I’ve been a long time fan of google transliterate – and have been using it for a couple of years for all my hindi tweets. Just like this one -

But I’ve always missed the translate functionality which was available on google for a host of other languages. Finally, it has arrived for Hindi as well- and man it’s awesome!
I tried with a few simple translations from English to Hindi, just to warm up – and to please google.

Pretty cool! So far, so good. And if Google is the big daddy of all internet companies, twitter is the son of all internet companies, isn’t it?

Ohoh… screwed up. Never mind google, the छोटे लला translation for “small sonny” still impressed me a lot
Overwhelmed with the google awesomeness, I gave it one real compliment.

Oops. I guess that’s what google translate really is. :-/ Try it yourself here

I’ve always been a big fan of Firefox, at least for the adblock plus extension which doesn’t let me see insane banner ads all day long. If not for speed, I’d have never moved to Chrome at all. It turns out, I was losing out on a lot of fun all the while just by not looking at these orkut ads!  There have been instances of orkut ads going wrong for me, but this one is a HUGE fail. Visualize this:

Orkut wtf

So orkut tried to “Find a match in my community and profession“. These are three epic stupidities in just one sentence! The girl they choose to titillate me with is Ms. Shah, a Gujarati (while I’m a marwadi), who is an MBA (while I’m an Engineer). And of course I’m MARRIED! The probability of me being interested in marrying Ms. Shah would be lesser than me surviving two thunder strikes and dying off a coconut falling on my head. So much for the targeted ads.

Oh, by the way: Facebook isn’t doing too good in terms of targeting either. The post on pluggd.in which talks about Indian matrimonial websites stooping too low also notices this.

Better photography, a well known photography magazine of India organizes the “Photographer of the year” competition every year. And year after year, they have organized it successfully offline, accepting entries from the best photographers across India and abroad. This year, however they decided to take this online and canvera.com being the associate partner had to come up with a web application that would enable photographers to submit their entries through a brand new site.

Three weeks was the allotted time for the completion of the project in which the design (and its thousand iterations), development, and QA and all the tweaks would all had to be completed. And my team, i.e. Mayur (a.k.a the designer), Kanupriya (product manager) and myself (the developer) were given the responsibility for the web application. It was definitely a roller coaster ride; new designs being discussed (and partly implemented) daily, new functional requirements and the architecture slowly but surely building up.

I had an option of choosing Ruby on Rails or php or Java EE to build this application, and for a two weeks time frame the former two would have definitely been faster. But we decided for Java, and built the entire application using jsp/struts/tiles/spring/hibernate/postgresql/jboss. It’s a standard web application: A home page which briefly introduces the application, some static pages which explain the competition in the detail, a registration page (with forgot password functionality), login, user profile page, category page, theme page and upload image page. Image storage and thumbnail generation have been given a lot of importance, and is pretty scalable. But to get the thing work in IE6 was a real pain. IE7 didn’t play too nice either but they all eventually fell in place

A javascript library is needed in every modern application, and although a big fan of YUI I decided on jquery this time. And I am amazed by the variety and support in jquery plugins, and slowly becoming my favorite. Although this is the first application where I hadn’t used any AJAX in the whole application, the whole experience is pretty smooth in my opinion. The image upload could have been a little smoother(and it will be, I promise ) with the flash uploader. Some more small features like an ajax feedback modal dialog box and editing image details might follow soon.

Coming to the competition, there are actually three of those. Photographer of the year(POY for brief), Young photographer of the year(YPOY), and Wedding photographer of the year(WPOY). YPOY and WPOY are being organized for the first time this year, and as you’d have guessed, YPOY is only for people under 18.

There are eight themes each for the photographer/young photographer of the year: Family and friends, Natural elements, life on streets, man/environment, twilight magic, still life, wild life and landscapes and a maximum of four photographs can be uploaded in each theme. For wedding photographer of the year, the themes are: Bridal portraits, couple portraits, family and friends, behind the scenes, emotions and photo series of a single wedding. All competitions are open for amateurs and professionals alike, so just pick up your camera, shoot some cool shots and go uploading!

All in all, it was a very fulfilling experience developing the application, in which arguably the best Indian photographers, young photographers and wedding photographers will upload their best shots! I hope that the best photographers in India would find participating in the contest simple and enjoyable.

If you think that orkut is the only social networking platform that cannot count, think again!

We’ve all had problems with orkut’s calculations gone wrong with number of friends, scraps, posts in communities. It’s a common error you get when you see when you check a community thread with number of posts, say ‘14′, but when you click through, you get only 11.

But facebook has gone a step ahead and has started messing up with dates. You can actually write a wall post in future as well

I went to a person’s profile to wish him ‘happy budday’, but guess what… people had already wished him ‘tomorrow’ and he had replied to them as well. I thought it would be some kind of problem due to time-zone difference, but he’s from India as well, so my theory had to just bite dust then and there.

p.s.: Yes, the birthday dude’s nickname is ‘mausi’.

And yes, wishing people ‘tomorrow’ for their birthday is another thing that really grinds my gears.

Google is supposed to be the best when it comes to targeted advertising. And as orkut is another product from google, ads on it aren’t supposed to be that off the mark either.

Now, I don’t know where in my orkut profile have I mentioned anything for which I deserve an ad like this one:

Actually forget the targeting, how are these kind of ads even allowed on google?!