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Discover patterns with Wordle

Wordle is a fun web application for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. It can also be considered a “information visualization” or a text-analytics tool.

The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Wordle is implemented as a Java applet. It’s popularity can be gauged by the fact that its users have over 2,000,000 word clouds to Wordle's public gallery.

The tool’s creator Jonathan Feinberg built it while he was at IBM Research and he now works for Google. He has authored a chapter for the book Beautiful Visualization, where he explains how Wordle came to be & how it works.

Below is the “tag cloud” of labels/tags (click to enlarge) that I’ve used on my blog, created with Wordle’s “advanced” interface.

Tools/Utilities

Microsoft SharedView - free document & screen sharing software

SharedView lets you connect, share, review, and update documents with up to 15 people in a session in real time. Anyone can share, and the person sharing can give control to anyone else as long as they have downloaded the current release of this program.

Audio support is not currently available, so a telelphone call or an instant messaging program that supports Voice over IP (VoIP) can be used.

Microsoft SharedView & Dimdim are yet to be listed on Wikipedia's article on comparison of remote desktop software.

Tools/Utilities, Websites

Aids for comparative analysis of software tools/products

If you are asked to recommend the best software tool or product for a particular requirement, a good way to start researching is to check Wikipedia. There are articles specifically devoted to comparative analysis of products under various categories. These articles typically start with the title "Comparison of". Wikipedia's search box supports auto-suggestion, so typing those words first followed by the category can lead you to the required article faster.

The topic of Project Management software came up in a discussion on the LinkedIn Groups (requires free subscription) & I learnt from there & the Comparison of project management software that while Microsoft Project is a commonly used tool, the most expensive tool in the class is Primavera (now owned by Oracle) while CA's Open Workbench & Serena OpenProj are open source alternatives.

LinkedIn Answers and StackOverflow are some other sites where you can find justifiable opinions on competing products.

Also see:
Crowdsource your supplemental learning with Stack Overflow
90

GMail, Tools/Utilities

Free Web-based TO-DO list tools/Task Managers

If you need a free web-based TO-DO list tool/Task Manager to stay organized, there are a bunch to choose from -

The Toodledo site has a nice features comparison chart that explains typical functionalities offered by these tools. Knowing about these can help you find the best-fit for your needs.

I've been using the Tasks feature within GMail for quite sometime as a seperate account is not required. I only recently noticed that a new GMail Tasks entry can be created for an email by clicking the "More Actions" button in the Inbox header and selecting the "Add to tasks" option for an email that needs to be tracked as a task.

Also see:
Free OCR Tools
Free ASP.NET based CMS

HOWTO, Performance, Tools/Utilities

HOW TO reduce the file size of images

Now that Google slightly rewards lighter web-pages (of course relevance of a page matters most) with a better ranking, it helps to trim down the file size of images within it without reducing their quality so that the page loads faster.

There are numerous ways & tools to reduce the file size but the one that I found most useful is the free image editor Paint.NET's dynamic file resizing feature.

Whenever you save a new image in Paint.NET as a Bitmap, GIF, JPEG or PNG, it shows you a preview of that image alongwith the file size before it actually saves the file & lets you change image settings to modify the file size or quality.

You can also open an existing image within Paint.NET & control image settings from the File > Save As step.

You can not just control file size but also image dimensions easily with the Image > Resize (Ctrl + R) menu option.

Also see:
HOW TO implement online cropping feature for uploaded Images

Browsers, Performance, Tools/Utilities

New features of WebPageTest

WebPageTest.org is a free online version of AOL's open source performance analysis & optimization tool PageTest (which you can deploy on your own server).

The new features of WebPageTest were demo'ed at Velocity 2010 Lightning Demos session.

One distinct feature in PageTest is Visual Performance comparision. A Waterfall chart is what most web performance analysis tools show. With PageTest you can see how your web page actually looked like at small intervals while it was still loading. You can choose between a Film-strip view & Full-motion video to know what your site visitors see when they access a web page on your website.

