Going through my RSS feeds this morning I found this Ninja name translation table:

I thought that was a perfect candidate for a YQL table, so I made one. So find out your Ninja name in the YQL console.

Conversion was easy – simply convert the table to a hash, check that the user has not entered any non-alpha characters, lowercase and loop over the different characters with a lookup. You can see the source of the table on github

Yours, mirishikiari.

Things that made me happy this morning.

• Changing a staircase into a massive piano makes 60% more people use it instead of the escalators – fun is the best way to make people use things.
• You can do vocoding with a Piano
• YQL meets SPARQL
• Kayak releases trends data – sadly enough not as a data API but as graphs
• Twig is a PHP5 templating engine with security baked in.
• Rails 3.0 now has XSS protection built in – congrats, guys.
• Michael Moore’s new web site is based on Django and here’s some info how they made it scale.
• This site is under construction is probably the best “under construction” animation collection ever.
• Google Moderator is a great app to collect questions for a final panel of a conference.
• Lego Mindstorm robots solving Rubik’s cubes – SkyNet has nothing on them
• Old point and click adventures in Canvas – play Leisure Suit Larry as a multiplayer game.
• The YQLEX builder is a nice mashup of the YUI grids builder and YQL

Avast! Saturday is the annual talk like a pirate day and my colleague Tom Croucher has done a tremendous job to create a YQL solution for translation of English to Pirate

In essence he used YQL to store a translation data set and allows us to alter it using the update and storage parts of YQL. He has come up with a few great things to use for talk like a pirate day:

A script to include into any page that will automatically convert it to pirate speak:

A bookmarklet to translate any web site: piratize (drag it to your links toolbar).

An open YQL table to add to the pirate dictionary.

Using this, I built the following interfaces:

• The Pirate Dictionary add-to form
• The ARRPI – an API to translate from English to Pirate
• The Pirate Translator form with tweet button

Have a great talk like a pirate day! Sadly enough I’ll be Aarrr-ing down from a plane as I am flying back to the UK on that date.

This morning I found this wonderful blog post that shows what happens when you run the “never gonna give you up” aka. RickRoll lyrics through an automated translation tool and back into English.

This has been a classic time waster using Babelfish in the past for me and I thought we could knock it up a notch and used YQL and the Google Translation API to automate this process.

Check out Rickrollwhisper to see the results.

Google Translate is one of the Open Data Tables built by the outside community for YQL and you can use it simply by providing a source text and the language to translate to:

select * from google.translate where q=”this is a test” and target=”de”;

Try it out for yourself or see it in the console.

The result is the text as a translatedText element:

true


	

	

	
185

178

2426





Dies ist ein Test

Using this, I simply took an array of supported languages and took a random one each time I translated the lyrics:

$lyrics = “We’re no strangers to love,

[…]

I just wanna tell you how I’m feeling,

Gotta make you understand”;


	
$target = getlanguage();

$t = getstuff($lyrics,$target);

$trans1 = ‘
‘.$t.’
‘.

‘
Language: ‘.$target.’
‘;

$target2 = $target;

while($target2 == $target){

$target2 = getlanguage();

}

	
$t = getstuff($t,$target2);

$trans2 = ‘
‘.$t.’
‘.

‘
Language: ‘.$target2.’
‘;

$result = getstuff($t,’en’);


	
function getlanguage(){

$languages = array(‘it’,’nl’,’fr’,’de’,’sv’,’pl’,’ro’);

return $languages[rand(0,sizeof($languages)-1)];

}

	
function getstuff($text,$target){

$root = ‘http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?env=’.

‘http%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltables.env&format=json&q=’;

$yql = ‘select * from google.translate where q=”’.$text.’”’.

’ and target=”’.$target.’”’;

$url = $root.urlencode($yql);

$curl_handle = curl_init();

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);

curl_close($curl_handle);

if (empty($buffer)){

return ‘Error retrieving data, please try later.’;

} else {

$json = json_decode($buffer);

$result = $json->query->results->translatedText;

return $result;

}
	
}

Maybe I find the time to create the multitranslate as an open table to make this more generic.

• Momentile has an IE6 message screen full of awesome
• A nice YQL open table to allow for multi queries
• Seeing that Facebook redirects vanity URLs with JavaScript, I thought I grab http://www.facebook.com/window.location.href
• Is it irony or by design that the London 2600 site has an invalid certificate ?
• The top 50 of words people looked up in NYT articles – I do like “fecklessness”
• “select * from weather.local where location in (select id from weather.search where query=’barcelona,spain’)” is a YQL statement that finally allows you to do a weather forecast by city name instead of weird city IDs. result, console.
• A nice Base64 encoding tool for images.
• Norwegians, baking soda and water spells doom (or clever viral, but heck – it is funny)
• You know mankind is doomed when we need the comfort wipe
• If you are a fan of the full English, check out the 10 pound breakfast
• 20 people wearing shirts they shouldn’t – slightly NSFW
• Chinese farmer build helicopter made from scrap metal – it worked for the A-Team, why not?
• Tattoos explained by location means I don’t have to pay tax anymore?
• elephants crossing a river looks fun