Top 10 lists

Time for the annual update on software I use. This time, I’ve got Wakoopa to help me with the relative usage as well. Here’s the top 100 software / web apps I’ve used recently, and how long I spent on them.

1. Gmail 186361 seconds
2. Notepad++ 130641 seconds
3. Google Chrome 79879 seconds
4. GitHub 43780 seconds
5. Windows Command Prompt 40967 seconds
6. Microsoft Excel 32578 seconds
7. Microsoft Word 27067 seconds
8. Microsoft PowerPoint 27059 seconds
9. Windows Explorer 20902 seconds
10. Google Docs 17989 seconds
11. Foxit Reader 17001 seconds
12. Microsoft Outlook 15855 seconds
13. Internet Explorer 15830 seconds
14. Google Search 15616 seconds
15. Skype 14423 seconds
16. Media Player Classic 14159 seconds
17. Google Groups 7061 seconds
18. Google Calendar 5531 seconds
19. Wesabe 2814 seconds
20. Google Analytics 2665 seconds
21. TeamViewer 1985 seconds
22. RGui 1875 seconds
23. LinkedIn 1528 seconds
24. YouTube 1400 seconds
25. Stack Overflow 1167 seconds
26. Acrobat Connect 964 seconds
27. Kongregate 914 seconds
28. HTML Help 871 seconds
29. PicPick 790 seconds
30. Zoundry Raven 684 seconds
31. Mockingbird 657 seconds
32. Twitter 655 seconds
33. iStockphoto 590 seconds
34. 7-Zip 584 seconds
35. Buzznet 552 seconds
36. Inkscape 516 seconds
37. Bitbucket 499 seconds
38. Microsoft Visio 496 seconds
39. Paint.NET 474 seconds
40. IrfanView 461 seconds
41. Tableau Public 436 seconds
42. µTorrent 435 seconds
43. HandBrake 422 seconds
44. Check Point Endpoint Security 411 seconds
45. Windows Task Manager 385 seconds
46. Microsoft Project 372 seconds
47. IETester 347 seconds
48. Google Maps 340 seconds
49. eBay 310 seconds
50. Spokn 270 seconds
51. Firefox 269 seconds
52. Google Calendar Sync 259 seconds
53. Windows Calculator 247 seconds
54. PayPal 246 seconds
55. JsonView 220 seconds
56. Windows Live Writer 184 seconds
57. Junction Link Magic 152 seconds
58. WinDirStat 142 seconds
59. Kindle 139 seconds
60. XAMPP 127 seconds
61. Wakoopa 105 seconds
62. Dropbox 100 seconds
63. Office Help Viewer 99 seconds
64. PrimoPDF 94 seconds
65. PuTTY 84 seconds
66. Python 80 seconds
67. Flavors.me 75 seconds
68. Google Sites 71 seconds
69. Process Explorer 70 seconds
70. Windows Volume Control 63 seconds
71. Wikipedia 58 seconds
72. Nitro PDF Reader 57 seconds
73. Management Console 47 seconds
74. PythonWin 45 seconds
75. Windows Based Script Host 45 seconds
76. WinDiff 45 seconds
77. VLC Media Player 39 seconds
78. ClipX 35 seconds
79. Windows Installer 35 seconds
80. The Internet Movie Database 32 seconds
81. ImageShack 31 seconds
82. WordPad 25 seconds
83. TeraCopy 22 seconds
84. Skype Portable 22 seconds
85. Picasa Web Albums 20 seconds
86. Syncplicity 17 seconds
87. Google Reader 16 seconds
88. Google Talk 15 seconds
89. VirtualDub 12 seconds
90. Adobe Manager 10 seconds
91. FreeCall 10 seconds
92. Notepad 8 seconds
93. Codebase 5 seconds
94. eTrust ITM 5 seconds
95. Google Checkout 5 seconds
96. GDI++ Tray Notifier 5 seconds
97. ImgBurn 2 seconds
98. Virtual Desktop Manager 2 seconds
99. Tesseract201 2 seconds
100. TortoiseHg 0 seconds

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:

1. You don’t need admin rights to install these.
2. You can run them off a USB stick.
3. 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.

