Basket Case

If you are a hacker and a student in India and you are interested in doing a startup, you have a golden opportunity in your hands. The Google Summer of Code (GSoC)  program offers $5000 for a 4 month project you do for one of the participating open source projects. You get a mentor, hands on experience of implementing something which will potentially be used by real users and also get to be a part of an ever growing community of hackers in India. Now let us say, you were able to get into the program. So you have access to: Money At today's conversion rate, $5000 translates to Rs.2,22,000/- approximately. After paying taxes (which comes at max to about Rs.6500/- assuming male and no other income), you are left with 2,15,000 in your hands. For a college student, 4 months expenses can be as low as Rs.10,000 when living on campus. But let us keep it at Rs.25,000/- assuming you really decided to live it up. Still there are ~Rs.1,90,000 in your account. Excellent Pool of Co-founders...

I was in DC last week to attend the follow-up workshop on the shared task that consumed the better part of my first 2 months this year. It is quite humbling to go to such a conference. A lot of people in the room had contributed something very significant to the area of MT in last 10 years and it is a pleasure to see them discussing things with each other and talk about the direction of the field. The workshop had a rather competitive tinge to it with Google, Microsoft, BBN, IBM and other companies being there apart from many universities and everybody trying to win the bragging rights for next one year at least. What was funny however that most of the people doing MT at these places are relatively young and so most of them have worked together and published joint papers in last 4-5 years. I can count at least one joint paper between most pairs of companies. There were many advisor student pairs that are now in different competing companies. It is a nice little well knit community. On...

OpenSocial form Google is the new big thing that everybody has been talking about, especially since it is being seen as a major blow back by the Google to the Facebook. It will allow developers to write one application and have it run on multiple social network sites. In other words, a Java for web apps (looks like Java has become too unfashinable since I saw this analogy hardly anywhere else). This is great news for developers. But what about users? Users will now have a choice of thousands of applications since developer can actually spend time in creating new applications rather than try and make one application run across multiple sites. So consider, a flixter application that I found to be very cool and added to my profile page on Orkut, spent 2-3 hours adding all the movies to it and comparing notes with friends. Then I logged in to Facebook and found the same application and now I want to match my interests with my friends here. No problem, spend 2-3 hours, add all the movies an...

A big reason for my decreased frequency of blogging had to do with Google launching the Hindi Transliterator in blogger. While, like every red blood Hindi lover, I was also very much pleased by the turn of events, the joy was short lived. Very soon, I discovered that on Linux Firefox version 1.5, the on line blogger editor became very very slow. So slow that I can type 1-2 sentences and than sit back and watch as it works very hard to bring the characters in view one by one, at the speed of around 1 character per second. And this is not in transliteration mode but in normal English typing mode. Now being a busy grad student that I am, I spend a large part of my day and night in my office and away from my laptop. So it was a sad situation. Finally I started looking around for an alternative blog editor and after some false starts, landed at ScribeFire from performancing which is an extension for Firefox. From the first looks, it seems to be quite fast and have all the basic facilities ...

तुलसी की लिखी हुई चौपाई याद आ गयी आज, "अति आनन्द उमगि अनुरागा..." जब गूगल के हिन्दी समाचार प्रष्ठ पर नज़र पडी तो। ना जाने कितनी बार google news India पर नीचे की सूची मे जा कर देखा था और सोचा था कि अगर यहां हिन्दी भी होती तो कितना अच्छा रहता। अब वह मनोकामना पूर्ण हो गयी है। गूगल समाचार का आना सिर्फ़ एक भाषा प्रेमी का व्यर्थ का उत्साह नही है। इसके अनेक ऐसे फ़ायदे हैं जो कि शायद पहली नज़र ने दिखते नही हैं। अव्वल तो ये कि अब अलग अलग जाल प्रष्ठों को देख्ने के लिये अलग अलग फ़ोंट लगाते रहने की आवश्यक्ता नही है, जोकि हमारे आपके जैसे लोगों के लिये तो सिर्फ़ एक छोटी सी समस्या भर हो सकती है पर अनेकानेक लोगों के लिये बस वही अन्त हो जाता है। साथ ही साथ यूनीकोड मे होने से समाचारों को ढूंढना भी सरल हो जाता है। पर इस सबसे बड कर बात है कि भाषा बदलने से समाचार पत्रों का पूर नज़रिया भी बदल जाता है। Google News India से अभी तक समाचारों की जो झलक मिलती थी वो अंगरेज़ी मीडिया के द्रष्टिकोण से दिखती थी, उन्हे क्या महत्वपूर्ण लगता है क्या नही वगैरह। हिन्दी समाचार पत्रों का द्रष्टिकोण इससे काफ़ी अलग हो सकता ह...