Hi friends,

I wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year with lots of happiness.

I hope that the posts I publish here are useful for you and your questions are answered. This year I promise that I will try to write better posts and write more regularly.

Best Wishes once again.

It was International Translation Day on 30th September and Google gifted users a new version of their website translator gadget.

From usability point of view this version is far more better then previous one and supports 51 languages. Earlier version of this gadget was a bit ugly in the manner it worked. It used to load the entire page in an iFrame which appeared like a full page reload every time user changed the language. It seems that the new gadget translates the page of text asynchronously. There is a progress indicator too which shows percentage of translation done. It is certainly faster then previous version.

There is one more feature to it. According to google if the language of a users browser visiting your page is different than the language of your page, they will be prompted to automatically translate the page in their language.

To use the gadget in your website just visit google at http://translate.google.com/translate_tools and follow these 3 steps:

• Select the language of your website.
• Select languages in which you want the translation.
• Copy the generated code in your webpages and you are ready to go.

Although the translation is not 100% correct, it is a great help to read and understand text of foreign languages.

Some time ago, just for fun I started to collect all funny and crazy mails that friends sent to me. Later I thought of putting them into a single place. I sat down to code and in a couple of hours created  http://www.vijayjoshi.org/humour/.

This page displays all the content that I have collected till now with the name of friend who sent it to me. (Some of them are insisting me to remove their names (read Bhuwanesh) which I will not do . I keep on updating it as I get new mails from friends.
Click on the story title to see the contents.
Yesterday I added one more feature to it. Now you can comment on individual stories as well. So please add your funny/crazy comments. Planning to add a recaptcha to comments soon as there will be lots of spam too.

Also, I request all of you reading this to send lots of crazy stuff to be included in the collection.

On one of the projects I am working upon currently, we needed a countdown timer in JavaScript. User had to fill in a form and we wanted to restrict that time to 5 minutes and simultaneously show him how many minutes/seconds are left now. After the set time limit is crossed user is informed that a timeout has occurred.

Here is the code for timer(call it timer.js):

var timer = {
	minutes :0,
	seconds : 0,
	elm :null,
	samay : null,
	sep : ':',
	init : function(m,s,elm)
	{
		m = parseInt(m,10);
		s = parseInt(s,10);
		if(m < 0 || s <0 || isNaN(m) || isNaN(s)) { alert('Invalid Values'); return; }
		this.minutes = m;
		this.seconds = s;
		this.elm = document.getElementById(elm);
		timer.start();
	},
	start : function()
	{
		this.samay = setInterval((this.doCountDown),1000);
	},
	doCountDown : function()
	{
		if(timer.seconds == 0)
		{
			if(timer.minutes == 0)
			{
				clearInterval(timer.samay);
				timerComplete();
				return;
			}
			else
			{
				timer.seconds=60;
				timer.minutes--;
			}
		}
		timer.seconds--;
		timer.updateTimer(timer.minutes,timer.seconds);
	},
	updateTimer :  function(min,secs)
	{
		min = (min < 10 ? '0'+min : min);
		secs = (secs < 10 ? '0'+secs : secs);
		(this.elm).innerHTML = min+(this.sep)+secs;
	}
}
function timerComplete()
{
	alert('time out buddy!!!');
}

To start the timer put these lines after you have included the timer.js

window.onload = init;
function init()
{
    timer.init(0,55,'container');
}

On the markup side create an element with id=container

init function accepts 3 parameters : minutes, seconds and the id of html element where the countdown will be displayed.
You will also need a function which will run after the timer’s execution has completed. For this purpose there is the function timerComplete included in the timer.js file. Write any code here that you would like to execute after timer has terminated (like redirect the user).
Also make sure that you have an html element with id set to container on your html page.
Above timer will do a countdown for 55 seconds. After 55 seconds, function timerComplete will be executed.
You can see a demo here and if you wish you can also view page source code for javascript code.

Download timer.js from this link

Give this  article a Thumbs-up on Stumbleupon if you liked it.

Its off topic but the concept is so great I could not resist blogging it. A traditional business model implemented over the web in these Web2.0 times which is sure to succeed.

Before you die or any unfortunate incident occurs in your life, you make sure that all your assets, property goes into right hands. To take care of it, you make a will and assign a beneficiary to pass your assets to the correct person. Now try mapping it with the web. You have an online life. Don’t you? You exist on Gmail, Hotmail, FaceBook, Twitter and numerous other services. You have some personal pictures stored on flickr, some lovely mails on your Yahoo or Gmail account which you would not want to go into any other hands. Ever wondered what will happen to your all these accounts in case you die or something happens to you?

Here comes Legacy Locker. Legacy Locker is a service that will store your credentials to mail services, social networks and other important services on the web and will pass them to a caretaker chosen by you in event of your death. It is kind of protecting your online life after death.

The service is not available yet and will be opening in April 2009. Of course there will be money charged for the service .The pricing is kept at $300 which can be paid as one time fee of $300 or yearly payments of $30.