While hunting for a VoIP service to call India, I found a fair variety of services that I’m sharing below.

FreeCall appears the cheapest when calling India, at 2.5¢ per minute to a land line. I’m listing the rate from London to Chennai below. I’m not sure of the difference in voice quality between these. The only one I’ve tried is VoIPDiscount, which is not too bad. As a benchmark, remember that Reliance offers a calling card at around 7.3¢ per minute.

(Incidentally, if you wanted to call the US/UK, there’s no reason why you should use your phone. Calls to the US, the UK and parts of Europe are free with most of these services.)

2.5¢/min	freecall
3.3¢/min	calleasy
3.3¢/min	webcalldirect
3.9¢/min	net2phone
4.2¢/min	smsdiscount
5.0¢/min	internetcalls
5.0¢/min	nonoh
5.0¢/min	voipdiscount
5.0¢/min	voipwise
5.5¢/min	freshtel.net
5.9¢/min	pc-telephone
6.0¢/min	mywebcalls
6.7¢/min	12voip
6.7¢/min	justvoip
6.7¢/min	poivy
6.7¢/min	sparvoip
6.8¢/min	gtalk2voip
7.1¢/min	vbuzzer
7.5¢/min	webphone
7.9¢/min	yahoo
8.0¢/min	click4
8.0¢/min	callserve
8.0¢/min	hotfoon
8.2¢/min	blasterphone.net
8.4¢/min	netappel
8.4¢/min	sipdiscount
8.4¢/min	voipbuster
9.1¢/min	voipstunt
9.9¢/min	iconnecthere
9.9¢/min	lowratevoip
10.0¢/min	phoneopia
10.6¢/min	skype
11.4¢/min	sipnet
11.6¢/min	voipcheap
13.8¢/min	wengophone
14.6¢/min	gizmo5
16.1¢/min	peneo
19.9¢/min	voipbusterpro

Between July 17^th and August 22^nd, I saw 57 movies and read 7 books. There were Saturdays when I watched four movies back-to-back. (I tried five. Couldn’t stay awake.) Amidst this, I also cooked, cleaned, shopped… and went to office. (Oh yes, I was working 10 hours a day.) And managed to build some interesting sites which I’ll release in a while.

But first, let me share the books with you.

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J K Rowling
• How to be Good by Nick Hornby
• The Runaway Jury by John Grisham
• Batman Year One by Frank Miller
• The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
• Pro Javascript Techniques by John Resig

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I wasn’t planning to buy it. I figured I’d just wait for the soft copy. On 21st July at 8am, I went shopping to the local Sainsbury’s to get groceries for my pre-movie cooking. I didn’t know that was the release date. And there it was. In a huge stack. 50% discount. Should I? Shouldn’t I? After finishing the rest of my shopping, and having deeply analysed the cost-benefit and ROI, I figured: if I didn’t buy it now, someone else might tell me the answers!

Was Snape evil? I couldn’t believe that. Not after Dumbledore’s implicit trust. Besides, I re-read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and if Dumbledore was dismissing Harry’s explicit warnings about Snape, he had to know something more. Anyway, what was the significance of Dumbledore’s last words? "Severus… please…" Please what? Dumbledore begging for death seemed more likely than Dumbledore begging for life. I had to know.

Who dies? Voldemort, of course. But who else? It couldn’t be Harry, unless J K Rowling was looking to make herself one of the most hated novelists. Yet, it seems so… possible. Harry dying to take Voldemort out. Naah, can’t be. Not Ron or Hermione either. Same reason. One of the other Weasleys? Maybe. Plenty of them anyway. Hopefully Percy. Hargrid? Possible. Lupin? The last of Harry’s father’s friends?

And all the minor questions: What’s the significance of Harry’s eyes? What does Wormtail do to help Harry? What’s the significance of Voldemort having used Harry’s blood to resurrect himself? etc. etc.

