cygwin on S Anand

Software I currently use

Fri, 09 May 2014 17:19:34 +0000

Every few years, I review the software I use. Here are some of my earlier lists.

Right now, among browsers, Chrome is my primary browser. What’s interesting is that IE 11 has overtaken Firefox in terms of usage. That’s partly because we’re working with Microsoft a lot, but also because Firefox has a number of weird bugs like IE6 used to have, and is slowly lagging in the race.

Next to browsers, I spend most of my time on the command prompt. I use Console2 for tabbed console windows. Given the number of command prompts I open, this is often necessary. I use bash in Cygwin as the default shell. Haven’t had the need for PowerShell.

The only text editor I use is Sublime Text 3. This is the only text editor I’ve used for the last 3 years. The only plugin I use is PlainTasks which I use as my todo list. I write my blog posts in Windows Live Writer, which makes blogging offline quite painless.

For image editing, I use PicPick to capture screens and basic editing. Since I haven’t upgraded to Windows 8, I don’t have the snipping tool. But PicPick also lets me pick colors from the screen, which is pretty useful when copying designs. For slightly more serious editing like changing colours, adding annotations, etc., I use Paint.NET. It’s close enough to Photoshop for most practical uses. On rare occasions, I’ve needed to power of GIMP – especially to remove background on images. But when even this fails me, it’s ImageMagick to the rescue, with inscrutable command line options that can morph Obama into Osama. If I want to edit icon files (to create favicons, for example), I use IcoFX. For vector graphics, I use InkScape, which has a steep learning curve but doesn’t seem to have a good free alternative. To edit shapefiles, I use QGIS, and Shape Viewer to view them.

For music and movies, I’ve kept it simple: I use VLC. It lets me stream on to my iPad. I can also watch/stream movies as they are being downloaded via μTorrent – which is probably the coolest feature feature of any torrent client. I store all my music in one large folder, and keep .m3u playlists. These are rsynced periodically into my Android phone.

For audio editing, Audacity remains my best bet. However, for video editing, my needs have changed. It’s usually screen-recordings I need to create, so I don’t use VirtualDub much. I’ve moved from CamStudio to Microsoft Expression Encoder Screen Capture (long name for a rather nice piece of software that works reasonably well.)

To read books, I’ve started using Calibre, simply because it can read both ePub and .mobi formats. Since then, I’ve been using Kindle less. I continue to use my old copy of Microsoft Reader, even though the product is dead, because I have a lot of .lit files. (That’s one of the advantages of software over online services. Even if they pull the plug, you can use an old copy of the software. And it works!) To read PDF files, I use Foxit PDF Reader. On the extremely rare occasion that I need to print PDF files from a software that does not support PDF printing, I use CutePDF Writer.

For file sharing, I use Dropbox for files. It’s simple, popular and just works. I tried BitTorrent Sync as a peer-to-peer alternative to Dropbox, but the interface has a long way to go before it’s usable. I do hope something emerges. For screen sharing, I use TeamViewer (which is fast) or join.me (which doesn’t require a client). Though I use Skype for calls, I don’t find its screen-sharing fast enough.

I play around with data a lot. This is mostly done in Python, for which I use Continuum’s Anaconda builds – they have most of the useful packages built-in. When I need to scrape Javascript-based websites, I try CasperJS on top of PhantomJS. This is particularly handy for the several ASPX based Government websites. I also have node.js installed, but don’t really use it much.

I use RStudio as my R IDE. I’m experimenting with Tabula to see if it’s practical to extract PDF tables with it, but my current preference is to use xpdf to convert PDF to text and then process it. For data cleansing, there’s only one tool that I know that’s effective: Open Refine. For network visualisations, I use Gephi, though NodeXL can do a small but useful subset of that within Excel.

For compression, I use 7-zip. The 7z format provides the best compression across most file types that I’ve seen, but even if you want to use ZIP files, 7-zip creates smaller ZIP files. For image compression, I use kraken.io, which offers the best compression I’ve seen. On the desktop, TruePNG and jpegoptim do the trick.

There are several small utilities I use. WinDirStat tells me how my hard disk space is used up, helping clean drives and Dropbox folders. ClipX lets you copy and keep multiple items in the clipboard. Restoration can undelete even permanently deleted files. Truecrypt keeps files encrypted. Putty lets you connect via SSH if you don’t have cygwin. But the mother of all tools is AutoHotkey, which I use for everything ranging from typing my signature to resizing windows to storing our conference bridge numbers.

