Thursday, September 25, 2008

Cool songs in recent times

Recently i stumbled upon a cool song from FloBots called Handlebars in a radio. I haven't heard about the band called FloBots till i chanced upon this powerful song recently. Having loved this song so much, wanting to hear again, digged YouTube to find the song here . No wonder the song got over 10 million clicks and over 76,000 comments within a span of just 5 months! Below is the song.



Another song which caught my attention was Viva La Vida by Cold Play. The song is really awesome and will linger in your ears even after the song is over :). I must tell, i had become a fan of Cold Play after this song. Below is the song.



A song that truly needs a mention is, So What, by Pink. Yeah you read it right, Pink is back and the song rocks! Here is the song, below is the embedded video.




Few others that are really good are,

More to come soon....

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Type in your local language - Firefox Extension

Ever wanted to chat in Tamil(or any other Indian Languages) from Zoho Chat or Gmail Chat? I have been longing to do so ever since i saw this feature in Orkut.

Google recently released their Language API, which include Translation and Transliteration APIs. Using their Transliteration API, we can convert any English text to native language(Ex: Tamil can be changed to தமிழ்) on the fly(like in Orkut). This feature is really useful while we chat or post comments.

Of-course we cannot expect every site we use to integrate this feature...but we can anytime build an extension in Firefox to fulfill our requirements. So one fine day i sat down and started writing a GreaseMonkey script...which happened to work in Firefox-2 and failed to work in Firefox-3. Dejected by the output, started porting the code as an extension, which worked fine in FF3 after a couple sleepless nights!


Here is the Firefox Extension i wrote to get the Transliteration feature plugged in to sites like Zoho Mail and GMail. As the extension is currently under Experimental category, you will need an account to install the extension. IE users please excuse :)

Currently the extension can transliterate the texts in 'textarea' alone. Hopefully will extend this feature to editable iframes very soon.

The extension is still in early stages, so bugs are common :). Please share your thoughts and report any bugs you face here.

Update 1: Version 1.0.3: Lots of bug fixes, Preference box with default language, text box support based on user preference

Update 2: Verion 1.0.4: Performance and issue fixes. Recommended Install.

Update 3: Verion 1.0.5: Textarea/textbox style corruption issue fixed. Recommended Install.

Update 4: Addon is now Public!! You dont need an account anymore to install your copy!

Update 5: I am(was) lobbying hard to get the latest version of the addon reviewed. Will try harder when I get more time. Till then please use the experimental version from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-transliteration-formerl/versions/?page=1#version-1.9