WebPageTest now offers more test locations, custom bandwidth configuration, browser resource utilization info (CPU & Network bandwidth) and support for HAR (HTTP Archive Specification)

HAR is an open format for archiving & exchange performance results between web performance analysis tools. The current list of tools that support HAR is here.

Related:
HOW TO measure page load times across continents for free

120

Browsers, Performance, Tools/Utilities

HTTP Traffic Export options in Fiddler

I've been taking notes from Eric Lawrence's recorded presentation at MIX10 on Fiddler for future reference. This is the fourth part, check the earlier three tips if you haven't already read them -

To share HTTP traffic debugging information, Fiddler offers 10 ways to export HTTP traffic -

Copy sessions to the clipboard - right-click & copy headers, URL or entire session info
Store as a plain-text file
Extract binary response bodies
Archive to a database
Export a Visual Studio .WebTest file - Visual Studio Web Test is a Visual Studio Team System feature that allows playback
Write your own - fully scriptable, so you can write your own exporters
Fiddler's native "Session Archive ZIP" (SAZ) format
HTTP Archive JSON (v1.1 & v1.2) - The two HTTP Archive JSON formats (*.har) are supported by a growing list of open-source and commercial tools and web services.
WCAT Load Test Script - Microsoft Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT) can simulate thousands of concurrent users making requests to a single web site or multiple web sites. A script exported from Fiddler can be loaded in WCAT & previously-captured requests can be replayed for functional-testing and load-testing purposes.
Raw Files - this export format allows you to easily dump captured response files to a folder on disk; this allows you to easily collect audio, video, or image files for instance.

The last 3 “out of the box” options in the above list were mentioned by Eric in a recent blog post.

The introduction of HTTP Archive spec (*.har) support means than you can run an archive file generated by Fiddler in Firebug or similar tools like HTTPWatch, and vice versa. As Steve Souders says,

With the adoption of HAR ..., we’re moving to having a record of the page load experience that can be saved and shared, and performance analysis that is consistent regardless of what browser and development environment you work in.

180

Browsers, Tools/Utilities

6 ways to filter HTTP traffic with Fiddler

I've been taking notes from Eric Lawrence's recorded presentation at MIX10 on Fiddler for future reference. This is the third part, check the earlier two tips if you haven't already read them -

Fiddler offers multiple ways to filter the HTTP traffic for analysis with varying degrees of granularity so that you can jump to the point of specific interest -

1. Application Type Filter - You can click on this Filter that's in the status bar to toggle between one of these options -

All Processes
Web Browsers
Non-Browser
Hide All

2. QuickExec - The QuickExec box is a thin black box just above the Fiddler status bar that lets you type commands instead of clicking on the menu options. Just type CLS when you wish to clear the Web Sessions, use ?word to look for a specific word among the Session URLs or filter URLs that are of a specific size using the commands > size and < size. Typing HELP lists all commands that you can use in the QuickExec box & explains what they do.

3. Process Filter - A recent feature to filter down to a particular process. Drag & drop the Process filter icon onto the application of interest.

4. Filters tab - This provides the most exhaustive filtration

5. Find Sessions - Accessible from the Edit menu or Ctrl + F keyboard shortcut, this dialog box aids in carrying out a deep find

6. Rules - The "Hide Image Requests" & "Hide HTTPS CONNECTs" options accessible from the Rules menu can filter out the generally distracting Image Requests & HTTPS CONNECTs from the captured traffic.

Google, Mobile, Tools/Utilities

Look what Google Goggles visual search can do

Google Goggles is a visual search application available currently for Android powered phones. It may possibly be available for phones of other platforms in the future.

You can take a photo of a book with a Android phone & Google Goggles will show you search results pertaining to that. So an image acts a keyword for Google Goggles.

It can scan a business card, extract information from it & store contact details on your phone automatically. It can get you the title & artist of a painting or get you landmark information for a place that you take a snap of. This computer vision technology can also do translation of text.

This YouTube video explains more about this interesting app. An excerpt from it about what it holds for the future -

Visual search is still in its infancy.

