Software & Utilities Archive

Brief reviews of useful software (mostly free), tools and online utilities for students

I have a fetish for checking out new technologies. While most things I check out turn out to be useless for my purposes, a few are life-changing. The following articles are about some such technologies, websites, plugins, gadgets or utilities that caught my attention over the years. These will be of particular interest to students and are relevant to others as well.

  • I was excited at the prospect of adding Google CSE to my website – but it does not fit my 3 column site I have always wanted to customise search engines and was thrilled when Google campe up wtih it’s CSE.  I quickly created a few.  Though they offer the codes to display the search in my site, I was not able to implement it in my wordpress site due to Javascripts.  This problem was solved by the an ingenuine idea at easywordpress.  Using the suggested method, I successfully got the CSE on my site and the results were displaying....

    Google custom search engine: frame size problem

    Posted on March 17, 2007 | No Comments
    I was excited at the prospect of adding Google CSE to my website – but it does not fit my 3 column site I have always wanted to customise search engines and was thrilled when Google campe up wtih it’s CSE.  I quickly created a few.  Though they offer the codes to display the search in my site, I was not able to implement it in my wordpress site due to Javascripts.  This problem was solved by the an ingenuine idea at easywordpress.  Using the suggested method, I successfully got the CSE on my site and the results were displaying....

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  • Add RSS content from delicious, etc. within your post.  Great possibilities to customise I had been looking for some way to add my del.icio.us links into my posts and this was proving to be impossible.  I finally found the perfect solution using a combination of Adsense Delux plugin and feed2js RSS reader. Using Feed2js to get RSS feeds Feed2js is a simple to use application through which we can publish rss feeds in our webpages.  Doing this is also very simple.  One just has to give feed2js the url of the rss feed.  It allows for many customisation including whether...

    RSS Feeds within post in wordpress – Horray!

    Posted on March 15, 2007 | No Comments
    Add RSS content from delicious, etc. within your post.  Great possibilities to customise I had been looking for some way to add my del.icio.us links into my posts and this was proving to be impossible.  I finally found the perfect solution using a combination of Adsense Delux plugin and feed2js RSS reader. Using Feed2js to get RSS feeds Feed2js is a simple to use application through which we can publish rss feeds in our webpages.  Doing this is also very simple.  One just has to give feed2js the url of the rss feed.  It allows for many customisation including whether...

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  • Search debates, policies, laws, parliamentary questions, and other issues relating to policy, politics law and governance in India. Covers Indian Parliament and State Assemblies For those with an interest in policy issues, following what happens in the parliament and the legislative assemblies can be crucial. All state governments and the Government of India have reasonably information websites these days. But it is a little painful if we have to look for a new education initiative in over 50 websites one by one. On the other hand a generic search in Google or other search engines will give a lot of...

    Indian Parliament & Legislative Assemblies search engine

    Posted on March 14, 2007 | No Comments
    Search debates, policies, laws, parliamentary questions, and other issues relating to policy, politics law and governance in India. Covers Indian Parliament and State Assemblies For those with an interest in policy issues, following what happens in the parliament and the legislative assemblies can be crucial. All state governments and the Government of India have reasonably information websites these days. But it is a little painful if we have to look for a new education initiative in over 50 websites one by one. On the other hand a generic search in Google or other search engines will give a lot of...

    Continue Reading...

  • I was looking for a video cutter that could help me make suitable clips for presentations.  Finally, I found Virtual Dub, an AVI editor that delivered.  Virtual Deb is open source and totally free.  It enables me to read a variety of files, including dll files that I was struggling with and make small clips from a longer video file.  I can save the clips as avi or wav file, and both are readable by windows media player – which is crucial if we wish to use these clips in power point presentations. I had to struggle with the options...

    Open-source video cutter for presentations

    Posted on March 3, 2007 | No Comments
    I was looking for a video cutter that could help me make suitable clips for presentations.  Finally, I found Virtual Dub, an AVI editor that delivered.  Virtual Deb is open source and totally free.  It enables me to read a variety of files, including dll files that I was struggling with and make small clips from a longer video file.  I can save the clips as avi or wav file, and both are readable by windows media player – which is crucial if we wish to use these clips in power point presentations. I had to struggle with the options...

    Continue Reading...

  • A tool to generate conceptually related set of words for content analysis Wordnet is a lexical database maintained by Princeton university.  It is described as: “WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser” When we with to do autocoding with NVivo or other qualitative research (or content analysis) software,...

    Using Wordnet lexical database with content analysis software

    Posted on February 14, 2007 | 2 Comments
    A tool to generate conceptually related set of words for content analysis Wordnet is a lexical database maintained by Princeton university.  It is described as: “WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser” When we with to do autocoding with NVivo or other qualitative research (or content analysis) software,...

