Archive for June, 2009

My 25 favorite Windows Applications

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Here’s a list of my 25 favorite windows applications. They are all open source or free to use. By the way with most Linux distributions you get the functionality those tools provide right out of the box.

Favorite Windows Applications

7-Zip is an open source file archiver with a high compression ratio. It supports all common archive types. Avast is a free (for personal use) anti virus kit, that protects my system from all those nasty pieces of software out there. Cygwin is an ingenious collection of tools that provides a Linux-like environment for Windows. You can use it with puttycyg to get a very easy to use Linux-like shell with all the tools you miss so badly on Windows. And for those good old DOS games you miss so much there’s DOSBox, the x86 emulator with DOS. Check out a number of old free but totally awesome games you can play on the DOSBox here. For file-transfers there’s FileZilla for FTP and for SFTP there’s WinSCP. And of course there’s everybody’s favorite browsers Firefox and Opera for browsing and ‘being connected’. From what I hear Opera 10 will be out any day now. For my document viewing, editing and creation needs I heavily rely on Texmaker, MiKTeX, GSview and of course OpenOffice.org.

For image creation I just love Inkscape. It has to be one of the greatest open source tools ever created. For graph creation I use gnuplot also I have to say I have been using the graphing tools of MATLAB a lot lately due to ease of use. For text and code editing I use either Notepad++ or Vim. It depends on my mood really. To communicate online I use mostly the cute pidgin universal chat client but I also sometimes log on to IRC using mIRC. For all my media and entertainment needs I have the great and famous VLC media player of course but I tend to use Winamp for audio playback. To download torrent files I use µTorrent and to connect to remote servers I use PuTTY.

I use XAMPP for web development and the ingenious VirtualBox x86 virtualization software for testing on different systems. When my harddrives are a cluttered mess I use WinDirStat to get a hold of the chaos and clean it up. And recently I accidentally deleted files from the SD-Card of my mobile phone and was able to recover them instantly using the awesome Photorec data recovery software.

That’s it for my list. I hope someone out there will find this list useful.

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Search, search and communicate!

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

There’s quite a lot going on in the ever interesting internet search and communication business these days. Wolfram launched its Wolfram|Alpha search engine, Microsoft launched its new Bing search engine and Google demoed its newest product Wave. They also rather quietly released Google Squared. Here’s a graph generated with BlogPulse’s Trend Search showing the buzz these products created over the last month.

Search and communication product buzz

I admit the graph is a bit ambiguous and it would be much better to count the number of links in blog posts that link to the respective product. But let’s just assume that the graph is an accurate representation of the buzz those products created.

So Wolfram. I like what they did but have a couple of problems with it. For one I feel like they kind of not understood what it is all about these days. They ignore collaboration, wisdom of the crowd, free knowledge and all that good stuff we have today. But they don’t want that, they want scientific accuracy and control over their content. That’s fine I think but I would have loved to see all those smart people to contribute to a project like Wikipedia or freebase. And maybe they could have dedicated some of their enormous brainpower to finally getting NLP off the ground to provide a nice interface to all the information out there and to establish some ground rules about how we should do NLP.

Bing, well – pretty pictures. That’s really all it is for me personally. The name is certainly better than their Live Search thing but I don’t like the interface at all.

And then for Google Wave: I really hope this product will not succeed and will not revolutionize anything. It’s in the first few minutes of the demo why it would be very scary to have Wave around. Lars Rasmussen says that E-Mail is bad because it’s peer to peer, not very comfortable and whatnot. So he proposes to put the Wave (i.e. Google) in the middle of all that communication. Scary.

What’s really awesome is Google Squared. It’s by no means perfect – still a lot of rough edges – but has a lot of potential. I hope to see some serious work done on that thing and maybe an API for us developers to play with and create new things.

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