indexing on S Anand

15 years of Dilbert searchable

Fri, 22 May 2009 07:17:47 +0000

The Dilbert search index now carries 15 years worth of Dilbert comics — over 5,500 strips typed out. This is mainly due to the contributions of BFMartin (over 6 years worth of strips) and Paul Dorman (over 3 years worth of strips), myself (over 3 years worth of strips) and a long tail of contributors.

You can search the strips here. While you can find strips as far back as 1989, you won’t see the images earlier than 2002 because geek.nl (whose images I’m shamelessly hotlinking without permission) only holds images that far back. But once you know the date of the comic (say 1991-02-03), you can visit the Dilbert official site at dilbert.com/1991-02-03/ and see the strip.

Dilbert started around 20 years ago. So we’ve covered 75% of all the strips, and this is in just 8 months after starting this collaborative effort. A couple of lessons I learnt from this:

Crowd sourcing beats going solo if you’re building content. It’s a no-brainer. There will always be only one or two people more passionate about something than you.
The long tail is not very big. There will only be one or two people more passionate than something about you. Don’t expect the long tail contribution to be the significant. The value comes from being able to attract “the big fish”.

Comments

Thejesh GN 27 May 2009 7:57 am: Thanks for the search engine.

Launching applications

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:00:00 +0000

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.

So I switched to the pinned menus on the Start Menu.

This works better with the keyboard. I access Word, I just type the Ctrl-Esc, W. Excel: Ctrl-Esc, E. But I run short of letters soon. I have trouble between Powerpoint and processing, for instance. And I can’t store documents.

I tried Enso Launcher and Launchy, both of which are great products, but I just can’t stand the thought of them hogging up all the memory that they do. Launchy in particular.

Given that I almost always have one or two command prompts open, I write my own little tool to do the job now. It’s a command line launcher I’ve written in Perl. I call it “o”. At the first run, it indexes my hard disk. (Well, not all of it. I’ve picked what I need.) Now, if I want to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I just type:

> o harry potter hallows

If I wanted to pick a Harry Potter book, I could:

> o harry potter
    0: D:/Entertainment/Books/Hugo Awards/2001 - J K Rowling - Harry Potter and the Goblet Of Fire.rar
    1: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.1.Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone.pdf
    2: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.2.Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets.pdf
    3: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.3.Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban.pdf
    4: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.4.Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire.doc
    5: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.5.Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.pdf
    6: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.6.Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.pdf
    7: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.7.Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.pdf
    8: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.The Harry Potter Encyclopedia.doc
    9: D:/My Pictures/2005-06 London/2005-07-16 06 Waterstones Oxford Street Harry Potter release.JPG
    ... more
> (0-9, q, any word): prince
D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.6.Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.pdf

The program lists the files matching the words I typed, and lets me filter within that.

I just wrote this yesterday, and already, I’ve used it dozens of times. Here’s the source.

PS: While I was at it, I downloaded a Flickr uploader for Perl. So I can now upload images with the command line. This easily saves me at least 5 minutes per article.

Comments

Karthik A 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: Oc here
I got equally bugged long back and wrote a python program called fo (folder opener ;-)

Here it is - crude but worked pretty well \
@setlocal enableextensions & python -x %~f0 %* & goto :EOF \
import os
import ConfigParser
import sys

CONFIGFILENAME = “config.ini”
CONFIGFILENAME1 = “config1.ini”
cleanInp = ‘’
scuth = {}
\
Load all the config file details in a hash \
cfgFile = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
cfgFile.read(CONFIGFILENAME)
cfgFileFP = open(CONFIGFILENAME,‘r+’)

scuts = cfgFile.items(“shortcuts”)

\
load into a dictionary \
for (x,y) in scuts:
scuth[x]=y

print “““Folder and file rapid opener (FO)
————————————
Ctrl-Alt-C - to start
@shortcut,path - to add a shortcut
x - exit
————————————”””

while cleanInp != ‘x’:
inp = raw_input(“Your wish Master!:”)
cleanInp = inp.strip()
if cleanInp.find(’@’) == -1:
try:
os.startfile(scuth[cleanInp])
except:
pass
else:
tmp = cleanInp.split("@")[1]
tmp1 = tmp.split(",")
cfgFile.set(“shortcuts”,tmp1[0], tmp1[1])
cfgFile.write(cfgFileFP)
q
Sathish 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: Anand,

Did you try slickrun.. It is extremely slick..
S Anand 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: @OC: Hey, didn’t realise you were into python. Neat!