In the future it will help you do more cool things like suggesting a move in a chess game or taking a picture of a leaf to identify the plant available for Android powered phones

The technology is both exciting & scary. Scary because of the potential privacy issues that it can cause.

Also see:
Sound Search Results
Visual tags: Microsoft Tag vs QR Code

Browsers, Performance, Tools/Utilities

FiddlerCap makes HTTP Traffic Capture easier

As a web developer, if you would like to debug HTTP traffic of web pages that your site users are having problem with, you can have the end-users record the traffic details as a Session Archive Zip (.SAZ) file & then send it to you.

Talking about Traffic Import options with Fiddler in his session titled "Advanced Web Debugging with Fiddler" at MIX10, Eric Lawrence highlights a lesser known tool called FiddlerCap. For non-technical folks, FiddlerCap Web Recorder is a lightweight version of Fiddler that's easier to use than Fiddler. The interface is more intuitive with Start Capture, Stop Capture, Save Capture buttons.

IE9 is going to have a Network tab like Firebug under Developer Tools (accessible through the menu or F12 key). The traffic details collected through the IE9 Network tab can be exported in a soon to be standardized format called HAR (or HTTP Archive Specification). The XML version of the HAR format file that is emitted by can be opened within Fiddler for analysis. As more tools start respecting the HAR format, the Web Performance Analysis & Optimization tools will be able to exchange information seamlessly.

180

Browsers, Performance, Tools/Utilities

Track HTTP traffic in Firefox with FiddlerHook

Eric Lawrence, the creator of Fiddler (his side project since 8 years) & an Internet Explorer Program Manager at MS, presented an interesting session titled "Advanced Web Debugging with Fiddler" at MIX10. I have gone through the half-hour breezy presentation and also downloaded it (.WMV version is 68.2MB) so that I can watch it again to digest & try out the many tips discussed in it. I plan to blog about the tips that Eric shared in his presentation with my own observations, starting with this one. I agree with him when he says "people are using Fiddler in a shallow way" as I'm one among them (having started using it on & off since 2005). Although the documentation is pretty good, I guess there should be more ways of creating awareness. I found that Fiddler now has a dedicated blog on MSDN & a Discussion Group.

While current versions of Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera all automatically use Fiddler when Fiddler is configured to capture HTTP traffic, Firefox is the only browser which does not use the System Proxy settings by default. So you can manually configure Firefox to point at Fiddler or better still, take advantage of the FiddlerHook Firefox add-on that lets you toggle Fiddler use with Firefox.

When you install Fiddler, FiddlerHook add-on gets installed as well. When I installed the latest version of Fiddler (v 2.2.9.4 beta) on a PC with Vista & Firefox 3.0, I did not see FiddlerHook in the menu under Tools or in the Firefox Add-ons/Extensions list. I suspected this could have been because I had already opened Firefox while installing Fiddler. I also wondered about what Firefox versions this Extension works on. My suspicion was confirmed when I re-installed Fiddler without having Firefox open and bingo...the Extension appears! Eric mentions in his talk that FiddlerHook works on Firefox 3.0 & above.

Whenever you need to debug HTTP traffic in Firefox, you can adjust your FiddlerHook preferences in the status bar or from the Tools > Monitor with Fiddler menu option. For easier access, you can add the "Launch Fiddler" button to your toolbar by right-clicking the Firefox toolbar, choosing Customize & dragging the Fiddler icon in the dialog box that appears to a preferred position in the toolbar.

Also see:
Web Performance Analysis & Optimization tools

180

Tools/Utilities

Save time while typing with PhraseExpress

PhraseExpress is a free utility that saves the time spent typing with features like Autotext, Auto-complete (found in MS Word), Text Suggestion etc. It integrates with Windows applications (like Notepad, WordPad, Office applications, browsers) & kicks in from the System tray whenever user starts typing.

The mobile phone text input T9-like predictive text feature is present in the paid versions of the tool.

One of the product's touted benefits is that it prevents Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI)!

