Google group for Information Retrieval

Please check out my Google group for Information Retrieval related discussions.

Mapquest for India

Check out this really cool website (http://mapmyindia.com) for getting driving directions from any city to any other city in India. It is Mapquest version tailored for India. You can also get list of movie theatres, hospitals...etc. Kudos to the team who put India on the digital map before Google did.

Check out the face found on Google Maps

Its amazing what people find on Google maps. Here is one such Example. Its in Canada near Calgary and Montana.

IE sucks...switch to Firefox

In past 2+ years of my internet life, the only time I ever used IE was to run ASP applications. Well...not anymore. With the cool introduction of IE addon for firefox, you can open IE specific applications within Firefox. Try this new IE addon, you sure would like it. Surprisingly some of the ASP applications which wouldn't run on IE actually ran without any problems in this addon. One more feather to the Firefox's cap.

Survive the Russian Roulette...!!!

Back to my favourite game of beating the odds, here is another one....Russian roulette...!!!

Unfortunately you have been captured by the enemy and taken as prisoner of war. Your life now depends on a crazy army colonel who loves to play the game of Russian roulette with his prisoners. If you can survive his game you might get a chance to breathe for few more days. Here is the game...

You have been tied to a chair and won't be able to get up. The colonel brings in a barrel of the gun, six chambers, all empty. He will let you watch him put two bullets into adjacent chambers in the gun. Closes the barrel and spins it for few seconds. He fires one shot in the air, CLICK...the chamber was empty. Now he points it to your head and asks if you prefer to spin the barrel again before pulling the trigger or just pull the trigger without spinning. Which one would you prefer to increase your chances of surviving this deadly game? Remember the gun still has 2 bullets.

File format Bible

If you are a programmer working with different file formats, you would definitely find this site resourceful. I have been crawling the web sniffing math content where considerable portion of scientific material is in non-html/xml format. This site was handy when it came to parsing Microsoft word and powerpoint file format. In case you need a programmatic interface to Microsoft file formats, Jakarta has an answer with their POI project.

MathFind: A Math-Aware search engine

Me and my supervisor Robert Miner submitted a paper on math search engine titled "MathFind: A Math-Aware search engine" to ACM SIGIR 06. It was accepted to be published...!!! The paper talks about our current implementation of a prototype math search engine. We will be presenting it in the forthcoming ACM conference on August 9, 2006 in Seattle, USA.