Trendalyzer (Motion Chart Gadget): Nice trends analysis tool by visualization

The other day I was seeing this nice presentation by Hans Rosling where he is presenting the different statistics of the developing world and how they changed over time. See his other talks on various topics.



I was largely impressed by the tool that he used in the presentation. It has a great visual appeal. It can represent different dimensions at the same time in the 2-D chart. Other than the regular X,Y axis it uses color, size, time to represent the other dimensions. The way one can drill down further into the statistics in a visual manner is very nice.

The software tool is developed by him and his colleagues at his non-profit organization "Gapminder". It was initially called Trendalyzer. Then google later bought this tool when the google founder saw this TED talk and was impressed by the software. Now, this software is available as a free gadget in spreadsheet in online google docs. Here is a tutorial on how to use this tool in google spreadsheet. Here is one more tutorial.

Uninstalling/Removing Groove Monitor (Folder Sync)

What is groove monitor ? First of all, dont worry. Its not a malware or spyware. It comes with microsoft office 2007. You will start noticing a "Folder Sync" button in the explorer. It is a collaboration tool that helps people working in teams. One can create groove workspace which is used to share files between people working together. Once you update files on your machine, the latest version of it can be seen by your teammates. See this link from Microsoft for more info.

Not everyone who works with office 2007 will want to share documents. I do not understand why this feature is being forced on people. This gets installed by default when upgrading to office 2007. Nothing comes for free. The corresponding process (groovemonitor.exe) occupies 30K of memory. Moreover it creates panic in the users. First time I started seeing the "Folder Sync" on the explorer, I was suspecting that its a malware/spyware.

I searched on how to remove this from running. There are many sites which suggested to disable it in the startup programs by running 'msconfig'. But that solution did not work for me. The process kept on coming back and the "Folder Sych" button did not go away. Some sites even suggested to remove the exe file which I think is not a good solution. Finally, I found a neat way to remove it.

1. In control panel, go to "add or remove programs"
2. Choose "Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007" in the list
3. Click "Change". (Do not click "Remove")
4. Three options will be presented.
5. Choose "Add or remove features" and click "Continue"
6. A list of features will be presented
7. Click on box beside "Microsoft office groove" and select "Not available"
8. A small red cross will appear on this feature.
9. Click "Continue" and let the office 2007 uninstall the feature for you.

Hard disk usage visualization tool

Ever wondered how you are running out of disk space even when you have a large capacity hard disk. Its very likely that you have bunch of large files that you do not need anymore. Actually, I faced this problem even more because I have a small capacity hard disk. I am almost perpetually short of disk space. So, I have to be very optimal in its usage. Sometimes, I store large files somewhere and forget that they ever existed after the use. One of the things that I keep doing is to use disk cleanup tool in windows and remove temporary files. But that does not reclaim much space beyond few MBs.

One day I was very frustrated that I have to continuously hunt for unwanted files on my machine. When I turned to the net for a tool that helps me in this, I found this nice tool called "WinDirStat" which stands for "Windows directory statistics". Its is a nice tool that quickly gives a map of all the files in the disk. Its visual presentation is very good with color-coding and size-coding. It visually shows the file sizes occupied by files and the directories.

The files will be shown as rectangular boxes and the size of the box represents the relative size of the file. All the files in a directory will be given same color. If you put the cursor on the blocks, it shows the filename etc. With this tool, you can quickly identify the large files/directories in your disk and delete them if they are not needed. Or you can backup the large files and delete them from your disk. You can do some basic operations like opening, deleting, seeing properties etc directly from the tool. I feel that this is a very convenient feature.

Here is the list of other tools that are available in case you want to explore more.

Standalone torrent downloader

For a long time I was wondering why can't there be a standalone torrent client. When I say a standalone client, I mean a device which can download torrents without the need of a PC. Recently, I got my answer from twitter feed of one of my friends. Here is the link to the product. It can download torrents to external hard disk, usb flash drive. It has an inbuilt SAMBA file server and FTP server. It has web server allowing connections over internet for administration. It seems to have decent security features allowing to created different users with different privileges. As I do not own this product, I cannot share personal experiences. But the link has reviews from users who own the product.


On a related note, when I was searching the web, I found that utorrent software has a standalone mode which is different from what I am expecting. It basically means that utorrent can run without installation. This gives it an advantage that it becomes very easy to move partially downloaded files from one PC to another. If you have a pendrive, have both the utorrent client and the download target on the pendrive and you are good to go. You can continue the download from any machine without needing to install. This is also a pretty good use case.