Also see:
Giveaways
Phone number to word - mnemonic generator
WordWeb - the desktop English teacher

C#, HOWTO, Tools/Utilities

HOW TO extract only specific files from a .ZIP using C#

"Well, it's better to be silent than to be a fool." - Harper Lee

Online Forums are a great place to learn new tricks.

I learnt today that DotNetZip is an open source class library and toolset for manipulating zip files or folders that's easier to use than the other popular library SharpZipLib. Built by Dino Chiesa, it is hosted on CodePlex and has extensive documentation & samples. It takes just a few lines & the ZipFile.ExtractSelectedEntries Method to filter specific files from a zipped file using a selection criteria expression.

Talking of open source compression\decompression Libraries, there is yet another Library on SourceForge that has been immensely popular - 7-Zip. The code is available in C++ for whoever wants to tinker. Like 7-Zip, there is a ready to use WinForms sample app based on DotNetZip which can be a free replacement for the commercial WinZip utility.

Rant: At a lot of places in CodePlex, like the Issue Tracker & Reviews sections of a project, the year part is not shown for timestamps of posts. If you are tracking a discussion thread, viewing the date is meaningless without the year. If you feel strongly about this issue with CodePlex like I do, please vote it up so that it gets addressed faster.

Also see:
Regular Expression to negate non-matching characters
Enclose email attachment as text in the body

200

Browsers, Tools/Utilities

Page Speed or YSlow

There are a bunch of web page performance analysis tools like Page Speed, YSlow, AOL Pagetest, MSFast, VRTA, neXpert but the first two are probably the most popular among web developers.

I have used YSlow in the past & was curious to know how it differs from Page Speed. There are a few articles that talk about the differences but the Page Speed FAQ sums up it up well -

YSlow and Page Speed use some common "rules" that are based on industry best practices. There are, however, some rules, such as deferring JavaScript until after the page has loaded, that Page Speed implements exclusively. In addition, Page Speed provides you with an activity panel that allows you to do a "before and after" comparison when considering the implementation of Page Speed's suggestions. Finally, Page Speed is an open-source tool that is open to community contributions.

YSlow & Page Speed can be used together but using them both may not be a good idea as it will make Firefox considerably slower. A Stack Overflow user has suggested using a seperate Firefox profile to handle that issue.

Also see:
neXpert - YSlow clone for Fiddler

India, Tools/Utilities

Google Translate can now SPEAK Hindi

Although Hindi is the national language of India, it is spoken by less than half the population. For those among the other half & non-citizens who want to learn Hindi, Google Translate's text-to-speech functionality can be a good tool. Hindi is currently the only Indian language supported.

On clicking the Speaker icon in front of the translated text, the Hindi words are read out by a female voice. This feature relies on Flash. The translation is not perfect always.

As Google admits...

Clear and accurate speech technology is difficult to perfect, but we will continue to improve the performance and number of languages that are supported.

I hope more Indian languages get supported by Google Translate & it's text-to-speech functionality lets Indians appreciate languages they don't know.

Also see:
Google Script Converter transliterates between Indian languages
Read Telugu news sites in transliterated English

Learning Resources, Tools/Utilities

Learning Resources on Computers & Programming for School kids

Life is a team sport - Janine Benyus

If you have to engage school-going kids constructively, there is nothing like introducing computers to them through the Tux4Kids line of free & Open Source products -

Tux Paint is a free drawing program for children (ages 3 to 12)
TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor
TuxMath is a fun way for kids to practice their mathematics

Tux the penguin can only catch the fish if you type the right letters in time

If they are ready for programming, there are some good & free options, like -

Small Basic IDE

(to be continued...)

Tools/Utilities

Image meta-search with SearchLite

Back in 2002, I wrote a small JavaScript program that searches multiple sites at once. A friend of mine keeps searching on the Web for reusable images & photos for personal use. I adapted my old script for him so that he can search multiple sites at once. The script takes advantage of the fact that the term to search on can be appended as a querystring value to the search pages supplied by websites providing freely reusable images.