I’ve a number of web servers on my system. I use XAMPP for Apache, MySQL and PHP, but also have nginx handy. But the simplest, easiest and smallest web server is perhaps Mongoose. Just run it in any folder to start a web server. python -mSimpleHTTPServer does the same for developers. I also have Fiddler installed as a proxy – partly to monitor what URLs my applications access, and partly to simulate slow speed connections for the web apps I build. Apart from MySQL in XAMPP, I have a few databases installed: SQL Server, SQLite and SQLite Studio to read the sqlite3 files.

Of course, some of my apps apps have moved online, and my earlier post on the A-Z of my browsing history covers that. But there are a few applications that I’ve hosted which I must talk about. WordPress, which this blog runs on, is the primary one on the list. I also use gitlab as an internal alternative to Github, slideshare.net to share slides, and etherpad.mozilla.org to chat / collaborate on code. But the application that I spend the most time on is selfoss – an RSS reader, my replacement for the late beloved Google Reader.

Comments

Pravin 10 May 2014 8:04 pm: Try Sumatra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumatra_PDF), it is a reader that supports PDF, EPUB, MOBI, i suspect its support for .lit files but you can give it a try as it is very lite on the system(It opens my Excel 2013 Bible e-book in less time compared to Foxit PDF Reader).
Jason 7 Sep 2014 1:59 am: Hey what happened to mDesktop? ;)
Nipun 10 Jul 2014 11:02 pm: Get a mac, this list will be much smaller then ;)
Vang Lian 28 Aug 2014 8:52 am: I use notepad++ as editor. Now sublime text looks very interesting. Thanks for the recommendation
Raghavendra 14 Apr 2016 5:39 pm: Hey Ananad, hope you remember me. I know only one data scientist so far n its you. Happy to read you blogs.
Khair 30 Mar 2016 5:29 pm: Since I haven’t upgraded to Windows 8, I don’t have the snipping tool Snipping Tool is available on Windows 7 as well, I just assumed you are on Windows OS ! :(
Vigneshraja 7 Jun 2017 7:34 am: Try Canopy for python
rpv 8 Aug 2017 1:46 am: What is the ereader of your choice if not Kindle?

Software for my new laptop 2

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:15:49 +0000

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

Dropbox [new]: Simplest way of sharing files.
Skype: I use it more than my phone.
Google Talk: For those friends who have chat enabled on Gmail.
TeamViewer [new]: Pretty efficient screen sharing. Works better than Skype, I think.
Google Calendar Sync: To keep Outlook in sync with Google Calendar.

Utilities

7-Zip [new]: Covers all compressed formats, and has the best compression ratio.
WinRAR: 7-Zip has it covered.
AutoHotKey [new]: Shockingly powerful macro functionality. Shockingly underused.
Clip [new]: Command line clipboard. dir | clip copies the directory to the clipboard.
ClipX [new]: Stores multiple clipboard entries and history. Invaluable.
DiskTT [new]: I’m paranoid about disk speed. I keep measuring it.
WinDirStat [new]: Best way to find what’s taking up space on disk.
ProcessExplorer [new]: Just in case Task Manager doesn’t show you everything.
Google Desktop: Well, it’s dead.
mDesktop [new]: A Virtual Desktop Manager (multiple screens) for Windows 7.
PowerToys: doesn’t work on Windows 7, but I got X-Mouse working.
Teracopy: I don’t worry too much about copying files any more. Maybe later.
Junction Link Magic [new]: To map folders. But I now use Cygwin, and symlinks rock.
uTorrent [new]: For bittorrent.
ntlmaps [new]: proxies requiring a password to a proxy not requiring a password
Putty [new]: SSH for Windows, but can also act as an SSH tunnel
TrueCrypt [new]: To securely back up my bank details on the cloud.

