Chennai gets a spanking new website

The new website of the Corporation of Chennai has not only caught me off guard, but left me gaping in awe. This could very well be the best designed corporation website in the country beating Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and even the country’s IT capital Bangalore in terms of visual design. There was no way i would have ever expected this from the CoC. Even more surprising is the footer which reads “© 2008 Corporation of Chennai” and not some 3rd rate web developer. Surely this cant have been done by the in house IT unit in the Ripon building, no way in hell.

Apart from stealing my photo off wikipedia, i have no complaints with their work, whoever it was. Now lets hope they keep it updated and make it more informative. This is a great start, and hopefully signs of things to come for this city.

I think the corporation has been doing some really commendable things of late and they deserve praise for that. I have always wanted to meet a ward councillor and see how much they really care about the city and its residents. So one of these weekends, Im planning to go to my corp zone office and see how receptive they are to my idea to have detailed neighbourhood maps at bus stops. Or if anyone knows a councillor personally, do let me know.

Creating the ultimate mashup

All the geek talk on the block somehow seems to revolve around mashups these days. Mashups, quite a tasty sounding word i know, but unfortunately its not something that you can put into your mouth, rather its the term for nifty little applications created by bringing together existing web content from different sources and integrating it into to bring you something a lot more useful.

The best part about them is that you make use of content already available in the web galaxy. However, making applications always involved reading through insomnia-curing api documentation and knowhow of html, javascript and other stuff that could make you forget english.

Nooo, Orkut is closing down!!!

yes its true,  looks like the infidel bots have done even google in this time. The bot accounts, those irritating ones that keep posting crap in you scrapbook have taken up so many names that only 57 are left, meaning that orkut was only designed for the current 40million users or .006% of the worlds population. Whats worse is that the overpaid smart guys down at mountain view dont know how to differentiate between a bot and a human account.

But thankfully the director of orkut, Ms Diana, has a great idea up her pants.

Take the madrasi test

 
saary ba, ennaku engilis puriyadhu

So you been living in Chennai for long? You think you deserve to be called a Madrasi? Are you fluent with the madras lingo?

Take the Test of Tamil as a foreign language (TOTFL) to find out. 

And if you’re new to Chennai, you can use the wikipedia guide on the madras baashai as a reference.

So, Bazarlai ushara illaina nijara kalatidu vaanga

The ball factory

When youfeel you have a lot of free time on your hands…
go figure