How I do things

I have a new home page design. (If you’re reading the RSS feed, check the home page.) One reason is that the old home page’s design sucked. Almost everyone told me that it was drab in black and white. Personally, I think the new home page sucks in terms of colours as well. There’s too many. I suck at picking colours. The only good thing about these colours is that I left it to the judgement of experts. These are the colours in Powerpoint 2007’s “Concourse” theme color, and I’ve just lifted them. ...

Opening programs from the Start - All Programs menu is painful. For many years, I relied on the quick launch bar. But it’s space constrained. There are only so many applications you can place there. I want space enough for frequently used documents as well. Recently, I decided that I need all the space on the screen. So my task bar is on auto hide, and that makes the quick launch bar a little tougher to use as well. And finally, I can’t use the quick launch bar with the keyboard. That’s important. ...

Some years ago, a friend asked me to write about how I manage my time. It seemed to him I was doing a good job of it, given that I had time to pursue my interests. It’s something I tried to do consciously. Every few years, I used to go down the route of “time management”. I’d read stuff and try it out. But over time, I’ve come to believe that “time” is not really “manageable”. Think about it: are most of your actions planned? Me, I just react out of habit, no matter how well planned I try to be. What I do is largely driven by what I’m in the habit of doing. ...

I have the habit of reading books on the screen. It’s something that started from the early 90s, when I got a copy of The MIT Guide to Lockpicking. Since I didn’t have access to a printer, I’d spent hours poring over the document on the screen. And then I discovered Project Gutenburg… I’ve heard many people ask if I have a problem with this. Personally, no. I’ve been staring at screens from the age of 12, and I’m quite used to it. My job requires me to stare at a screen for most of the day anyway. (I’m not saying there’s no a strain on the eye. My eyes are red at the end of the day. I don’t know if they would be less red if I’d been staring at paper instead of a screen. But my glasses have remained roughly the same power over ~15 years, so it’s probably not ruining my eyesight much.) For those who are like me who reads all the time and spends a lot of more time facing their laptops, you might want to check this sd card, a very good quality card that can be handy in the future. ...

I’m thinking of buying a digital keyboard with touch sensitive keys and MIDI support. (The one other thing that I thought off – a pitch bend – puts the keyboards out of my budget.) I’d like a good deal. (Who doesn’t?) But I don’t like to spend time searching for one. (Who does?) So here’s the plan. Firstly, I’ll restrict my search to Amazon.co.uk. For electronics items, I haven’t found anyone consistently cheaper. Tesco has some pretty low prices, but not the range. eBuyer is pretty good, but not often enough. Google Products is the only other one that gets me consistent lower prices, but I’ve had my credit card identity stolen once before while shopping online, so I’d rather not pick any random seller listed on Google. ...

If something goes wrong with my site, I like to know of it. My top three problems are: The site is down A page is missing Javascript isn’t working This article covers the second topic. One thing I’m curious about is hits to non-existent pages (404s) on my site. I usually get 404s because: I renamed the page Someone typed a wrong URL Someone followed a wrong link Find the 404 ...

If something goes wrong with my site, I like to know of it. My top three problems are: The site is down A page is missing Javascript isn’t working I’ll talk about how I manage these over 3 articles. My site used to go down a lot. Initially that was because I kept playing around with mod_rewrite and other Apache modules without quite understanding them. I’d make a change and upload it without testing. (I’m like that.) And then I’d go to sleep. ...

I have only two problems with Google Reader. The first is that it doesn’t support authenticated feeds. Ideally, I’d have liked to have a single reading list that combines my e-mail with newsfeeds. GMail offers RSS feeds of your e-mail. But the feeds require authentication (obviously) and Google Reader doesn’t support that right now. (So I usually don’t read e-mail :-) The second is that it’s tough to manage large feeds. It’s a personal quirk, really. I like to read all entries. If there are 100, I read all 100. If there are 1000, I struggle but read all 1000. I’m too scared to “Mark all read” because there are some sources that I don’t want to miss. ...

If a site doesn't have an RSS feed, your simplest option is to use Page2Rss, which gives a feed of what's changed on a page. My needs, sometimes, are a bit more specific. For example, I want to track new movies on the IMDb Top 250. They don't offer a feed. I don't want to track all the other junk on that page. Just the top 250. There's a standard called XPath. It can be used to search in an HTML document in a pretty straightforward way. Here are some examples: ...

I’ve stopped visiting websites. No, really. There’s only one website I visit these days. Google Reader. Google Reader is a feed reader. If you want to just catch up on the new stuff on a site, you can add the site to Google Reader. Anything new that is published on the site appears in Google Reader. Right now, I’ve subscribed to over 50 feeds. There’s no way I can remember to visit 50 sites – so I’m actually able to read more and miss less. ...

