Archive for December, 2007

Now you can have your own personal language translator! All you have to do is to add him as a friend in Google talk!

Google has released 24 language translator bot in Google Talk. These are named in using language codes - for example a contact named en2fr will translate from English to French. You just need to add en2fr as a friend and then anything you type to en2fr will be translated to french instantly!

Since this service uses XMPP open protocol, you can write different applications to make use of the underlying engine. For example, you can enable this chat translation facility on your own site using the Google talk engine.

Machine translation comes with its own risks, so don’t try it on your date

Want to host your own Instant Messenger? Then you should try out Ajax im. This is very compact custom instant messenger which is based on PHP and AJAX. The complete download is less than 300kb! In order to host this on your server, you need a MySQL database and PHP support.

Since this is AJAX based, you can integrate this within your existing site. You can also host this as part of your intranet. It is not as sophisticated as any of the commercial ones, but still is good enough as supporting tool to your site.  You can try out a sample implementation here.

Recently Orkut is focusing more on the privacy options available for its users. They have announced a new feature while allows you to keep Orkut privacy options. This means that now you can ensure that your scraps, videos, feeds and photos are only visible to your friends!

To enable privacy option, go to your profile and click on "settings" link. Then click on "privacy" tab on the right top. Then restrict the access of your videos, scraps etc. to "friends" only.

But why do you need to take this precaution? The reason is this - Internet has shortage of stalkers and criminals. So it is very important that your personal information is kept private. Also ensure that you add only those people whom you know personally as friends. Otherwise turning on privacy will be of no use!

Many people tend to post private information such as email or phone numbers in the scrap. Some even go to the extend of publishing their address in scraps. So it is better to keep the scrapbook  private.

Every day you see crazy studies popping out from different so called "expert" institutions. One day you see that mobile usage can cause brain tumour and in the next month you hear that it is not brain tumour but tongue cancer!  Never, I repeat, never believe in any of these studies. Most of these are done on a ridiculously small test data that you should be a perfect idiot to believe in them.

Now the latest in these studies is this one on sex and virginity. According to researchers in Columbia university, people who start sex at a later age appear to have more sexual health problems! According to them, people who started sex at 22 or later had difficulty in erection and orgasm!

Now here is the catch!  It is not possible to determine cause-and-effect from the survey data, according to the researchers. Why? Young men with sexual problems may start having intercourse at a later stage, contributing to the link between sexual debut and sexual problems!  Ha ha, really nice touch there!

Here is a counter proof I can offer. The guys at Columbia university used a sample data of 8000 US adults. In my counter proof, I will use a sample data of 1200 million Indian adults! In India, a significant majority of population engage in sex over 25 years of age. But we have the highest fertility rate and our population is exploding! Now eat that!

Blogger OpenID support commenting for all blogs hosted. This means that if you have an OpenID setup, you can ensure that all comments by you on blogger blogs are genuine. No one can spoof you when commenting on a Blogger blog. This assumes two things - you use OpenID for commenting and others know that only OpenID based comments are written by you!

Another advantage is that your URL can be automatically inserted in the comment. For this to happen, use your blog or site as your OpenID identity. This doesn’t mean that you have to have your own OpenID provider. You can use other providers such as Verisign or Technorati and then delegate to it from your blog! This means that you can change your provider without affecting your identity (your blog).

Now it is not necessary that you should use a third party OpenID provider. You can be your own OpenID provider! For details, check Setting up OpenID.

How does OpenID work?

When you use OpenID, there are 3 players. You (Y), OpenID service provider(P) and the site you are trying to login(T) using OpenID. When you indicate your OpenID identity at the T, it will handshake with P to get a secret key. Then you are re-directed to the P’s Web site to login. After login, the same secret key is prepared using your password by P and it returns it to T. Now T can compare this with the original secret key. If they are same, that means you did authenticate at the P!  Simple isn’t it?

Consider this scenario. You have been running one or more blogs/sites on free hosting providers such as blogspot. One day you decide to move your sites to a professional Web hosting provider. But the problem is which one to use?

