VT’s Tech Blog

 

Here’s a site I came across, which has a boat load of links to Open Source software.  The list is divided into various categories to ease your search. So if you’re looking for open source tools to get work done, check this one out first.

Link: Open Source Living 

Flauntr allows you to embed their services on your site for free. API programming knowledge not required! Click on the image above to see how one of the embedding methods work.

Flauntr provides 3 different ways you can embed their service on your site:

1. LightBox : Get a nice little graphic you can put on your blog post, panel or header. When one of your readers clicks on it , flauntR appears in a popup.
2. Iframe: If you want to allow your readers to enjoy flauntR without even a pop up, meaning flauntR sits right in your site.
3. Linkback: f you want to set up an image or set of images for editing or viewing through flauntR this is the right widget for you.

The method I used to embed code you see above this post is using their Lightbox method. If you’re running a image gallery site and would like to allow people to edit the photos straight off your site, I’d recommed integrating the Linkback method for your images.

To get more information on this, head over to: http://www.flauntr.com/flauntr/login/intro.html and get the embed codes to try them out.

While you’re out there, also check out their new apps – photomobilR and photoprofilR. photomobilR allows you to resize your images to fit ask the desktops of about 250 models of mobile phones! If you haven’t created a your own custom desktop background for your mobile yet, this is the right time to start.

photoprofilR is for those social network junkies to allow you to resize your photos to fit the profiles of 30 social network sites.

Here’s an online service which allows you to edit and style your photos online. flauntR currently provides two services – photoeditR and photostylR. Both services allow provides an interface to upload images from the desktop as well as pull images from flickr though the flickr API.

photoeditR is a basic photo editing service which allows you to perform basic actions and effects on your photos. You can resize, rotate, colorize, remove red-eye and spruce up your photos here. If you’re looking for more advanced features, you’ll have to use the photostylR service which provides much more to spice up your pictures. There are predefined effects here which you can apply to your pics. Effects include digital scrapbooking style ‘compositions’, textures, light effects, overlays and colorations.

Once you finish editing your pics you can save them on flauntR in an album, download them to your system or directly send them to flickr.

Link: www.flauntr.com

Here’s something I cooked up in flauntr in a few minutes:

Have you ever wondered how you would look if you were to appear in one of the Simpson’s episodes? Here’s your chance to find out. Head over to Simpsonize me and upload a pic of your self and out comes your Simpsonized character!  You can tweak and accessorize your character to make it look more like you.

If you’ve Simpsonized yourself  do share your character too here.

Here’s another shot of me outside Appu’s Kwik-e-mart at Springfield.

Link: http://www.simpsonizeme.com

Here’s a cool app from Google India Labs called Google Indic Transliteration. Here’s what Google says about the app:

Google Indic Transliteration offers an option for converting Roman characters to the DevanÄ?garÄ« characters used in Hindi. This lets you type Hindi words phonetically in English script and still have them appear in their correct alphabet. Note that this is not the same as translation — it is the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other, not their meaning.

When I typed in my name, here’s the Hindi text which came out of the app : वीनू थॉमस

Link: http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic/

We in India have always felt frustrated with services like Google maps which don’t give driving directions for places here in India.

Here’s a cool service called MapmyIndia which gives you driving directions in some of the major cities in India.

Link: http://mapmyindia.com

Onyourmo is a location based service which gives you the nearest restaruants, bars, atms, cinemas around your area of interest.

Link: http://www.onyomo.com

For users on the go, a wap version of the site is available at:  http://owap.in/

I just came across this new service called reCAPTCHA which provides you with a service to embed CAPTCHA codes in your application. The cool part of this service is that it uses the CAPTCHA codes to actually digitize words which an OCR software couldn’t read. The project currently helps digitize books from the Internet Archive

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Link: http://recaptcha.net

It looks like the web2.0 is quickly eating up the desktop application market. Picnick an online service which allows you to edit your photos entirely though yourweb browser. They use a flash to provide you the interactive interfaces to manipulate images. You can crop, rotate, resize, apply filters and even remove red-eyes from your pictures online.

Once you finish editing your photos, you can save them or send them to a whole range of online photo sharing sites like flickr. Register for free and start editing your pics online !

Link: Picnick.com

Vulnpeida is a security search engine which uses Google Custom search to search for vulnerabilities based on your search term.

The site gives sorts vulnerabilities by expolits, cve, mailing list posts, blog posts and more. A good way to check if your framework is susceptible to attacks.
Link: Vulnpedia – Security Search Engine

Looking for a quick way to design Databases without having to download software? Here’s an Ajax application which allows you to design databases online without having anything other than a web browsers installed on your system

This application allows you to define your tables and rows through an easy to use web interface. You can also link tables together by dragging and dropping the primary keys into other tables. You can export the database tables as XML, MS SQL and SQL Server statements.

Link: SQL Designer