Lost in translation

We all know about multitude of translation engines out there like altavista's BabelFish, Google translate etc. But if you don't know the translated language, how do you figuer out the quality of your translation. One simple way is to translate back again to original language :-)

I tried out following statement from English to Spanish on babelfish:

"I love to stand on one leg with my arms raised."

It resulted in following in Spanish phrase:

Amo estar parado en una pierna con mis brazos levantados.

Now I have no clue what the hack this means. So decided to translate this Spanish phrase back to English. It resulted in following English translation:

"Master to be unemployed in a leg with my raised arms."

Wow! All I can say is be careful, very careful if you are trying to use any of this translation engines.

Website registration headaches?

Now-a-days every website wants you to register with them using your email address. One solution is to create an email account just for this purpose so that your real email account is not bombarded with Spam and web site announcements.

Another neat trick is to use temporary email services. They allow you to create a temporary email id that you can use while registration and also allow you to check confirmation emails that get sent to these emails ids.

Check out the this list which gives 20 websites providing this service.

Find distance between any two cities in the world

Lots of websites help you in finding distance between two cities. Some of them listed below:
GeoBytes
Indo

Its cool. Check it out.

Where is Indian Amazon?

Where is the Indian version of Amazon.com? Why can't I buy any book/movie/CD/clothes/gifts/electronic gadgets/flowers/magazines etc from a single website? And don't suggest sites like rediff.com, indiatimes, indiaplaza etc. They don't even come close.

I think India has huge supply chain issues to overcome and a brick and mortar company has a better chance of doign it then a software company.

Imagine doing these day-to-day things from a single website owned by a brick and mortar company. A company who delivers right from milk, cereals, grocery, petrol, landline phone connection, wireless phone connection, broadband, financial products, clothes, electricity, software and list goes on and on. You name it and they do it. Imagine all these things being available from a single website. All that company has to do is get their act together and decide to become Indian version of Amazon. You might have guessed it, I am referring to Reliance. If they overcome trivial issues (like tiff between two brothers!) they can own this space (that's the only space I think that's not owned by them right now).

So wake up Reliance (ADAG and MDAG both), Indian net space is for yours to rule.