So I bought it.

But didn’t start reading.

I knew that if I picked it up, I wouldn’t put it down. It was time to cook. And watch movies.

By 4:00pm, after three movies, I couldn’t stand it any more. So I picked it up. Read until 2:00am. Picked it up again on Sunday at 9:00am, and starved until 11:00am until I finished it.

Whew! What a book. Definitely the raciest of the lot. My earlier favourite in the series was The Prisoner of Azkaban, though The Half-Blood Prince came close. But this one beats them all. Resolves most of the mysteries till date, too. As Stephen King says in his review of Harry Potter, but by the time she penned the final line of Deathly Hallows, she had become one of the finer stylists in her native country.

How to be Good

And then there was Nick Hornby’s book. I’d seen a couple of his movies: About a Boy and High Fidelity. They were interesting, and I’d heard the books were good. Figured I’d pick one up.

And it was hilarious!

How to be Good is the funniest book I’ve read since Five Point Someone and The Inscrutable Americans. Most of my colleagues kept wondering what I was laughing out so loudly about.

This is the story. The author is a doctor and a good wife. “Gooder” than her husband, certainly, and that makes her feel good. Until he has suddently becomes GOOD. Truly good. Saint-like. And then she can’t stand him any more. The story is in first person, so you can see her thoughts almost verbatim. (See thoughts verbatim? Well, whatever the phrase is.)

The Runaway Jury

I had just seen the movie Runaway Jury, so I had to re-read it immediately. The movie was surprisingly good, though. Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, John Cusack and Rachel Weisz. Many changes from the book, but didn’t detract from the experience.

Batman Year One, The Dark Knight Returns and Understanding Comics

I saw 300. WOW! Brilliant. One of the greatest visual experiences ever. Possibly better than V for Vendetta and certainly better than Sin City — both of which I thought had incredible visuals. The colours, the texture, the contrast, the surrealism — whew!

That’s when it hit me. Three of the best movies I’ve seen recently were based on graphic novels (comics). Two by Frank Miller. Maybe I should explore this a little more.

I got myself Batman Year One — and that’s when I realised where Batman Begins got its inspiration from. The graphics were pretty old style, but the story, incredible. Then I picked up The Dark Knight Returns. Now THAT is phenomenal graphics. And what a story! Christopher Nolan‘s next movie is slated to be The Dark Knight. Really looking forward to that.

With all this, I ended up reading a bunch of new Superman comics as well (but they were lousy, so I won’t mention anything), and in the meanwhile, heard about Scott McCloud‘s comic book on comics — Understanding Comics. Like I said, it’s a comic book, but non-fiction. It’s about the history and art of comics. Very nice reading, and quite insightful too. I think every visual designer should take a look at it.

Pro Javascript Techniques

I’d been reading up a lot of Javascript recently — learning mostly from Douglas Crockford, Peter Paul-Koch, Dean Edwards, and John Resig. So when I realised John had a book, I had to read it. Douglas Crockford recommends JavaScript: The Definitive Guide (5th Edition) as the least bad among many bad books. I read it. Sorry, but it was quite a bore. Pro Javascript Techniques on the other hand, is gripping. Dives right into modern techniques, writing style, and is filled with practical advice. How wonderful.

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So anyway, that’s what my month’s been like. Well worth the break from blogging, I think. (And I haven’t even told you about the movies or sites yet! Well, soon.)

Now that I’m well on my way to watching the Top 250 movies on IMDb, I’m slowly turned my attention to fiction. My interest is mainly in the Fantasy & Science Fiction area. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any list like the IMDb Top 250, but there are a few awards that could take the place of the Oscars for books. That’s probably a good place to start.

The most popular awards in Science Fiction are the Hugo award and Nebula award, followed by the Philip K Dick award, John W. Campbell award, Arthur C Clarke award and other awards. I collated a list of all the awards (from LocusMag) into the spreadsheet below

Very few of these books have won multiple awards. None have won more than 3 on this list. Of these, only five have 3 awards:

Over 20 books have won two of these awards.

