Blog

Tips, tutorials and the stories behind my projects and tools.

AI

AI For Progammers – Tips & Tricks

Having been in the industry for more than two decades, I’ve seen several “revolutions” come and go—the shift to web-native apps, the rise of cloud computing, and the transition to mobile-first development. Each of these changed what we built. However, the current AI boom is fundamentally different because it is changing how we build.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI has moved beyond simple autocomplete. We are no longer looking at just a “better Google search”; we are looking at a collaborative partner that sits inside our IDE. For “old school” developers like myself, it takes time to fully embrace this shift and ride along with a totally different style of problem-solving…

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OpenAI ChatGPT Subtitles Translation

I’m sure you have heard, and most probably also used, OpenAI Chat-GPT by now. And in case you don’t know what it is, why don’t you ask it yourself. Yes, it can answer this and many other questions with tremendous detail and creativity. Here is its response, when I asked this chatbot “What is Chat-GPT?”:

Chat-GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a type of natural language processing (NLP) model developed by OpenAI, based on the GPT architecture. It is a large language model trained on a vast amount of data to generate human-like responses to natural language inputs. Chat-GPT can perform a variety of NLP tasks such as language translation, text summarization, question-answering, and conversational agent…

And while all its language-processing capabilities are amazing (sometimes unbelievable), here we are mostly interested in its “translation” function and how we can use it to translate subtitles…

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Multiple Target Languages Subtitles Translation

After years of requests, and contemplating on the idea, I’m pleased to announce that DeepL translation service is finally integrated in my Online Subtitles Translator. You can now enjoy their great machine translation to translate subtitles too. This is hopefully a good news to start the new year. I’m watching you 2021!

As you may have guessed, unfortunately, this one is also a paid translation service, and is based on the same payment model as already supported Microsoft Azure translation. But I think this will still be way cheap option compared to human translation services, and hopefully its quality is somewhat acceptable too.

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DeepL Subtitles Translation

After years of requests, and contemplating on the idea, I’m pleased to announce that DeepL translation service is finally integrated in my Online Subtitles Translator. You can now enjoy their great machine translation to translate subtitles too. This is hopefully a good news to start the new year. I’m watching you 2021!

As you may have guessed, unfortunately, this one is also a paid translation service, and is based on the same payment model as already supported Microsoft Azure translation. But I think this will still be way cheap option compared to human translation services, and hopefully its quality is somewhat acceptable too.

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Subtitles Translation using Baidu (Beta)

I’m please to announced that the Subtitles Translator now support the English to Chinese translation using the baidu translation API.

The main reason to support this was some requests from Chinese community that the translation done by Google or Bing to Chinese was not that great. I don’t know how bad the translation was, but I take their words, and thought to better integrate translation API from people who speak Chinese with high hopes that it performs better…

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Jack Sparrow Compass 3.0

After some long pause, there is one more update for the Jack Sparrow Compass App. The new 3.0 release includes some major user-interface tweaks and improvements for the static and mobile locations. Some of the prominent new features includes (but not limited to):

– New integrated map view for both static and mobile locations.
– Easy access to permission and log page for mobile locations.
– Smart and secure location sharing protocol.
– Andy many small bug fixes…

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2 comments ASP.Net C#

C# SAML 2.0 SSO – Tips and Pitfalls

Recently, one of my clients decided to support the SAML 2.0 for SSO to their website. Since, the plan was to just support it as Service Provider, it was decided to use a custom implementation in C# as the overall concept and idea is of SAML sounds very simple. In the end, even though we were able to make the service work and running in less than 2 days for internal demo, we ran into many integration problem when working with Identity Providers of client using the different SAML 2.0 implementation on various platforms. We run into problems like:

– Some clients were using Deflated XML while others were not
– Encryption Algorithms Choice per client
– Difference in the NameID format being used
– Difference in how SAML attributes were being communicated/passed

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Android

Location Tracking and Sharing with Jack Sparrow Compass App

Jack Sparrow Compass Android App provides a simple and yet powerful interface to save any Geolocation, and then at any time get direction and distance to that saved Geolocation from your current location. This is good enough for most of Jack Sparrow fans, but the beauty of the legendary compass was that it can point to any thing you want at any time, and that thing can be moving as well. For example, if it was pointing to Dead Man’s Chest, it will keep point correctly to it no matter if it’s on land, carriage or on a ship.

Based on these lines, this new Jack Sparrow version brings this magical property to your beloved compass as well, and now it can not only point to a static geo-locations, but can also point accurately to any moving object or person. So, for example, if you want to track where your friend or family member is at this time, or where is your car at the exact current moment, using this app, you can get target mobile object exact location, distance and direction from your current position…

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