chethan

At any point of time, there are always some Developer contests running. These are especially good for students & hobbyists who can pit their wits against the best in the class, win goodies and get noticed. I plan to compile a list of contests that I come across & this will be a work in progress. Be sure to check the end dates of competitions. * .NET Champions: Submit a story or video on a successful & innovative solution you have developed on the Microsoft .NET Platform. Program is restricted to Technology Professionals and Academicians from India Prize: 1 Windows Mobile every month More details:  .NET Champions website  * Google Code Jam 2010: Google's annual programming competition, where thousands of coders around the world attack algorithmic problems in several 2.5-hour online rounds. Prize: Top 25 finalists will divide over $10,000 in prize money. More details:  Code Jam site * Google Gadget Ventures - a pilot program to help developers create richer, more

Some clever YouTube users take advantage of the wisdom of the crowds who graciously give a video they have watched, a thumbs up or a thumbs down. You can identify a popular video for a specific keyword  by googling with a search query like this : "like 100..200" "dislike 0..2" Moog site:youtube.com reference : https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol_video_feeds Currently, this technique doesn't seem to work effectively due to a code change involving the count of Likes & Dislikes. Finding out the count of people who dislike a video and the ratio of likes to dislikes for a particular video is simple if you use the YouTube API. The JSON feed of the  YouTube search webservice  exposes values for viewCount, likeCount, ratingCount which can help in gauging if a video is really what it claims through its title. Some trolls disallow rating for the videos they upload so that viewers cannot rate it. That's another red

The   GoogleFinance function   can be used to fetch historical data for a specified time period. Try these to get historical data of Sensex & Nifty indices for the first 9 days of September 2013: =GoogleFinance("BSESN", "close", "09/01/2013" , "09/09/2013", "DAILY") =GoogleFinance("NSEI", "close", "09/01/2013" , "09/09/2013", "DAILY") You can even go back in time. The Sensex was at 4031.55 this day in 1997!

Trains are easily the cheapest way to travel long distance in India. Though the punctuality of trains has improved over the years, there is no guarantee that even the trains at the top of the  hierarchy  won't be late by several hours.  TrainEnquiry.com  can help you track a train’s location status though not in real-time. Knowing when a train will reach a particular station is helpful in many ways - it can help you book a cab while you're on the train while timing it with time of arrival at the destination, you can plan your commute time to the railway station if you had to pick up visitors. The  TrainEnquiry.com  website has undergone an overhaul but it is still unfriendly, un-intuitive & cluttered. The links (shown with arrows in screenshot below) which actually show the status don't stand out. Now - the site in 2014 Then - before the overhaul Possibly because a lot of App developers scrape data from the site or there are heavy automated cal

Most questions in the Google Webmaster Central YouTube video channel are answered by Matt Cutts. The questions are very interesting but the answers are available only in video format. You have to watch the video which is of around 2 minutes to know the answer. While the background that Matt Cutts provides is educative, even 2 minutes is a lot of time if you need a quick answer and  when you are on a low bandwidth internet connection . So I started compiling short answers to build  summaries of Google Webmaster Central YouTube videos . I noticed that these videos have captions and I realized that I don't even have to watch the video to know the question and answer. It is possible to extract subtitles from YouTube videos  by specifying the language and VideoId in this generic URL -  http://video.google.com/timedtext?lang={LANG}&v={VIDEOID} . For instance, instead of watching a Google Webmaster Central YouTube video that has a URL like this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v