Software for my new laptop 2

Time for a new laptop, and to replace software. Here’s my new list. A lot has changed in the last 5 years. Mainly, I use the browser, cygwin and Portable Apps a lot more. (The last is to escape jailers, not registry bloat.) Media Chrome [new]: For browsing and development. Fast, light, and stays out of the way. Firefox: I keep it just for printing. Chrome sucks at printing. Media Player Classic: Nothing against it, but I decided to stick to just one app, which is… VLC: Continues to be the best media player, IMHO. WinAmp: I just manage my playlists as M3U files, using Python programs. Audacity: Still the easiest way to record audio. Camstudio: The simplest free portable screen capture software I know. PicPick [new]: Lightweight, powerful screenshot grabber VirtualDub: Not the simplest, but still good for what I need: cropping and joining video. MediaCoder [new]: Good for video/audio conversions. Maybe I’ll install this later. Foxit Reader: The simples free portable PDF reader I know, better than… NitroPDF Reader [new]: … which is good for Printing PDFs – better than… Primo PDF: … which has trouble on rare occasions. Microsoft Reader: I have a lot of ebooks in .LIT. Kindle for PC [new]: I don’t own a Kindle, but I’ve bought a few ebooks. Paint.NET: Good enough for cropping and adjusting colours on images. Windows Live Writer [new]: The best way to write this blog WYSIWYG Inkscape [new]: I occasionally edit vector graphics. Google Earth. Google Maps is good enough. ImgBurn: I no longer use CDs/DVDs. Just flash drives and external hard disks. Picasa: I’ve stopped browsing pictures. No time. Sharing ...

Faster data crunching

I’ve been playing with big data lately. The good part is, it’s easy to get interesting results. The data is so unwieldy that even average value calculations provoke a “Amazing! I didn’t know that,” response (No exaggeration. I heard this from two separate ~ $1bn businesses this month.) The bad part is that calculating even that simple average is slow. For example, take this 40MB file (380MB unzipped) and extract the first column. ...