to 1.6MB without the photos). Then I wrote a Perl program to filter CVs by keywords. We were looking for people with an interest and/or experience in IT consulting, so I picked “technology”, “consulting”, “SAP”, “IBM”, “Accenture”, “Deloitte”, etc. ...
You can play a video backwards and still recognise the scenes quite well. Can you do that with sound? I tried it on this Bryan Adams clip of Summer of ‘69 (mp3). When played backwards (mp3), it almost sounds like Arabic! Instruments sound weird backwards too, like the guitar played backwards and drums played backwards. It’s seems obvious once you see the wave file. The picture below shows the guitar. The sounds are clearly not symmetric left to right. ...
I stopped using Google Analytics when I redesigned my site. I track my own statistics. This gives me access to raw data, and I can do my own analyses. I wanted to know the keywords on Google that led to my site. (Google Analytics only gives you phrases.) I also wanted independent words. If you search for “Calvin and Hobbes”, I want to count only “Calvin”, knowing that it’s in the context of “Hobbes”. ...
Wikipedia says the human voice frequency for speech is between 85 to 155 Hz for men, and 165 to 255 Hz for women. That set me thinking. What is the limit to our hearing? How do sounds differ? How can we synthesise speech? What are the limits to our hearing? Kids can hear frequencies from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, while adults hear only up to 12-14 kHz (Frequency Range of Human Hearing). ...
When you make a link, there’s no guarantee that the link will work 5 years later. Sites change their URL structure. I’m finding that many of my blog entries from 2000 are invalid. Sometimes you want to link to a concept rather than a site. In such cases, it’s better to link to a Google query. For example, rather than link to a site that defines SVG, I could link to the Google search define:SVG. ...
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). ...
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
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. ...
I work across multiple computers (my office laptop, home laptop, client desktop) on a daily basis. I used to transfer data across these by e-mailing them before I travelled. (I often forgot to do so.) Mostly, these are notes – like telephone numbers, things to buy, places to visit, etc. Google Notebook solves the problem. But not entirely. I store a lot of my notes on spreadsheets, as lists. For example: ...
Microsoft adCenter Labs has a demographics prediction engine. Based on a person's search queries and web sites visited, it can predict their gender and age. So I tried that on parts of the body, to see what men were interested in vs women. topicmalefemale hair25%75% eyes33%67% cheek33%67% hands33%67% lips36%64% ears39%61% fingers40%60% forehead42%58% nose43%57% neck46%54% beard55%45% moustache58%42% leg60%40% palm61%39% toe64%36% While I can understand men being more interested in beards and moustaches (perhaps even legs), why are they far more interested in toes than women? ...
Cut and paste has become easier. So we make less effort to understand. We don’t need to. Like when we pay less attention if we’re recording a lecture. Solution? I suggest the Tunnel in the Sky strategy. Rod Walker is going for survival training on an alien planet, and asks his sister, Captain Walker… “Uh, Sis, what sort of gun should I carry?” “Huh? Why the deuce do you want a gun?” ...
I was reading John Battelle’s The Search , and realised: We don’t sit down on the computer and say, “Let’s do a search”. True. We want to get something done. We know it’s out there somewhere. We search. So every search on a search engine is a commercial opportunity. Contrawise, every site must let people to do what they want to do on the site. Think… What do people want to do when they’re on YOUR site?
On a related note, 60% of the search queries that lead to my site this year were Calvin and Hobbes quotes. “i can’t help but wonder what kind of desperate straits would drive a man to invent this thing.” topped the list (Calvin referring to a yo-yo), with i always catch these trick questions following closely. People searching for Excel related stuff were next (20%): excel indirect(address(, row() excel offset address and the like. ...
On the IMDb top 250, you normally see a correlation between the number of votes and the rating for a movie. Better rated movies are more watched. The outliers are interesting. The movies that are popular despite not having a high rating are: The Matrix The Sixth Sense Gladiator Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith Pirates of the Caribbean I can understand why The Sixth Sense, Pirates of the Caribbean and especially The Matrix are on this list – geeks would have watched these and voted on IMDb, though their voting need not have been high. But why are Gladiator and Sixth Sense on that list? ...
I'm a cautious gadget freak. I love buying gadgets, but think a lot before buying them. Invariably, I use spreadsheets to help me decide. I try to buy only those gadgets that are right for me at the cheapest possible price, and I look at two things: features based on usage and breakeven. Usage-driven buying I pick the features I want based on my usage. For example, when I bought my first mobile, I listed the my most likely uses for the phone: ...
At what bitrate should you encode your MP3 files? Listening tests show that at 256kbps, you can’t tell the difference. But that’s with 2 amplifiers and big speakers. What about headphones? I tried an experiment with my cousin, who has the best ear for music that I know. We ripped a good audio CD of his at 128 kbps. He put on a pair of headphones (the kind that fit into your ear) connected to my laptop. I played the first half a minute of the original and the ripped version 10 times, in a random order, asking him to guess which was which. Result: 5 correct and 5 wrong. He couldn’t tell the difference. ...