S Anand

Here are the top 1000 most popular movies on the Internet Movie database, along with their ratings and number of votes. I've also marked whether I've seen them or not, as of today. This list, incidentally, is part of my source for the post on popular lousy movies. Here is the Excel list of Top 1000 movies on IMDb. Comments Arch 1 Dec 2006 10:14 am: Your site is too good.I browse thru so many blogs every other day, but hav found nothing as entertaining and as informative as this one. U must be really gifted fella…Y dont u post some pics of ur kid … err 1 Dec 2006 10:04 pm: is to do. S Anand 1 Dec 2006 10:35 pm: Thanks, Arch. I haven’t gotten around to posting any family stuff. No specific reason. Maybe I will… Michelle 5 Dec 2006 12:36 pm: You have been writing movies, do you have top 10 books? DeuceLee 11 Dec 2009 2:37 am: Hi, I really love your imdb top 1000. Seriously it’s great info. Can you get an updated version from imdb and swivel? Looks like it’s been a while (2006). :-) Andreas Beer 20 Oct 2010 4:38 pm: Dude, you seriously should watch Yojimbo! Masterpiece! :D

Here’s a “music video” with brilliant video editing.

My digital camera conked off. The cover that holds the battery fell off, and I can’t use it any more. I went back to my buying principles, and prepared an Excel sheet to choose my next camera. Here’s what I was looking for: Low-light photography. Flashes are lousy. This effectively means I need ISO control. Shutter speed control. I sometimes take really long exposure (3-10s) snaps, and sometimes can’t afford the blur (1/250s). Long battery life. My current camera consumed batteries like crazy. Fast start-up. By the time I got my earlier camera out and it started, it was too late. RAW mode. Gives me more control in Photoshop. I didn’t care about: ...

Here are dialogues from famous English movies. Can you guess which movie they are from? (Don't forget The in front of some movies.) Comments Vivek 28 Jun 2010 7:31 pm: Excellent collections ANAND.. !!! hats off 2 u :) Cris 6 Dec 2010 2:18 am: Nice but how do we get the right answers??? Cool job. Rishi 26 Aug 2011 5:08 pm: Nice Quiz ………..?? how to get the answers…???

I am selecting a CRM package for a bank. I asked my colleagues how they’d gone about it, and got 8 responses. Every single one of them had the same weighting approach: Take a huge list of criteria, assign weights, score each package, calculate a weighted-average score, pick the highest one. As I mentioned earlier, I think weighting is a lousy method. (See Errors in multicriteria decision making.) You can’t say “I picked this package because it has X, Y and Z features, which the others don’t.” You can only say, “Oh, overall, it has the highest score…” ...

If you create a file in Windows Notepad with the string “bush hid the facts”, save it and reopen it, it shows you boxes. Same with “this app can break”. Here’s why. It has nothing to do with George Bush or Microsoft. It’s just that these strings are in ASCII, but they also constitute valid Unicode strings, and Notepad guesses (wrongly) that they are in fact Chinese Unicode files.

If you plot all movies by their number-of-votes on IMDb and their rating on IMDb, you get the chart below. Movies with more votes usually have a higher rating. I was interested two things: Which are the unpopular, but good (highly-rated), movies? Which are the popular, but lousy, movies? The answer to the first question is: there are no unpopular good movies. The cluster of dots on the top-left (in red) are not movies – they’re TV shows (Band of Brothers, Pride and Prejudice, Arrested Development). ...

I haven’t been blogging the last 6-7 weeks. This is partly because I’ve been averaging 1 book or movie per day, but mostly because I ran out of things to say. I will start again soon. In the meantime, this is an announcement I heard when travelling on the Jubilee line. (The train had halted at North Greenwich.) “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re being held at this station for a while. This is because, you’re not going to believe this, but we’re slightly early! We’re not due at North Greenwich for another 60 seconds. Once again, I apologise for the delay, which is because we’re early. ...

Wooden sculptures that move with the wind. These look more like huge insects than scuptures, really. Catch the videos of Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures on YouTube.

A timeline of Microsoft, Google and Yahoo acquisitions.

Programming theorems. The likelihood of Perl being involved in a system is directly proportional to the length of time the system has been in maintenance. Every 5 minutes you spend writing code in a new language is more useful than 5 hours reading blog posts about how great the language is. Think twice before presuming that CSV is a nice little easy file format. (see Leon)

The O’Reilly Code Quiz shows a snippet of code and asks you to guess which book it could be from (given a choice of 4). It’s addictive.

The myth of prodigy. Precociousness as a child is no indicator of future success.