I haven’t read most of these books. The ones I have read are:

1. The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov (which I loved)
2. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (which I loved)
3. Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card (which was OK)
4. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (which I didn’t like)
5. Dune by Frank Herbert (which I didn’t like)

That’s about a 50% ratio, so I guess this list doesn’t quite very well work for me. Or at least, my taste doesn’t match the Award critics. But maybe you will find something interesting to read…

Since I like Tamil songs and statistics so much, I did some analysis on the ~1,400 Tamil songs I’d listened to in 2006.

The trends are around the length of a typical film song are interesting. For example:

Songs have gotten longer over time. On average, a song in the 60s was 4 minutes. A song in the 2000s is 5 minutes. Each decade adds about 14 seconds to the length of a song.

But some of the old movies have pretty long songs. Thiruvilaiyadal and Vanjikkottai Vaaliban have among the longest songs on average, for example.

As a corollary, newer music directors make longer songs. While KV Mahadevan‘s songs lasted 4 minutes, Ilayaraja‘s songs lasted 4.5 minutes, and AR Rahman‘s songs last 5 minutes. Today, Ramesh Vinayagam‘s compositions are 5.5 minutes.

However, Deva seems to make longer songs than usual for a 1990s director (5.5 minutes), while Devi Sri Prasad makes shorter songs for a 200os director (4.3 minutes).

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Since I rated the songs, I could also analyse my preferences. I like older songs a bit more.

My top movies list for instance, has only one movie from the 2000s, 2 from the 90s, 5 from the 80s, 1 from the 60s and 1 from the 50s.

My all-time favourite movie (for songs) is Vaidhegi Kaathirundhaal. I didn’t need the analysis to tell me that, though.

My all-time favourite music director is G Ramanathan, thanks to Uthama Puthiran, Ambikapathy, Madurai Veeran, etc. AM Raja follows, and then the great Ilayaraja. It’s interesting that AR Rahman falls below Harris Jayaraj and Deva. He also falls below MS Viswanathan, but that’s not surprising.

For quite a while, I was convinced I liked shorter songs. But surprisingly, it turns out that my preference is quite independent of the length of the song! Anyway, all time favourites short songs include:

Indhiraiyo	Kaadhalan	1:02
Muthu Mazhaiye	Mazhai	1:21
Yamunai Aatrile	Dhalapathi	1:22
Anbana Thaayai	Mahanadhi	1:34
En Azhagenna (mp3)	Minsara Kanavu	1:47
Manamagale	Devar Magan	2:13
Poojaikkaaga	Payanangal Mudivadhillai	2:18
Suttum Vizhi	Kandukonden Kandukonden	2:18
Brindavanamum	Missiamma	2:48
Theerthakaraiyinile	Varumaiyin Niram Sigappu	2:49

P.S.: It’s interesting that three of them have Bharathiyar songs in them.

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All of this analysis was possible because I recently dumped WinAmp and moved to MediaMonkey, which lets you write your own scripts.

Try this: search for a song and listen online.

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.

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:

1. Which are the unpopular, but good (highly-rated), movies?
2. 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).

The answer to the second is: there are 9 really popular lousy movies.

• Titanic
• Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
• Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones
• Independence Day
• Armageddon
• Pearl Harbor
• Batman & Robin
• Godzilla
• Wild Wild West

It’s interesting that every single one of these had a huge budget. (Perhaps this is understandable: more people would see a big-budget film and vote on it.)

And so, thanks to Infosys Consulting being spun off as a separate legal entity in the UK, I got my new laptop. (Because our old laptops were legally the assets of Infosys Technologies Ltd, and not Infosys Consulting Inc. Weirder things have happened, but who’s complaining?)

My old Toshiba Portege A200 has been replaced by a Dell Latitude D420 (which I was dreaming for, after having just read Jeff’s post on big laptops).

