2005

A corollary of Rule 3: Never type the same formula twice. Design the formula so that if you cut and paste it elsewhere, it works correctly. The $ symbol and the F4 key for cell references help in 90% of the cases. For complex requirements and large data, 5 functions come in handy: INDIRECT, OFFSET, ADDRESS, ROW and COLUMN. I once did a survey, and had data spread across 300 sheets (same format on all sheets). I needed cell D3 across all sheets in a column, to summarise the results. The image explains what I did. ...

10 most puzzling artefacts.

Super cooled water.

Research suggests that chimps learn differently from humans. When they showed the chimpanzees how to retrieve the food, the researchers added some unnecessary steps. Those chimps could see that the scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the top. None followed suit. They all went straight for the door. The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway. ...

Quote by Herbert Simon on Information: What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. It sounds quite like the Scientific American article The Tyranny of Choice which says that after a point, more choice causes unhappiness. The satisfaction of picking the best choice is less, because the second best is almost as good. And you’re more likely to not pick the best – because there are so many choices – and will regret it more often. ...

Da Vinci Code trailers. Comments Sai 15 Dec 2005 9:56 pm: Anand, tell us a bit about Infosys consulting. They seem to be on a big expansion drive. Hows it out there? S Anand 16 Dec 2005 7:32 am: I can mail you, Sai. What’s your e-mail ID? S Anand 16 Dec 2005 9:39 am: BTW, the del.icio.us tag on “The Da Vinci Code” is an anagram: c i con thee david. Sai 16 Dec 2005 7:42 pm: Anand it is [email protected] Sai 16 Dec 2005 7:46 pm: Thanks!

All Apple advertisements

Real-life Calvin snow art.

An article on NYT about Ray Ozzie: can this man reprogram Microsoft?

Yahoo buys del.icio.us.

I don’t like hunting for new songs either. Too much effort. External recommendations like Raaga Top 10 help, but not much. I usually like only 1 of the top 10. I don’t really know the recent music directors. But many interesting songs I’ve heard recently (like Ondra Renda in Kakka Kakka, Vaseegara in Minnale, and Kaadhalikkum in Chellame) are by Harris Jayaraj. So maybe if I can find the music directors I like, other songs by them would be good recommendations. ...

I have a large MP3 collection (Tamil and Hindi films). I don’t like selecting songs to listen to. Too much effort. I rated all songs I had listened to (650 songs x 5-10 seconds = 1-2 hrs) and created 7 SmartViews. I just go to one of these and play them in order. Here are my views, in descending order of their use. Most played. Sorted by Play Count. Songs I play the most. Plays stuff I listen to usually. Not heard recently. Played Last before 3 months ago AND Rating >= 3. Plays good songs I haven’t heard recently. Not played much or recently. Played Last before 1 month ago AND Play Count <= 2 AND Rating >= 3. Plays good songs I haven’t heard often enough. Recent hits. Last updated after 3 months ago AND Play count >= 3. Plays songs recently added and liked. Recently played. Sorted by Last Updated. Often, I like to listen to songs I listened to yesterday. Top rated. Sorted by Rating. My best songs. (Suprisingly, I don’t use this view much.) Recently added. Sorted by Played Last. Plays songs I just downloaded. But WinAmp’s not good enough. For example, I can’t find out what songs I played at least thrice last month. How do I see what I’ve been listening to a lot recently? Fortunately, there are a few WinAmp history plugins. I installed Pepper, which produces a log file that can be analysed. I did this two weeks ago, and don’t have enough data. When I do, I’ll modify two views ...

Rule #3: Avoid manual labour (continued) Reconciling data is where I spend most of my time on Excel. Say you have a list of branches by city from 2 banks. You want to know where both banks have branches. Excel doesn’t know that Kolkata is Calcutta. There are 500 cities, and you have 30 minutes. Use VLOOKUP for a start. If Bank A’s cities are in column A (say 2-500) and Bank B’s cities in column B (say 2-400), in C2 type VLOOKUP(A2, B$2:B$400, 1, 0) (read Excel help – all I’ll say is, don’t miss out the 0 at the end: otherwise you get approximate match, and that’s not good). Copy the formula to down to C500. Similarly, in D2 type VLOOKUP(B2, A$2:A$500, 1, 0). Copy the formula down to D400. ...

Windows Live Local tries to match Google Maps. But Google Maps is just too fast. As I mentioned earlier (Why Google Reader): the reason I like Google is largely speed.>

Microsoft’s IT department has used the Theory of Constraints in software development. Comments Suresh 17 May 2006 5:39 am: Interesting and informative

Tech books for free from O’Reilly. Speaking of which, it looks like you can read whole books on Google Print.

Top lists for 2005 – books, movies, etc.

Hilarious post on how to stop filesharers from stealing hotel bandwidth. So, I’m in Milwaukee at ye olde Holiday Inn Express. They have a wireless internet connection here and it’s been suckin’ all night, like I couldn’t even do anything on it. I suspected someone running a p2p program and taking up all of the bandwidth, so I fired up ntop to analyze the type of traffic on the network, and just who it was generating it. Lo and behold, someone was running a p2p app, and taking up 1.6Mbit worth of bandwidth. That’s just not fair to the 20 other people on the network, so I decided to boot him from the network. I tried poisoning his arp cache and the default gateway’s cache, but that only works on some wireless access points, apparently not this one. I can’t send an 802.11 deauth message from my OS X box, because the card doesn’t support raw packet injection, so what to do??? I notice that his IP in the ntop interface changed into a name. His windows machine was spewing Netbios packets with his computer name in it. For the sake of his privacy, I’ve changed the name, but let’s say it was “smith-laptop”. So I pick up my cellphone and call the front desk at the hotel and as for Mr. Smith’s room. The lady at the front desk says “Eric Smith?” And I tell her yes. The phone rings, someone picks up, the conversation goes like this: Me: Eric Smith? Eric: Uhh, yeah? Me: My name is Jim Grant, and I’m an investigator with the RIAA. Have you heard of us? Eric: Uhhhhh….. What does that stand for? Me: Recording Industry Association of America. We represent several large record companies. In monitoring several p2p filesharing networks, we have found that you Eric, are currently downloading copyrighted material. Are you aware that this is illegal? Eric: Ummm…. my laptop is off. (At this point, I no longer see him on the network) Me: We are in the process of filing 18182 lawsuits against people who steal copyrighted music on the internet. We will continue monitoring these networks, and if we see you on them again, you will hear back from us. Eric: Ok, thanks. Bye. So, now my network is nice and speedy again. And some guy is in his room trying to dry out his underwear. :) I should have recorded the call since my cellphone has the capability to record conversations. The above conversation can’t even begin to show the fear in his voice. I’m sure he’s scared as hell wondering how they found out his name and that he was staying at a hotel and exactly what room he was in. ...

Benford’s Law: how to spot fake data.

500 mile e-mail: the story of a server that would not send e-mail beyond 500 miles.