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  • NVivo Rating: 4 out of 5 I started using NVivo – a qualitative research and content analysis software – last year when I worked on a content analysis project. NVivo’s purposes are simple – it allows us to assemble different documents (including pictures) and code them. The codes can be arranged in a hierarchy or individually. While most coding is manual, some of it can be automated (see below). The best part of NVivo is that it allows us to review contents carrying a particular code with ease. For example, I was looking at newspaper articles on contracting and wanted...

    NVivo: Useful content analysis tool

    Posted on February 14, 2007 | 3 Comments
    NVivo Rating: 4 out of 5 I started using NVivo – a qualitative research and content analysis software – last year when I worked on a content analysis project. NVivo’s purposes are simple – it allows us to assemble different documents (including pictures) and code them. The codes can be arranged in a hierarchy or individually. While most coding is manual, some of it can be automated (see below). The best part of NVivo is that it allows us to review contents carrying a particular code with ease. For example, I was looking at newspaper articles on contracting and wanted...

    Continue Reading...

  • Visualising ones ideas is a great way to think through complex issues or arguments. Here are three free utilities to put our ideas into neat pictures Last year I used a mind-mapping software called FreeMind productively. Mind maps start with a simple core from which one can have multiple nodes that lead to multiple nodes and so on. Free mind allows the user to link different nodes, make comments on certain nodes, link them to files, insert a number of images, etc. Last year I did a course on Social Movement Theory. Towards the end of the semester a friend...

    Visualise ideas with Mind Maps, Concept Maps and Diagraming tools

    Posted on February 4, 2007 | No Comments
    Visualising ones ideas is a great way to think through complex issues or arguments. Here are three free utilities to put our ideas into neat pictures Last year I used a mind-mapping software called FreeMind productively. Mind maps start with a simple core from which one can have multiple nodes that lead to multiple nodes and so on. Free mind allows the user to link different nodes, make comments on certain nodes, link them to files, insert a number of images, etc. Last year I did a course on Social Movement Theory. Towards the end of the semester a friend...

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  • I recently tried using an online utility to find a suitable date for all students in my programme to meet. Normally, this is a hugely time consuming affaire. This time around, I tried an online utility called MeetingWizard.com and it turned out to be fantastic. It’s a simple utility that works like a poll. The organizer can choose an initial list of times and send invitations to chosen people. The invitees just have to click a link and choose merely click on the times that suit them. The site offers a lot of other useful features too. For example, apart...

    Online tool to schedule meetings among many participants

    Posted on February 3, 2007 | No Comments
    I recently tried using an online utility to find a suitable date for all students in my programme to meet. Normally, this is a hugely time consuming affaire. This time around, I tried an online utility called MeetingWizard.com and it turned out to be fantastic. It’s a simple utility that works like a poll. The organizer can choose an initial list of times and send invitations to chosen people. The invitees just have to click a link and choose merely click on the times that suit them. The site offers a lot of other useful features too. For example, apart...

    Continue Reading...

  • A rather surprising feature about Google calendar is that it does not have a task manager. I recently changed my time management technique from being ‘calendar based’ to ‘list based’ management. In my search for a task management system, I discovered www.rememberthemilk.com – an incredibly well designed utility. It’s online, capable of creating multiple lists, one can specify due dates, estimated time, associate with multiple tags (that are across lists), specify location, and do an assortment of other things. It’s highly keyboard friendly and has a terrific search facility. Oh, I forgot to mention that one can specify status of...

    Google Calendar integrates with Remember the Milk

    Posted on January 29, 2007 | 2 Comments
    A rather surprising feature about Google calendar is that it does not have a task manager. I recently changed my time management technique from being ‘calendar based’ to ‘list based’ management. In my search for a task management system, I discovered www.rememberthemilk.com – an incredibly well designed utility. It’s online, capable of creating multiple lists, one can specify due dates, estimated time, associate with multiple tags (that are across lists), specify location, and do an assortment of other things. It’s highly keyboard friendly and has a terrific search facility. Oh, I forgot to mention that one can specify status of...

    Continue Reading...

  • It’s easy to import citations from Google Scholar into Refworks. In order to do this go to “scholar preferences”, a link you will find next to the search box and at the bottom of that page you will find an entry called “Bibliography Manager”. In this, select Refworks (I often end-up choosing a similar sounding thing called “Refman”, take care). Once you save the perferences, you will find a link called “import to refworks” below each search result. The rest is one click away. This though is not entirely trouble free since logging into Refworks should be done only through...

    Using Refworks with Google Scholar

    Posted on January 28, 2007 | 2 Comments
    It’s easy to import citations from Google Scholar into Refworks. In order to do this go to “scholar preferences”, a link you will find next to the search box and at the bottom of that page you will find an entry called “Bibliography Manager”. In this, select Refworks (I often end-up choosing a similar sounding thing called “Refman”, take care). Once you save the perferences, you will find a link called “import to refworks” below each search result. The rest is one click away. This though is not entirely trouble free since logging into Refworks should be done only through...

    Continue Reading...

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