Development

Cygwin: UNIX on Windows. I also install make, curl, lynx, wget, tidy, mercurial, git, openssh, rsync, optipng, pdftk, sqlite3, imagemagick and sgrep. Also cacert.pem.
ActivePython: My primary programming language. I also install NumPy, SciPy, ipython, tornado, tabular, lxml and eyeD3.
ActivePerl: … isn’t as readable.
node.js: Soon becoming my favourite programming language. Fast, popular.
XAMPP [new]: Fastest way of getting Apache + MySQL + PHP running
nginx [new]: Faster than Apache, but no CGI, and I like CGI.
Google AppEngine [new]: To maintain sites like 250.
redis [new]: My new favourite database. In-memory, and fast.
CouchDB [new]: Simple, persistent JSON store. (Or MongoDB. Both’re fine.)
Fiddler2 [new]: To see where traffic is really coming from.
IETester [new]: I’ve stopped developing for Internet Explorer 6 or 7.
JDK: Sadly, some apps require a Java compiler. (I like the JRE. Can’t stand Java.)
Notepad++ [new]: Excellent editor. I’ll probably go back to it some time, but…
Sublime Text 2 [new]: … is just a little bit cooler.
Crimson Editor: Didn’t have Unicode support a long time ago, so I switched.
Subversion. I’ve switched to Mercurial and git.

Data Visualisation

R [new]. The God of all statistical packages. Install reshape and ggplot2.
Gephi [new]: Does network visualisations quite well.
GraphViz [new]: Does network visualisations not quite as well.
Google Refine [new]: Helps clean up messy data.
qhull [new]: For voronoi treemaps. Don’t ask.
wkhtml2pdf [new]: To print web pages as PDF.

What am I missing that you really like?

Comments

Scraping for a laptop | s-anand.net 14 Jan 2012 4:01 am (pingback): […] for a laptop January 14th, 2012 How I do things S Anand I’ve returned my laptop, and it’s time to buy a new one. For the first time in my life, I’m buying a laptop for […]
shiva 10 Dec 2011 11:45 am: Wat abt notepad ++
408wij 28 Sep 2011 11:56 pm: Evernote Zipeg (available on both Mac and Win, better UI than 7zip) Keepass Switcher (Expose-like feature on Win. A bit flaky and not supported.) Erunt (registry backup) I’m trialing Xplorer2.
Arun 13 Oct 2011 6:11 pm: I tried to do something similar and then got lazy and simply installed VirtualBox ;)
Rajasekar 4 Nov 2011 11:35 am: Good One.
bhavesh 4 Jan 2012 5:24 pm: What about CClener and Unlocker?
Naveen 28 Sep 2011 6:26 am: Finally :-)
Ravi Atluri (@sonnes) 28 Sep 2011 7:14 am: One more thing, I wanted to know from you is - How do you organize your work, specifically code and how do you handle repository and workspaces (if you use an IDE) ? In case you don’t use an IDE, what kind of coding environment? I got a new laptop a few months back and have been trying to figure out how to start organizing my work, repositories of things I work or experiment on and the IDE. Currently, I am trying to put in Java, Python and Scala into eclipse by using it’s plugins, hoping eclipse would help me to organize the code and repos.
Mohit 30 Sep 2011 8:37 am: At least some of this could be automated :) check out “ninite dot com”
Shankar V 30 Sep 2011 3:06 pm: Excellent list. Thanks for sharing :) I agree about Eclipse - too heavy. But if you code in Java, I dont see a better alternative. Anyone remember NetBeans? Google Desktop - I find this amazingly useful and I am sad Google is retiring this. Wish there is a good alternative. I hate windows search.
Venu 7 Oct 2011 7:22 am: Thanks for excellent compilation. Can you point to any free utility to optimize the performance of our computers
TD 28 Sep 2011 8:32 am: Wordweb and Evernote
TD 28 Sep 2011 8:38 am: Also, iTunes…. Not that I like it but for Ipod.
S Anand 28 Sep 2011 3:13 pm: @Ravi: I don’t use an IDE. Just Sublime Text + bash/Command Prompt + git/hg. Since I don’t use Java, I can stay away from Eclipse (which I think is way too heavy for my liking).
Karen 17 May 2012 5:23 am: Very nice list! I would add JV 16 Power Tools to the Utilities list. They have a free 30 day fully functional trial to try them out. It’s not limited like most trial software.
Vinu 11 Aug 2012 11:06 am: If you spend any time in Excel, ASAP Utilities is an absolute joy!… get it and I’m pretty sure, you’ll swear by it in no time.. the Sparklines add-in by Fabrice Rimlinger is also excellent.. a bit raw, but powerful nevertheless.
Vinayak 23 Jan 2013 7:40 am: Nice list. You should really try out: Xplorer2 (get the professional version if you can - it is $30 and worth every penny and more) from http://zabkat.com Wikidpad - for organizing information in an offline desktop wiki - from http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/ Sublime Text - the best text editor - http://www.sublimetext.com/ Everything - the perfect replacement for Google Desktop - actually it is better since it does not hog memory - from http://www.voidtools.com/ Slickrun - the perfect program launcher - http://www.bayden.com/slickrun/ MindManager - for Mindmapping - from http://www.mindjet.com/ Irfanview - basic image viewer and editor - http://irfanview.com/ SumatraPDF - Single portable program for reading ebooks (ePub & Mobi), comics (CBR and CBZ) and PDFs - from http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html
Software I currently use | s-anand.net 9 May 2014 6:19 pm (pingback): […] few years, I review the software I use. Here are some of my earlier […]
Perl, 1994-2011 - S Anand 28 Sep 2024 10:21 pm (pingback): […] 2011, I stopped installing Perl on my […]

