Its Diwali Time

So here comes another diwali, the festival which brings with itself ulimited joy, energy, hope and of course lots of sweets and crackers. Diwali is a very special festival of Indians. The following links have a great details in them of the significance of diwali.

• Greet2k.com
  - Send flash e-cards.
  Funmunch - Diwali
  - Offers free resource for diwali including ecards, recipes, fireworks, origin and lots more.
• eGreetingz - Diwali
  - Send free e-cards.
• Bawarchi.com
  - Indian recipes for Diwali.
  Sscnet.ula
  - Information on Diwali.
  Diwalimela.com
  - Send greetings and gifts, shop online.
  Theholidayspot.com
  - Information on Diwali, send e-cards.
  Rumela.com
  - History of Diwali.
  ReachGujarat.com
  - Site about Diwali, history, tradition, information.
  Matiyapatidar.com
  - Covers the origin and significance of the five day festival.
  Indiaexpress.com
  - Small collection of traditional recipes.

And heres a message for you on diwali(dont't cry at his mimicry, he is only wishing u happy diwali)

Final release of Internet Explorer 7

Yesterday microsoft release final and stable version of IE7 which is more secure and employs many cool features (such as tabs etc) which makes ones browsing experience more pleasant.
Grab your copy now http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx.
You can also download it from here. Remember you gotta have Windows XP with sp2 to install it.

Meanwhile its interesting to know these "20 things you don't know about death".

Orkut open to all

The orkut, google's online community portal (very popular in India,Brazil,Pakistan and Iran) finally opened its door to all. It means that now you do not need an invitation from others to open account with orkut. Orkut has added some extra features like instant reply of scraps , deleting multiple scraps etc. More details can be found at Dreamchaser's blog.

Meanwhile, final results are out for the "Most uggliest vegetable in Britain" contest and the winner is a parsnip grown by Mrs Hillary Nellist.

Get Free Online Certification

I know many people ( including myself) who want to do a lot of certifications but not willing to pay a penny (cuz sometimes they are not sure of clearing). The certifications on resume certainly gives it a professional and heavier look, its not bad for self-accessment either.

Well your/our problem is solved. The Brainbench offers free certification over a wide range of categories ( including computers, finance, management etc). To get the hard copy you have to pay a little, but they do provide an url of your result/transcript which you can easily share or even put up into the resume and it remains valid for 3 years.

MP3 Search using Google Search Techniques

There are a lot of techniques of searching google for specified filetypes (such as .mp3) and contents ( in url or title). This is another good place to search for different filetypes, here filetypes are arranged in alphabetical order and you can perform a good search.

The MP3 searching hack of google has been levereged by this site to get a good result on search by artist or album name.

A word of caution though, even though its so easy to locate them its not always legal to download and use them.

Google Suggest powers Firefox 2

The recent release of Firefox 2 web browser has included the Google Suggest ( which is built upon Ajax technology) feature into its toolbar. Not only this but now your Firefox can work as a calculator without you being pressing enter or equal to key. All we have to do is to key in the expression into the search toolbar. It looks like there is some implicit implementation feature of the calculator feature of Google Search.

Web Services - Solutions over web

The routines and daily lives of todays techno-homo-sapiens are shaped in a way like never before by employing the power of web services. A web service seeks to solve the computing problem of an individual over the web. Gone are the days when you need to code your own program to solve problems. As the solution delivered over web is XML based, it can be transefed by the standard HTTP protocol and all you need is a web browser to acces them. The W3C defines web service as "A Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards."

Here's a list of some useful free webservices:

http://www.lionwap.org/validationtest.html
Validates the email address first by checking if its syntactically correct ( better to use client side script to do this) and later checks whether an email server is found at this address. Check out the error message at the bottom which gives a good clue.

http://centralops.net/co/
http://www.ippages.com/
http://network-tools.com/ or http://nwtools.com/
http://visualroute.visualware.com/ (includes visual search)
www.tracert.com/cgi-bin/trace.pl
Solutions for ipaddress to domain name or location( lots more),email validation, root tracing, path tracing (great to see what path the data traverses from source to destination), getting your browser details etc. These are implemented through basic ping,traceroute,nslookup etc commands besides looking up the HTTP Header. On top of that you can get source code of all their services.

http://www.xe.com/ucc/
http://www.x-rates.com/calculator.html
Online Currency conversions, can also compare/plot graph for the history of currencies.

Services By Google

There are a hell lot of services being offered, most of them can be found here.
Some of the less known and used services I have listed here.


Translate

Translate text between some of the common languages or translate a whole webpage.



Currency Conversion
To use our built-in currency converter, simply enter the conversion you'd like done into the Google search box and hit "Enter" or click the Google Search button
Example:

    3.5 USD in GBP
    currency of Brazil in Malaysian money
    5 British pounds in South Korean money
    2.2 USD per gallon in INR per litre

Definitions

To see a definition for a word or phrase, simply type the word "define," then a space, and then the word(s) you want defined. If Google has seen a definition for the word or phrase on the Web, it will retrieve that information and display it at the top of your search results.
Example:

    define World Wide Web

define Computer

File Types

Google has expanded the number of non-HTML file types searched to 12 file formats. In addition to PDF documents, Google now searches Microsoft Office, PostScript, Corel WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and others. The new file types will simply appear in Google search results whenever they are relevant to the user query. If you prefer to see a particular set of results with a specific file type (for example, PDF links), simply type filetype:[extension] (for example, filetype:pdf) within the search box along with your search term(s).


Q&A

Want to know the population of Japan? What currency is used in Algeria? The birthplace of Bono? Hit us with a fact-based question or query (like "population of Japan") by typing it into the Google search box. We'll search the web and display the answer at the top of your search results page. We also link to our source for this information so that you can learn even more.



Site Search

Searches a specified site. To search a site key in "site:sitetosearch.com query" into the search box.



Google code APIs

Google recently released APIs for its products and services which can be found at http://code.google.com.

Watching what is happening when a web service is called. Also provides some useful web-services.

http://www.mindreef.net


Here is an elegant list of web-services.