Perspectives

Here in India, we speak several hundred languages amongst the billion of us. Even the Government officially recognizes 23 of them. No single person can possibly learn all Indian Languages in his lifetime and so, most of us make do with a few. Yahoo! India Maps ( http://in.maps.yahoo.com ) is no exception. After sitting through a lot of language courses, Yahoo! India Maps has now learnt to speak nine languages (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Oriya, Kannada & Malayalam) apart from English. Watch out for the “Vernacular” button along with “Map”, “Satellite” and “Hybrid” buttons to see an area in it’s primary language. We have covered the major cities and towns and will expand the “Language Map view” to other regions in the time to come.

Personally, Maps in vernacular languages is magical for me. Because for once, my Grand-moms and Grand-dads will get to see and understand what I do all day long sitting at Yahoo!.

We have also released “Walking directions” along with this push. If you are the one who walks, You could simply type a query like “Walk from Yahoo! egl bangalore to Yahoo! MG road, bangalore”. Alternatively, You could also choose the “Walk this Route” link on the right pane when you have driving directions.

I don’t expect you to have heard of Stuff White people like. I heard about it only minutes ago. And from what I see, it is (getting) quite famous (in the white land, ofcourse) and is quite hilarious (especially if you are not a white person). You probably already know of all the stuff they talk about in that blog if you have interacted with a bunch of whites and have been to the US atleast once. But you should still go ahead and read it. Rarely do you get to laugh so much at stuff you already know.

Anyways, this blog is not about Stuff White people Like. It is about stuff Brown people like. Yeah, Brown People. You, me, my neighbour, your beer buddy. We are all brown. In California, brown people call themselves (and us) desis, but they are brown too.

Kaysov is one of the authors of the blog, and he is not this funny. Not in real life. Maybe he learnt to be funny by going to Berkeley. Nevertheless, subscribe and spread the word if you like it. Kaysov has agreed to give me 50% of the stuff he makes out of adsense.

My dad used to be a master of pincodes in Chennai. He has been and around Chennai for such a long time that he can beat the Head Post Master to his Job. Infact, it was one of our favorite time pass activities. I used to get hold of an yearly diary that had Pincodes of Chennai city as an addendum and then I will pick and ask Pincodes of random and weird localities that nobody goes to in Chennai. And he used to be right every time.

Now, You don’t have to live in a city for 30 years to know it’s pincodes. You can leave that job to Yahoo India Maps . The next time you have a pincode with you and you are wondering where that place is, go ask Yahoo India Maps.

For instance, 600001 is Chennai GPO, 560034 is Koramangala, bangalore. Those are my places.
What Pincode are you?

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Originally uploaded by shivku.

On March 2nd, thirteen years ago, little did Filo and Yang know that they are going to create the most visited site on the planet.

They did and here we are. Happy Birthday Yahoo!. I love you.

Yahoo! India Next, which is an Indian clone of Yahoo! Next was launched a little while ago. Yahoo! India Next will talk about innovations and cutting edge technology that gets built in Yahoo! Bangalore for India.

I was asked to write about “Landmark based driving directions” that we launched in a India sometime ago. And I did. You can read about it here.

I also made this little banner for the blogpost.

I made an ad-hoc small “Yahoo! India Maps, Try it!” kinda badge which you can see on the right pane.

What do you guys think?

One of my friends who runs Hummaa, is looking for Software engineers and Senior Software Engineers who are cool in Linux, Apache, MySQl and PHP. If you are one of them or you know one of them who is looking for some cool stuff to do, let me know.

Inspired by Pradeep B V’s comment on my earlier post, I went on to check if Nokia has any (updated) Maps for my Nokia Phone (N73). My phone does not have GPS like the Nokia Navigator, but nevertheless, Maps on mobile (with GPRS for Search) can still come in very handy. Also, my phone came pre packaged with a dumb local application (with maps), but it only used to show the outline of India. Now, I have seen that many times in my sixth class Geography and that level of map is not useful for any god damn thing, let alone Local Search.

So, I started from here , downloaded and installed the “Nokia Maps” application over to my phone and then downloaded and installed a windows only (Infact, you won’t even find the download link on firefox on windows. Visit the link on IE) application over to my PC. And then, after a few glitches, I downloaded the India data pack.

The map data is from Navteq. And we all already know Navteq does not have the best data set for India. For instance, the data pack for China was about 190 MB whereas the India one was 21MB. (India is about a third in size compared to China).

I was checking in and around Bangalore and they have all the major roads named and searchable. But more importantly, because you can download the data pack into your mobile, you don’t need a network connection to search or view the Map. That is cool, because GPRS (or EDGE, 2.5 G) is real slow for Maps. Also, there is no connectivity in places where you generally tend to get lost.

Now, the technology is also different when you compare this with Google Maps Mobile or Yahoo! Go. Nokia Maps is a vector map application. What that means is, the maps are rendered by an engine that understands shapes rather than showing images that have maps pre-rendered (aka raster maps ).

So, the application is smaller, renders what needs to be rendered and ignores layers and shapes when it needs to, It is probably a bit slower because of all the bits it needs to flip/flop before rendering the shape. I may be wrong here, that is just my guess.

I don’t have GPS on my phone. Earlier, I tried to buy a bluetooth GPS receiver that I can hook up with my phone. But the pieces that I tried never worked with my phone and I gave up. So, I couldn’t check if GPS worked well with the application and if the map is, infact, accurate.

Anyway, If you have a Nokia big smart phone, go download the maps. It will come in handy.

Telematics Research Group released a press release a little while ago and they say that the future of Portable Navigational devices look promising. Also, Mobile phone based GPS will become popular than traditional PNDs from makers such as TomTom or Garmin. So, if you are going to buy an in-car navigation system, you may want to hold on. Maps may just be available on your mobile phone.

More here

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We’ve joined forces with Twitter and Twittervision to give you instant updates on Super Tuesday. Throughout the day, you can watch Twitter texts from across the country. And send in your own updates!
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Twittervision has always been fun to watch. And to make your ordinary super tuesday fun (after you’ve voted, that is) , visit Google Maps + Twitter. I think this is basically twittervision with filters on words like “obama” and “poll” and “vote”.

Someone was asking me for the top ten tech books that I would recommend for someone in my domain of work. Which is Internet & Computer technology. This is the list I came up with:

1) heads first design patterns By Eric Freeman; Elisabeth Freeman; Kathy Sierra; Bert Bates ( 500 rs)
2) Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML By Elisabeth Freeman; Eric Freeman (500 rs)
3) c++ programming language by Stroustrup (600 Rs)
4) JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition By David Flanagan 750 rs
5) Learning Python, 3rd Edition By Mark Lutz (Not sure)
6) Introduction to Algorithms – Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest/Stein – 305 rs
7) Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory in Practice (O’Reilly)) [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback) by Andy Oram (Author), Greg Wilson (Author) – 38$
Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke, Molly E. Holzschlag (32$)
9)Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition (Paperback)
by Jon Erickson (Author) – 33$
10)The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman (800 rs)

What am I missing? What should I not include in this list ?