Nithin Kamath's Weblog

Google Labs has come out with a new and cool tool for Indians. It is called ‘Indic Transliteration’, here is what it does as Google puts it:

Google Indic Transliteration offers an option for converting Roman characters to the Devan?gar? characters used in Hindi. This lets you type Hindi words phonetically in English script and still have them appear in their correct alphabet. Note that this is not the same as translation — it is the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other, not their meaning.

This is a great tool, considering that most of us would have till now used some sort of software to get this type of result. The good thing is that it converts the text word on word basis, so it convert to Devan?gar? once a word is entered and a space is keyed. See below for an example.

Once the Hindi word appears, if you are not happy with the word displayed, you can click on it and change the word from the various ones displayed or change it manually. It is great that Google keeps coming out with such good tools, especially like these which can be run from the web directly. Also another great aspect is that Google also has a dedicated section in Labs for India related products.

Visit Google Indic Transliteration

Want that document urgently, but don’t remember which folder you put it in…and thousands of files are littered all over…..Search! Search!….but how…..???

Well over the last year or so the desktop search, an area which has been a sore point in Linux desktops is finally seeing light. Initially we were offered Beagle, which I liked but had to do away with because of it hunger for cpu and the ram. And more recently Google announced its offering. And this time not a wine implementation of the Windoze version like Picasa, but a complete port of Google Desktop Search.

So I thought I will give it a try. Installation was simple as every, just downloaded the file and the installation went on without any issues. After installing, the next time I restarted the machine the search agent appeared in the system tray panel and it began indexing.

The good thing was that it installed the required extensions for firefox and thunderbird itself, so I did not have to do anything. And the indexing was getting done during the idle time, and not when you were using the machine, though I would feel the system crawl How?? Well, I have just 256 megs of RAM ;-( and too much thrashing and swapping was going on, also thunderbird began to slow down, since the indexing was getting done real time rather than offine.

But Google being Google delivered a good product, though with fewer features than the Windoze version. The search result are accurate and it even has a cached copy of the search result.

Over all a good product with good search capabilities, I keep it on most of the time, but sometimes when the things get slow, I do turn the ‘pause indexing’ option on. So no more struggling to find that document, google is here.

You can find more about it here @ features page.

You can download it from the download page.

I have just shifted my mail account handling option for my domain to take advantage of Google Apps for Your Domain which provides me with a gmail accounts with 2GB+ space with all the features that Gmail provides but for my domain email accounts.

The option also allows use of Google [Talk, Calendar and Page Creator] for use with the domain. But I don’t think I will be using it that much, since I wanted a better interface and management features for managing incoming mail. This service is currently in Beta and the good thing is that as per their quick facts, once it gets out of beta the service will still be free for people who signed in during the beta phase.

In the past week I also registered with the networking site LinkedIn.com, which says:

Through your network you can:
* Find potential clients, service providers, subject experts, and partners who come recommended
* Be found for business opportunities
* Search for great jobs
* Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals
* Post and distribute job listings
* Find high-quality passive candidates
* Get introduced to other professionals through the people you know

Reads well ain’t it, for me i am just joining it to explore the possibilities. The thing with such networking sites is that people who register have to keep updating their profiles to be able to make best use of the features. The problem that arises currently is that people are currently so much hooked up to Orkut that even though some register at other sites, they never come back to those sites. I am talking from my experience with Gazzag and Facebook. Though I am not impressed with Gazzag, I had really liked the features that Facebook provided, but there are not many people I know in there and not many I request have joined in. For Linkedin at least a many people have shown interest by registering, let me see how it goes.