Web hosting is a very competitive business and hence choosing one is not easy. Hosting providers do all kinds of gimmicks to lure you in. They have even gone to the extend of promoting sites which write negative reviews of other service providers! In this post, I will look at the key factors you should consider before purchasing your Web hosting.

Note that Web hosting is different from domain registration. It is possible to register domain somewhere else than the hosting provider. In certain cases it is better and cheaper to register your site with a different company.

1. What is your traffic requirements? - This is something which you must evaluate carefully. Some Web hosts offer terabytes of data transfer per month, while some others offer only a few gigabytes. If your intention is to host a personal blog and you don’t plan to be an A-list blogger, few gigabytes per month is ok. But if you think you may have more than 1000 visitors per day, go with a service which gives you atleast 1 terabyte transfer per month. Another important factor to keep in mind is that this limit includes your uploads, downloads and user access to the site.

2. Do you need shell access? - Not all Web hosts provide shell access. In fact, very few provide shell access. But for certain things, shell access is a must. For example, consider a case where you want to configure your cron settings or sometimes you may want to install custom software on your server. But even when you have shell access, you may not be able to run all the applications. This is because there could be resource usage limits on CPU, memory etc. For example, Dreamhost provides shell access, but Godaddy doesn’t.

3. Dedicated virtual server or shared hosting? - Web hosting comes in different varieties. You can have shared hosting, dedicated virtual server or dedicated physical server. Dedicated physical server means you have a dedicated machine for your site. This gives maximum flexibility, but is very costly as well. Dedicated physical servers are needed when you have large Web applications which are resource intensive. Dedicated virtual server hosting provides a virtual machine which for all practical purposes behaves like a separate machine. This service used to be costly, but these days it is becoming comparable to shared hosting. Dedicated virtual server protects your site from other sites that are running on the hosting providers network. In shared hosting, resources such as memory and CPU are shared with other customers. Hence depending on the behavior of your neighbors, your site may go down!

4. Unlimited Emails, Unlimited Databases, Unlimited Domains? - These days a lot of Web hosts provide unlimited email accounts, databases and domains. For most us, unlimited doesn’t mean much since we probably need a few databases and domains. But before you purchase hosting, do check these. This is important since some of the providers charge you for additional domain hosting!

5. Server uptime requirements? - It is rare that you have 100% uptime for shared hosting. But some providers do achieve over 99.99% of uptime. If your site is critical enought that you can’t have even a minute of downtime, go with a provider who offers 100% uptime. But that is rare and in my opinion, go with a provider who is honest when something goes wrong (for example - dreamhost).

6. Server software requirements? - Some hosts don’t allow custom software installation. In that case ensure that the software they have on their server is what you need! For example, not all hosts provide Ruby on Rails support. It may not be easy to find out the server software versions from the hosting providers site, but take that extra effort to find it out!

7. Stick with direct hosting providers - A lot of Web hosting providers out there are resellers. This means that you get really cheap hosting service at the cost of reduced price. But I don’t recommend it. For example, I have seen 100MB bandwidth per month offered for $3/month. This is not worth it as you soon run out of bandwidth! So my advice is to stick with well known direct Web hosting providers.

8. Server robustness - This is the ability of the hosting server to survive sudden increase in traffic. This is very common when you get noticed at slashdot, digg or reddit. Some servers go down under this traffic, while some don’t. It is not easy to find this out beforehand. Research on the Web hosting providers if you think you might get a lot of attention among social bookmarkers!

Now even after evaluating all these parameters, you might end up with a Web host which is unreliable. In such a case, switch as early as possible and you may even be able to get a refund. This is another important reason why you should register your domain separately with a well known domin registrar (like godaddy or enom).

Also after you have decided on a host, look for deals. Sometimes deals can be found on the homepage, sometimes you will have to hunt for the coupon codes on internet. For example, if you use my coupon WEBSTUFFSCAN when you sign up with Dreamhost, you get a discount of $40!!

Here are some of the good web hosts I am aware of,

Godaddy
DreamHost (Recommended)
Globat
Hostgator

Happy Web Hosting!