More and more people are taking to writing in Indian languages on the net and online dictionaries play a vital role here. I had once mentioned Shabdnidhi, an AJAX enabled online English – Hindi dictionary. Priyankoo, who is the first Assamese blogger, recently informed me about another such project called Xobdo, an online English-Assamiya dictionary. [...]

Wordpress Sidebar Widgets have been the latest buzz in the blogdom. Indeed these Widgets elevate Wordpress’ standing among the blogwares and encourage community to contribute to the project. With Sidebar widgets, things have become as easy as drag and drop, though you would need “widget compliant” themes. I still wish Wordpress had done something with [...]

Ok I admit that I never made a formal announcement about it, but this blog has now moved to its new home at http://nullpointer.debashish.com. If you are reading this, you are at the right URL.
This blog used to be happily hosted at the excellent free service provided by the JRoller people. Roller is one of [...]

Shunya promises to bring news for Indian techies by Indian techies.
They say everything started from shunya (Sanskrit for absolute nothingness). And Shunya seems to be a good beginning for Indian techies. Move away Slashdot, Shunya claims to be the Indian Slashdot but would probably try to be different (”It started when slashdot rejected a story [...]

XML feeds are the way today to keep a tab on what’s happening in the blogosphere as well as to know about site updates and new additions. I had heard about two popular open source feature-rich Java APIs to deal with the feeds, Rome and Informa but could never really savor them. For one of [...]

I recently had a task wherein I was required to call few Perl routines from inside my Java class. You must be saying, what’s the big deal? Runtime.exec is what one needs. You are dead right, this comes to rescue when ones needs to call a non-Java process or an executable. With this, I was [...]

Thousands of issues are raised everyday in blogs and among all those heavily opinionated posts, sometimes you wish you could get to know about both sides of a story, effortlessly. Opinmind is a new blog-search engine that does precisely that. It displays both the “positive” and “negative” opinions on the searched topic, with a “sentimeter” [...]

Google has expanded on this idea of customization of their homepage and now you can come-up with your own custom widgets for the whole world to use. Within days of Yahoo releasing version three of its widgets, Google has made its API to make modules public for developers to create modules, possibly host them at [...]

Yahoo has acquired del.icio.us, the pioneering social bookmarking service made by Joshua Schachter, an unpredictable yet great move for the giant after the Flicker buy. With Yahoo hopefully integrating and augmenting the services, it seems tagging would now be everywhere. What a tasty way to end the year!

I have been planning this for some time and it feels good bringing to you, Aavaran, a site where you can get new Blogger templates with, perhaps for the first time, ready templates for Hindi blogs. Apart from new templates that I propose to add, most of the templates would be adapted from popular themes [...]