The list of sites/networks that Legacy Locker has already covered is impressive. The list already includes Gmail, Flickr, Facebook, Paypal, Yahoo! Mail, Ebay, iTunes, ING, Snapfish, YouTube, AOL, Amazon, Kodak Gallery, WordPress, GoDaddy, Hotmail, Netflix, Blogger, LinkedIn, Photobucket, 12seconds, Box.net, Friendster, TypePad, Party Poker, Mint, Twitter and many other sites.

The service seems to be useful. Let’s see how many users consider it for managing their online identities after death.

Give this  article a Thumbs-up on Stumbleupon if you liked it.

Pi fans will be celebrating Pi Day all over the world on 14th March. As you already know Pi is a mathamatical constant. Its value is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter
Today at 1:59 date time will read 3 14 1 59 which is the value of Pi upto 5 decimal places i.e 3.14159. It is observed by the majority of people at 1:59pm though some celebrate at 1:59am too.

Official website for Pi Day – http://www.piday.org/

Click to add Sherlock Holmes quotes to your iGoogle homepage.  

Elementary,my dear Watson.

Remember these words? Definitely yes if you love Sherlock Holmes. However, it is a different fact that Sherlock Holmes never said those words exactly.

I am a die-hard Sherlock Holmes fan. I was in 10th standard when I first read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I finished it as fast as I could.
Then I bought all books and now I have lost the count how many times I have read each story. Once you read a couple of opening pages of any Holmes story, you cannot put it down until you finish it. All of the books are great but my favorites are “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” and “A Study in Scarlet”.
The popularity and influence of Holmes can be inferred by the fact that Holmes is the only fictional character that has been inducted as an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Great.

Kudos to the character and the man who created it : Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Many of the statements said by Holmes have become quotes by now. Even “Elementary,my dear Watson”, which is the most famous quote of Holmes, has not been uttered a single time in any of the stories, has become the most famous of them all.

Some of my favorite quotes are:

• My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.
• It was easier to know it than to explain why I know it. If you were asked to prove that two and two made four, you might find some difficulty, and yet you are quite sure of the fact.
• It is quite a three pipe problem, and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.It is more than possible; it is probable.
• It is impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong.
• Dr Leslie Armstrong “I have heard your name, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and I am aware of your profession – one of which I by no means approve.”
  Holmes “In that, Doctor, you will find yourself in agreement with every criminal in the country.”
• Cut out the poetry, Watson.

It is a small list,all of them are fantastic. Anyway,as a way of paying tribute to my favourite fictional character, I created another gadget. It displays a quotation of Sherlock Holmes each day. By default it will select a quote from any one of the books. But you can select a specific book also.
For example, if you wish to see quotes only from “A study in scarlet”, you can set it. Just click Edit settings in gadgets toolbar and select the book.

What are you waiting for now? Add the gadget to your igoogle and have fun.

As a bonus, I present to you a book titled “THE QUOTABLE SHERLOCK HOLMES ” taken from American Digest.

Download “THE QUOTABLE SHERLOCK HOLMES “

Enjoy!!!

As you probably know, Google celebrated its 10th birthday last month and they are celebrating it in a number of ways along with the internet users. On this occasion Google has presented a timeline of their journey of 10 years. This timeline marks all the major landmarks that Google has achieved in last 10 years,some of which are quite interesting.

Project 10 to the 100 is another project that they have launched. Google will accept ideas from users in certain categories. Then 100 ideas will be selected from these and public will vote on these. Finally 5 ideas will be selected and Google is committing $10 million to implement these ideas.

Now the best part which encouraged me to write this post. Yesterday google announced that it has made its oldest index available to users. In exact words  – “In honor of our 10th birthday, we’ve brought back our oldest available index.”. You can find it here. Note that the logo of Google is with exclamation mark. Its also missing the “I am feeling lucky” button. Google will also not be displaying ads in search results for this index

This index is of January 2001 and contains 1,326,920,000 pages. As Google says it is not the exact index of 2001 because they have removed some results from the index. Now an obvious question arises that why they are showing index of 2001 and not of 1998. Google’s answer is that this is the best and readily accessible index they can present.

Searching the web of 2001 gives interesting results. Like this search for AJAX . Search for youtube and you will get 0 results. Searching json gives InterneTV Music Videos-on-demand as first link. Search for php and see the third link. Its Parents Helping Parents, Inc. Home Page. Quite funny, isn’t it? Today if you search for php you will not get anything except php sites for at least 50 pages.  A search for captcha gives 5 irrelevant results. Today it returns 76,600,000 results. This shows how the web has evolved in these 7 years.
The results page is also not much different from what it is today. Clicking a search result will take you to the live version of that page as on today. There is another link with each result titled “View old version on the Internet Archive”. It will take you to the archived version of the page. I searched for google and followed the first link to the archived version of their homepage. It looks like this originally.

This index will not be available online forever. It will be live for a month only. Try searching the web of 2001 till then and do tell if you find any funny or interesting results. Happy searching…