@Sathish: How much memory does Slickrun use up? Given some of the apps I’m running on my 1GB laptop, I’m having to count each byte!
oracle 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: The method I use:

enable google desktop by ctrl-ctrl

in the search bar first few alphabets of the app..invariably it shows me the app i need.
Saurabh 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: I used to use Launchy before switching to Mac an year book and have been using QuickSilver since then. Dont use the Apple Spotlight, neither the Google Desktop thing..QS does all the work - launching apps, searching for files and quickly accessing them, a nice article abt a great QS trick (for Mac users) here : http://www.43folders.com/2005/06/13/quicksilver-the-comma-trick

BTW Processing.org seems to be interesting, plan to check it out soon!

Cheers!
S Anand 11 Aug 2008 5:35 am: @Sathish: 7MB is not too bad. Launchy was taking up over 25MB in my case.

10 great uses for Google Desktop

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 12:00:00 +0000

10 great uses for Google Desktop. The only one I didn’t know about before was the “Control Panel replacement”. You can use Google Desktop to launch control panel items.

Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Martijn’s Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search is back. It doesn’t let you search the quotes themselves, but a (pretty detailed) description of each cartoon instead. (Mine searches Calvin and Hobbes quotes).

Comments

Anonymous 21 Oct 2006 8:55 am: if you know calvin and hobbes u know how many are there. I have been looking for March 24, 1994 for an ages and this helped me to find it in a minute. great site I do recomend

Calvin and Hobbes index - 930630

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

My Calvin and Hobbes index is current up to June 1993. Two-and-a-half years left to complete.

Google Blogsearch

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Google Blogsearch.

Comments

Ok 28 Sep 2005 7:29 am: Nice!

Google Desktop Search 2

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 12:00:00 +0000

I installed Google Desktop Search 2. The best part is “search as you type”. It also introduces a sidebar showing e-mail, RSS feeds, news, photos, popular searches, etc. The indexing is much faster too. (I take that back. Indexing is as slow as ever.)

Comments

Sumeer 24 Aug 2005 5:15 am: I am installing the same. Yet to use it
khjk 24 Aug 2005 9:44 am: nice one
Aditya Chaturvedi 25 Aug 2005 9:50 am: Yes Indexing is very slow. when working i had to stop Google desktop.
S Anand 25 Aug 2005 10:21 am: I did the same. But fortunately, it’s finished indexing within 48 hours (with lots of breaks).

Google Sitemaps

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Google Sitemaps.

…is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.

Anil Dash links to alternate proposals. via Anders Jacobs

Search engine features

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 12:00:00 +0000

On the new features of search engines.

Google programming contest winner

Wed, 17 Jul 2002 12:00:00 +0000

The winner of the Google programming contest.

GoogleDance dates

Wed, 17 Jul 2002 12:00:00 +0000

I know – I’ve been talking too much about Google. Still, here’re the dates on which Google updates itself.

I deliver movie tickets on the phone at Bandra

Sun, 23 Jun 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Fame has its ironical twists. I was searching in google for someone who could deliver movie tickets on the phone at Bandra. The irony is that my site landed up on top.

P.S: The title is sarcastic. I DO NOT deliver tickets. I’m a consultant, not a ticket distributor. So please don’t try to book your tickets in the comments section below!

Google image search

Sat, 07 Jul 2001 12:00:00 +0000

Google has an image search with 150 million images. (While on the topic of Google, try this search on dead.long.live.)

indexing on S Anand

15 years of Dilbert searchable

Comments

Launching applications

Comments

@setlocal enableextensions & python -x %~f0 %* & goto :EOF \

Load all the config file details in a hash \

load into a dictionary \

10 great uses for Google Desktop

Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search

Comments

Calvin and Hobbes index - 930630

Google Blogsearch

Comments

Google Desktop Search 2

Comments

Google Sitemaps

Search engine features

Google programming contest winner

GoogleDance dates

I deliver movie tickets on the phone at Bandra

Google image search