Here’s a small neat script that I coded yesterday in about 1.5 hours – Wikislate

The script was created to simplify a process that I’ve been using for some time. Being a math&cs student, I’ve acquired the unique mathematical-technical jargon (and I keep doing so).
The problem is that I live and study in Israel – in the Hebrew language. Given the fact that there’s a great English mathematical knowledge-base online (Wolfram is the first website that crosses my mind right now), I had to know the English equivalents of the Hebrew mathematical terms.
The method that I found was to load up the Hebrew Wikipedia page for the term, and then look for the English interwiki link – for the English version of the article.
Most of the time, I only had to read the title of the English page to know I was at the right place.

Yesterday night, after desperately trying to get asleep (my brain suddenly decided to start intensive thinking the night before an exam – took me 2 hours to get asleep) , I came up with the idea to code a quick and simple PHP script that will do the work for me, and act as my scientific terms dictionary. I had some spare ( I decided it was spare ) time, and the above code was the result of a quick coding session. As the code came along, I thought that incorporating Google’s “Did you mean” is a neat feature. So in case a term wasn’t found, it tries the Google search for it, just to get the “Did you mean” line for you

I hope other people will find it useful. I might improve it, making it use shiny AJAX and maybe even have a db store the searched terms for autocompletion.
I have the intention to write a bit about how it was done (really fairly simple) – again, if there’s enough interest.

Enjoy, and please comment about it!