Portable Apps

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:17:24 +0000

I’m totally hooked to portable apps now. You don’t need admin rights to install them. You can run them off a USB stick. They won’t make your machine slower. All the reasons not to install an application vanish.

PortableApps.com is a good starting point. For what it’s worth, here are my portable apps by category (most used on top).

Platforms

Firefox. If you’re using IE6, please die. Lack of admin access is no longer an excuse.
Cygwin brings you UNIX commands to Windows.
Portable Ubuntu run Ubuntu as a window in Windows.

Tiny utilities

GDI++ replaces the Windows font engine with a Mac-line rendering. Looks cool.
Clip is a command line tool that copies to clipboard. “dir | clip” copies the file listing to the clipboard. Outrageously useful.
PicPick takes screenshots of the screen, windows, regions, whatever. And you can edit them too.
uTorrent downloads torrents.
WinDiff compares two files and tells you the difference.
AlwaysOnTopMaker makes any window stay on top of other windows.
DiskTT tells you your hard disk (or USB stick) speed.
WinHTTrack downloads websites.
AllChars lets you type special characters like ½ by type Alt-1-2 or “ by Alt--. It’s shockingly intuitive.
Restoration lets you undelete permanently deleted files.
Windirstat tells you what’s taking up space on your disk.
Sysinternals is a bunch of system monitoring utilities.
Virtual CD-ROM mounts .ISO files. You can use .ISO files without burning them.
Autostitch stitches together photos to create panoramas.

Media

VLC plays any audio or video file.
TightVNC lets you log into other machines like a remote desktop./li>
Audacity lets you record and edit audio.
CamStudio lets you record video (screen capture).
VirtualDub lets you edit video.
MediaCoder converts audio and video from any format to another.
GIMP is like Photoshop. You can edit pictures.
Inkscape lets you edit vector graphics.

Servers

XAMPP installs Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl at one shot.
App Engine is Google’s freemium platform for app hosting.
Persevere is a RESTful JSON app server that runs on Java.
Tomcat is a JSP server.
nginx is a fast web server
CouchDB is a RESTful JSON app server that runs on Erlang.

Development tools

Notepad++ is my current text editor. It has syntax highlighting, column editing, Unicode support, auto-completion, and is fast and free. So I dumped Crimson Editor.
Putty is SSH for Windows.
Tidy cleans up HTML files.
CSSTidy cleans up CSS files.
Processing is a graphical programming language.
Wireshark monitors network traffic.
Drip checks IE for leaks.
NVDA is a free screen reader.

Let me repeat:

You don’t need admin rights to install these.
You can run them off a USB stick.
They won’t make your machine slower.

There’s really no reason whatsoever not to have them on a USB stick at least. They’re cheap.

Comments

Naveen 19 Jan 2010 9:34 am: I have been using portableapps for more than an year now.Though the idea is to run it off a USB stick, this results in poor performance usually, especially for firefox.
Ganapathy 13 Feb 2010 5:47 pm: I landed in your site for analyzing IR songs. The collection of applications in www.pendriveapps.com seems to better than PortableApps.com (my personal opinion).