In those early days, when all I had was an analog SLR, I had to make choices up-front. Do I buy an ISO 100 film for daytime shooting? (It’s cheaper, besides.) Do I go in for the expensive ISO 1600 film for my fancy night shots? Do I lug around the tripod? Do I use the flash? Do I even bother taking indoor shots? etc. With my new digital camera, at least the ISO choice vanishes. The ISO range varies from 64 to 1600. And so, I don’t need flash or a tripod most of the time. ...

My music search engine takes quite a while to load (typically 40 seconds). That's an unusually long time for a page, given that most of the people that access it are on broadband connections, and are listening to music online. The reason is, firstly, that I'm loading a lot of data. Literally every single song on that you can search comes through as Javascript. All the downloadable Hindi songs, for instance, occupy 1.3 megabytes before compression. On average, this takes about 20 seconds to load. ...

I’m been using a shared hosting service with 100 WebSpace over the last 7 years. It’s an ad-free account that offers 100MB of space and 3GB of bandwidth per month. Things were fine until two months ago, which was when my song search engines started attracting an audience. I had anticipated that I might run out of bandwidth, so I used a different server (that has 5GB of bandwidth per month quota) for loading the songs. But what I didn’t anticipate whas that my server load would run over the allotted CPU limit. ...

The Internet has a lot of tamil song lyrics in English. Finding them is not easy, though. Two problems. The lyrics are fragmented: there's no one site to search them. And Google doesn't help. It doesn't know that alaipaayudhe, alaipaayuthe and alaipayuthey are the same word. This is similar to the problem I faced with tamil audio. The solution, as before, is to make an index, and provide a search interface that is tolerant of English spellings of Tamil words. But I want to go a step further. Is it possible to display these lyrics in Tamil? ...

I often need to extract words out of sentences. It’s one of the things I used to build the Statistically Improbable Phrases for Calvin and Hobbes. But splitting a sentence into words isn’t as easy as you think. Think about it. What is a word? Something that has spaces around it? OK, let’s start with the simplest way to get words: split by spaces. Consider this piece: "I'd look at McDonald's," he said. "They sell over 3,000,000 burgers a day -- at $1.50 each." High-fat foods were the rage. For e.g., margins in fries were over 50%... and (except for R&M & Dyana [sic]) everyone was at ~30% net margin; growing at 25% too! Splitting this by spaces (consider new lines, tabs, etc as spaces too.), we get the following: ...

In some of the Web projects I'm working on, I have a choice of many small files vs few big files to download. There are conflicting arguments. I've read that many small files are better, because you can choose to use only the required files, and they'll be cached across the site. (These are typically CSS or Javascript files.) On the other hand, a single large file takes less time to download than the sum on many small files, because there's less latency. (Latency is more important than bandwidth these days.) ...

Two weeks ago, I pulled together a Media PC. This has been a long-term ambition. I’ve always wanted to have a PC as the centre of all my media. To use it as a radio, TV, stereo system, CD player, DVD player, etc. I finally did it, for just under 1000 pounds. At the centre of the setup is my 42" Plasma TV (LG 42PC1D). I was debating between a plasma and LCD TV. The differences, as I understand them, are: ...

Click here to search for Hindi songs. This is an article on how I wrote the search engine. I find it a nuisance to have to go to Raaga, search for a song, not find it, then go to MusicIndiaOnline, not find it, then go to Musicplug.in, and so on until Google. So I got the list of songs from some of these sites, put it together in one place, and implemented a find-as-you-type. ...

My earlier list of statistically improbable phrases in Calvin and Hobbes is technically just a list of “Statistically Improbable Words”. I re-did the same analysis using phrases. Here are the top 20 statistically improbable phrases (2 - 4 words only): baby sitter chocolate frosted sugar bombs comic books doing homework fearless spaceman spiff() good night hamster huey ice cream miss wormwood new year peanut butter really think slimy girls spaceman spiff stuffed tiger stupendous man sugar bombs susie derkins watch tv water balloon That is, these are the 2-4 word phrases whose frequency in Calvin and Hobbes is substantially (at least 5 times) higher than in the other books I have. ...

These are the most bookmarked pages on my site: My home page Excel tips Calvin & Hobbes quotes (I typed them all) Indian torrents (I have a search engine for Indian torrents) Tamil Transliterator (Lets you type Tamil in English) Tamil songs quiz Movie quote quiz My best links Top 10 lists But this post is not about these links. It’s about how I found this out. Think about it… how could I know what pages have been bookmarked? The browser doesn’t send any information about bookmarks. ...