Firstly, it’s light. I thought my Toshiba was light compared to the Dell monsters others had, but this weighs 1.4 kgs! Secondly, it’s thin. It’s thinner than some of the paper notebooks I used to carry. It’s hard to imagine where we will be in 5-7 years time if innovations keep rolling in at this rate.

There were only two (minor) problems I saw with it. It didn’t have an S-Video port — so I can’t watch movies on TV. And it had a fairly small (12″) screen. Being a wide screen, I get a lot less height than I used to. I’m still having some trouble getting used to that, especially when browsing tall pages but it’s a good laptop for playing games such as 올인구조대.

My weekend was like a kid in a candy store. Here’s what I did.

Uninstalled useless software: The laptop came with Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 Basic and PowerDVD 5.1. I got rid of them.

Copied all my files: I had about 25GB of data (15GB of music, 5 GB of books, 2 GB of video, 3GB of work). This was a bit tricky: some of my data was in SVN repositories, and I had to migrate them.

Configured the new system by literally running through each entry in the control panel, and ensuring that it’s the same as my old machine. Most of my changes are spartan (aimed at less eye-candy, usually). For example,

• Display: I switch to Windows Classic and a black background. I used to do this because it takes less memory, but with 1GB of RAM, that’s no longer a consideration. I just got used to this. I also turn off all special effects, and remove everything except the Recycle Bin from my desktop. But the really useful thing is to turn on ClearType.
• Taskbar and Start Menu: I switch to the Classic Start Menu, and turn off everything. Here’s what mine looks like now.
• Toolbars: I like my toolbars to fit on one line. So I do some heavy customisation with the Internet Explorer toolbar to shrink it to a line. Similarly on the desktop toolbars.

Installed software. This is the fun part. I’ve made a number of changes to my software inventory.

• ActivePerl: Perl is the only language I still know.
• ActivePython: I’m learning Python. I’m not impressed, but the Python Image Library makes jigsaw quizzes easier than in Perl.
• Apache HTTP server: To test this web page locally.
• Audacity: To record and convert sounds. I’ve ditched Goldwave.
• Camstudio: To capture screen sessions.
• Crimson Editor: I’m still trying to pick a good text editor. (I need block operations, filtering, regular expressions and syntax highlighting. No editor seems to offer all of these. Filtering is especially rare.)
• Cygwin: Just for the basic tools (head, tail, less). UnixUtils would do just fine, actually.
• DX-Ball 2: The only game I play other than Solitaire, Minesweeper and Age of Kings.
• Google Desktop: I can’t live without it any more.
• Google Earth: I find Google Maps faster and better (because of the street maps).
• Google Toolbar for IE: It practically replaces my address bar.
• ImgBurn: I’m trying it instead of Nero. Except for multi-session support, it’s great.
• Microsoft Reader: I have a lot of books in the .LIT format
• Mozilla Firefox: Mainly for its extensions (Google Suggest, NextPlease, Tab Mix Plus, Google Bookmarks Button, Extended Statusbar, IE Tab, Live HTTP Headers, Web Developer)
• Paint.NET: Quicker than Photoshop. Mostly I just crop images.
• Picasa: Adequate for viewing photos.
• Powertoys for Windows – TweakUI: To make Windows even more spartan.
• Restoration: Can restore permanently deleted files.
• Subversion: I like the version numbers (1, 2, 3, …) better than CVS’ (1.1, 1.1.1, 1.1.1.1, …).
• VirtualDub: Mainly to convert videos from my digicam to DivX.
• VLC player: When all else fails, I turn to VLC.
• WinAmp: with Media Library import/export and Pepper
• WinRAR: For the occasional .rar download

And finally, after reinstalling my SVN repository and copying my WinAmp playlists, Firefox bookmarks, etc, my new laptop feels as good as old.

• Berkeley webcasts of their courses.
• Google TechTalks.
• Authors@Google.
• LongNow seminars about long term thinking.
• UCTV Video on Demand.
• Nova.
• Computer History Museum.