Here is the background music from some Hindi songs between 1995-1999. Can you guess which movie they are from? Don't worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green. Comments Sarvadamana 13 Oct 2006 7:38 pm: 9/10 in the previous and 8/10 in this one. Is it possible to mail the answers for numbers 6 and 7 of this quiz and number-6 of hindi songs 2000s? amitabh biyani 21 Oct 2006 5:28 pm: 10 on 10 here :) good quiz sourish 21 Dec 2006 3:01 am: 10/10 deepak joshi 6 Oct 2012 5:49 am: thank you

1.5 million internal e-mails of Enron were released after it collapsed, to help figure out why. The UC Berkeley Enron Email Analysis Project has some links analysing these emails. Check out the visual analysis. Comments Prakash Ayer 9 Oct 2006 3:03 pm: Hi Anand, Did you mean Enron instead of Amazon here? Take Care S Anand 9 Oct 2006 3:15 pm: Gosh, yes – sorry, typo on my side. (Wonder why that happened… must’ve been sleep-typing :-) Ravi 16 Oct 2006 6:51 pm: Along the same network visualization lines, http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html and http://liveplasma.com/ are pretty interesting too. Or if you like Digg, http://labs.digg.com/swarm/ works too. (drop me a line some time Anand - kumar (pulli) venkateswar (at) gmail (pulli) com) Irrexu 27 Oct 2006 5:06 am: Long time since you’ve posted any article on your site.. Anand, just a suggestion though.. I think you should start writing more about yourself and the latest in your life.. I am sure there are a lot of takers for that like me. Cheers!

I talked about my approach for multicriteria decision-making, and mentioned that it was fundamentally flawed. Here’s why. The charts above compared two industries. The bigger the area, the more favourable the industry. The underlying assumptions being: The criteria are comparable. (Points at the same level are of comparable importance. Twice as large is twice as important.) All (and only) relevant criteria have been included. In this particular example, I know for a fact that both these assumptions are invalid. And in every case I used this methodology, the assumptions fail. ...

These are pavement drawings. They are NOT 3D objects. But it’s hard to believe. (Even the shadows are perfect.) See more at Julian Beaver’s site. Comments Abbie 9 Oct 2006 12:00 pm: hey these are cool drawing they actualy look 3-D and like the come right out of the ground alex meneses 9 Oct 2006 12:00 pm: UNBELIEVABLE……AMAZING…..WISH I CAN SEE YOUR DRAWINGS IN PERSON….

Here is the background music from some Hindi songs from the 2000s. Can you guess which movie they are from? Don't worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green. Comments Mihir 13 Mar 2009 6:44 am: Hey, Anand.Great work !!! Keep it up… One question, from which song is the 1st piece ? Dhar 8 Oct 2006 9:29 pm: A friggin 0 outta 10. :( S Anand 9 Oct 2006 7:13 am: You really need to start watching Hindi movies, buddy ;-) Dr. Atul Garg 9 Oct 2006 10:56 am: Pretty good quiz. I scored 5/10 and I think I recognised a few other tunes but couldn’t guess the movie. I couldn’t even cheat from the page source code, couldn’t be bothered to go into JS scripts to get the answers. Thanks. Nice one !! Good website too. S Anand 9 Oct 2006 12:04 pm: Thanks! (I did go to some pains to encrypt the answers, so the JS scripts wouldn’t have helped either :-) Venkatesh S 12 Oct 2006 12:17 pm: Hi Anand, This is Venky, Batch of 2000 from IIMB…good to connect after ages! Great Quiz..I got 6/10..let’s keep in touch. Cheers! S Anand 12 Oct 2006 8:12 pm: Hi Venky! Great to hear from you. Will mail you. Sandeep 20 Oct 2006 2:16 pm: 9/10 mate. But could not guess the first one. amitabh biyani 21 Oct 2006 5:37 pm: 9/10 here too. don’t know the 1st one Rajesh 1 Nov 2006 3:00 pm: 9/10: Whats the first one? SHAMIT 27 Apr 2007 1:36 pm: First one is Swades ;) sonu goyal 20 May 2007 3:13 am: aaaa anusha 8 Oct 2006 12:00 pm: I scored 9/10…whats the 4th one…. nabanita 8 Oct 2006 12:00 pm: hehehhh it was gr8….!! nice test..!! hav sum more?? Anson 22 Nov 2008 11:09 pm: Scored 9/10… the 4th audio is a bit difficult. Anyway, good work, Anand… Keep it up. Rivjot 12 Mar 2009 8:57 am: 10/10 too easy, should have made a little harder appreciate the efforts for putting the quiz though, i love ur blog :D Anup 4 Nov 2009 11:13 pm: 10 on 10. Very easy ones. Anil 8 Jul 2010 3:59 pm: got all ten.. 1st one confused me for a while though.. nirmala 18 Dec 2010 8:34 pm: 5 n 10 coulndt find…help pls

When I wrote my Tamil song lyrics quizzes, I had two problems: I can't write in Tamil (not on paper, nor on a computer) I can't spell right in Tamil (ந vs ன, ர vs ற) I overcame the first using a Tamil transliterator. I write in English, and you see it in Tamil. The problem of ந vs ன was simple. ந occurs as the first letter of a word, and just before த. Nowhere else. (Is this always true?) ...

Video of Guy Kawasaki’s talk on The Art of the Start at TiECon 2006. It’s informative, even if you don’t want to start a venture, but I didn’t know Guy was such a funny speaker! He begins with: Early in my career, I sat through many keynote speeches – at Comdex, at Mac Road Expo. I saw many many hi-tech CEOs speak, and I have to tell you, one thing I noticed is they pretty much sucked as speakers. And the second thing that I figured out sitting in these audiences of sucky keynotes is that if there’s anything that’s worse than a CEO who sucks as a speaker, it’s a CEO who sucks as a speaker and you have no idea how much longer he or she will suck! And so, I have adopted the top 10 format for all of my speeches. This way, if you think I suck, at least you can track progress through my speech. ...