Also see:
Free Photos & Images

180

India, Tools/Utilities

Google Script Converter transliterates between Indian languages

If you can speak & understand one of 11 Indian languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu) but cannot read in that language, Google Script Converter can help you out by transliterating it into a language among them that you can read or to English. So let's say you are a Hindi speaker living in Hyderabad who can understand Telugu but cannot read local news in an online Telugu newspaper like Eenadu. To start reading Telugu in Hindi, English or whichever of the other Indian languages supported by the tool, you have to copy a site's content & paste it within the text-area in Script Converter.

Telugu text in Hindi (click on the image to see a larger one)

This is a great tool for those trying to learn new Indian languages. To take this a step further, I wish there is a text to speech tool that can work well for Indian languages. I found that regular text to speech tools can speak out English words properly but not words in Indian languages transliterated to English.

Try it out: Eenadu in English

Also see:
Read Telugu news sites in transliterated English
Voice of Opera

SEO, Tools/Utilities

Comparison of free Web Analytics tools

There are a bunch of free Web Analytics tools -

Google Analytics
StatCounter
Piwik
Woopra
Clicky
SiteMeter

Each of them has something unique. The Clicky website compares all the above across some 40 odd parameters.

Except for Google Analytics & Piwik, the rest have limitations on features with their free editions. They restrict the data retention size & period.

Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) real time web analytics software program that uses PHP & MySQL. It needs to be installed on your server, so you own your data.

The number of hits captured by each of the tools for the same site could vary. This could be because some tools like Google Analytics use JavaScript & a user may disable it in their browser. Some of these may not count bots and some register hits based on user's visit length.

Also see:
HOW TO generate a Heat Map with Google Chart API

India, Tools/Utilities, Websites

Indian software product start-ups that are making news

The business newspaper Economic Times (Hyderabad edition) carried an interesting front-page article yesterday on successful Indian software products coming out of India.

Over two-and-a-half million people worldwide, half of them in the US, are using word processors,creating slide-show presentations and doing their sums with the help of an online suite of software products built by technology start-up Zoho, located in Chennai.

In Bangalore, InMobi,a company that builds technology for mobile internet advertising,is helping global advertisers and publishers reach 175 million customers every month across Asia,Africa,the UK and the US.

... while it took Infosys Technologies 18 years to record its first $100 million in revenue,product start-ups such as InMobi expect to do so within five years.

In Kolkata, FusionCharts,a graphic data visualisation tool created by startup Infosoft Global is used by 1,500 organisations across the globe, including the US government.

..Webaroo’s SMSGupShup a Twitter-like closed group messaging product for cellphone subscribers, has 27 million users in India. In three months GupShup will be available to mobile users in nearly two dozen countries.

Apalya now has one million customers for its product MiMobiTV that streams live television onto mobiles starting at a subscription price of Rs150 a month.

Earlier this year, Mango Technologies, that was incubated at the NSRCEL centre in IIM-Bangalore, sold two of its proprietary telecom solutions to handset maker, Qualcomm.

This blog uses a contact form that's built with Zoho Creator & I'm happy with the way its been working. Zoho also provides APIs for integrating Zoho services with third-party applications.

The free version of FusionCharts works with PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, ColdFusion, Python, RoR, simple HTML pages or even PowerPoint Presentations. I was not aware of it when I was evaluating free ASP.NET charting controls for a project requirement.

Webaroos SMSGupShup was probably the inspiration for Google India's free SMS service called Google SMS Channels.

Similarly, JustDial may have been the inspiration for another Google India Labs service called Google Phone Search. This free service which is in the pilot stage provides voice search for region-specific info like local business listings, movie showtimes etc., in Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. While Google Phone Search (toll free # 1-800-41-999-999) uses speech recognition technology to process a query and read out the results or send the information via SMS, a real person picks up the phone at JustDial (phone # in India - 6999-9999; in 240 cities in India) to address a query.

JustDial makes money from small businesses paying up to be sponsored listings. In this fiscal year, it made about $32 million in revenues having answered 72 million calls. JustDial (1-800-JUSTDIAL) has recently been launched in the US. The operations will be handled out of India but it will soon be creating call center jobs in the US.