One of the things that I have always struggled with is keeping my desktop free of clutter…I am a compulsive downloader and everything I download invariably lands on my desktop. So, at any given point, and particularly  near deadlines, I might have as many as a hundred files on my desktop. Once the deadline passes, then I do the usual spring-cleaning and put them into various folders.

Fences, this new piece of software that I found listed in Forty-Three of The Best Free Windows Enhancements That You Should Know About on freeware genius has come as a godsend. Simply put, it “fences off the desktop in such a way that you can group your files together in any way you feel like. My desktop ended up looking like this after I used the autofence function in Fences:

Creating new fences is a breeze, and as far as I can see, the app uses little to no resources at all. This is despite have some very nifty graphical effects built into it. The only downside is that the present release is an  alpha version which will expire on the 31st of August, 2009. Hopefully, the final version will also remain free. There is talk of a Pro version on the website, so I’m expecting this to be the case.

After all the hype over Cuil being a Google killer, it turned out to be such a damp squib, so the once bitten twice shy syndrome manifested itself and it’s only now that I’ve taken Wolfram Alpha out for a spin. Wolfram is not exactly a Google clone- it calls itself a “computational knowledge engine” and you really need to try it out yourself to figure out what it’s all about. It’s still in a very early stage of development, hence the “alpha” tag, but the “alpha” could also be taken to mean that it’s a knowledge provider on steroids:-)

Like nearly everything else on the Internet, you can use it either for productive or unproductive work- of course there’s very little separating the two, nowadays. Wolfram can produce the most amazing bits of trivia for a whole host of subjects, such as the ones given below:

Among the downsides of Wolfram are that there is a bias towards the US and the West since most of that data fed into Wolfram is from Western sources. Nonetheless, I found plenty of interesting facts, when for instance, I fed Indian cities and towns to the Wolf.

I also ended up with Wolframs equivalent of a 404 whenever I tried something that was not in Wolfram’s database, or because I strayed too far from Wolfram’s rather rigid syntax.

Before you take Wolfram out for a spin yourself, it would be useful to take a look at the faqs and the tips, some of which are given below:

Wolfram comes in many different flavours including toolbars and addons for your browser of choice. It can also be embedded on websites, like so. Enjoy!

There are any number of programs, widgets, bookmarklets and add-ons that I install, and almost instantly uninstall because they come up short, one way or the other. It could be that they hog too much resources, or they have a clunky interface or simply end up complicating things.

A simple bookmarklet that does none of the above is called simply Readability and it’s  made a world of difference to my online experience. What it does is to strip away all the excess from a webpage leaving you to concentrate on the content that you have come for. As the developers put it, “Reading anything on the Internet has become a full-on nightmare. As media outlets attempt to eke out as much advertising revenue as possible, we’re left trying to put blinders on to mask away all the insanity that surrounds the content we’re trying to read.”

This is all the more true with Indian websites which are pretty badly designed to begin with, with the advertising making things worse. A good example that I visit frequently is Mouthshut.com which is a consumer review site. The reviews that I have put up for the public interest are barely readable, thanks to the advertisement blocks that surround the content and literally squeeze it out.

A click on the Readability bookmarklet and hey presto, sanity is restored to my screen. The same content is now available without the screaming advertisements or the other distractions fore and aft.

The developers warn that it doesn’t work for every site but my experience has been that it works for 99% of sites.  You can set how you want the modified page to appear in terms of style(Newspaper, novel, ebook, terminal), font size and margin. These tweaks enable you to arrive at a page that suits you best. Readability has been an enormous relief for my sore eyes and is highly recommended. You can get the full funda here.

I found an invite to be a beta tester for Wikirank in my mailbox this morning and promptly took it out for a spin. It’s a service similar to Google Trends, showing what people are reading on Wikipedia though it is no way affiliated with Wikipedia. Like Google Trends, it also lets you compare topics to see which is more popular.

I did a comparison of top Indian political leaders and this is how Wikirank ranked them. Manmohan Singh got the bump-up on the 20th of January since that’s when he was admitted for heart surgery. Even without the boost, he was still the most popular of the lot on Wikipedia with Sonia Gandhi coming behind with 73,000 page views in 90 days.

As you can see in the above screenshot, there are links to Wikipedia, Google News, Twitter and the New York Times next to each article. Each link takes you straight to the search  page on those respective properties. I have suggested that a link to Google Trends be also given since that would explain the spikes much better than Google News.

Wikirank is quite addictive to say, the least, and will be even more so once additional options such as embeddable charts go live. Wikirank is currently in beta, invite only, and you can sign up at wikirank.com.

I’m constantly on the look out for software that will help me keep track of my voluminous downloads of academic material, much of which happens to be in pdf format. While Google Desktop indexes my pdf files, there are times when I would want to locate a file based on author, title, journal and the like. Enter Mendeley which describes itself as “ffree academic software for managing and sharing research papers.”

What Mendeley does is to take all the pdf files that I throw at it and attempt to retrieve the above information based on the meta data stored in the file or through a full-text search of the file. To quote from the FAQ:

The automatic extraction of metadata (authors, title, journal etc.) from a research paper works in several steps. First, the full text is extracted from the article (currently, only text PDF documents are supported; OCR support for scanned image PDFs is coming soon). Then, Mendeley Desktop generates a “fingerprint” from the article’s text. The fingerprint is anonymously sent to the Mendeley server (the server doesn’t store this information and no one can see which articles you are reading). The server checks whether correct metadata already exists for this fingerprint and, if that’s the case, downloads it. If no corresponding fingerprint is found, Mendeley Desktop searches the article’s text for a DOI (”Digital Object Identifier”) number. Should it detect a DOI, it queries the CrossRef database for the correct metadata. Finally, if no DOI is found either, Mendeley Desktop uses algorithms to analyze the full text extracted from the article and tries to “guess” the metadata.

The software has worked quite well so far and I have even rediscovered a few pdfs that I didn’t know I had with me. Not surprising considering the Google Desktop shows a count of 3,500 pdf files on my computer. Mendeley is still in beta and the video on the site indicates that the final product will have plenty more bells and whistles.

Mendeley also provides 500 mb of space online where the offline data can be synced and  the Mendeley website also has some social networking features which I am yet to fully come to grips with. After the ma.gnolia debacle, I am a little wary of storing stuff in the cloud. Even without all that, Mendeley more than serves my purposes. Apart from that, the only issue I have is how to port my pdf database to another computer in case I change jobs or the like. According to the FAQ, I can use bibliographic formats such as BibTex  to transfer information. I did try to use BibTex to import info into Mendeley from Zotero but it didn’t work properly. I’ll just have to cross that river when I come to it;-|

Update: Apparently, the Himalayas had a role to play in the birth of Mendeley:-)