Google Page Creator!

Google is slowly moving into a different domain. I think it wants to make desktop based tools redundant and move everything online. The prospect makes the thought of hard-disk crashes less scary, but as we all know, companies are like human beings, not perpetual and have to die one day. What will happen if that moment comes too soon?
Google Page Creator!
Notice how they have started including the exclamation mark in this, like Yahoo! (I know that was a very very lame article)

India's contributions to mankind

Taj Mahal, Kamasutra, Kajuraho, and now, Fake Viagra.

Mind-reading Crystall Ball?

A lot of people have seen this online crystall ball that can read minds Crystal Ball. The first thing everybody invariable says is how does this thing work? Here is how it works (super intelligent people don't bash me, this is for people who wonder how this works)

We will follow the steps one by one, and then see how this works

Let us take a 2 digit number 10x+y
add the digits and subtract them from the original: 10x+y - (x+y)
=> 10x-x+y-y
=> 9x
x can be 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
=> it can be 9,18,27,36,45,54,63,72, or 81
all these numbers on the chart have the same symbol :)

Google Moon

This is like Google Earth, but of the moon, to commemorate the first manned moon landing. If you zoom in all the way, you will see a nice easter egg, rather cheese. It reveals that the moon is made of cheese.

Google Moon

War in LOLCity

One day, I was reading the quotes on bash.org, and I saw some smiley dances, written in sequence. That was so cute, and I wanted to make that as an animation. First, I wanted to do that in flash, but the company would not allow me to install Flash in my computer. Then, I wanted to make it as a gif. But, the process was painfully slow and the only program that I could install myself messed up the animation very badly. I was sad for a few days when I found this - ROFL.name website that makes ascii animations. I came to know when I saw one swf combined with the song of one of my favourite bands - Rammstein. I also found out they have swf for some very funny stuff - like Kerpal's 'kicked my dog', that soundboard, etc. These guys must have too much time in their hands!

YaGoohoo!Gle

Earlier there used to be meta search engines which got a search string, searched multiple search engines and presented the results. Now, someone has come up with something like that, again, but not quite the same. Yahoo! and Google are the top search engines now, battling to be number one. Some prefer one over the other. Some, like me, prefer to use both for a more better search. Someone has thought of combining the powers of meta searches and yahoo and google and come up with yagoohoogle. The search string is taken and both google and yahoo results are displayed in two panes of the same browser window. The searches are somewhat faster both individually and combined than searching yahoo or google separately. You can also compare the two searches. A nice idea! I wonder who came up with it.

Update: This was discussed on my engineering class egroups and this is what one guy had to say, he interned at yahoo.

Well, I developed the first prototype while on internship in summer 2003. The tool was in Perl and was as slow and haphazard as Sourav Ganguly's running between the wickets. The main idea was to test the algorithm(s) behind the search process. When I left for the promised land, there was talk of implemeting it in C++, guess they might have done it as well.

Sharktank

Technology in the hands of idiots is dangerous, irritating at the least and amusing to the readers. We have seen so many email forwards of people who think the CD drives are cup-holders and say they can't move their mouse because it is already on the edge of the mousepad or write click when told to right-click. Sharktank is something similar on a different level where IT people have to deal with someone like that on a daily basis, and sometimes work under them. They have a huge collection going back to the dot-com era. Go through the extensive archive and be vent your frustation by laughing at others.