Carthik Sharma

This microsoft tool will remove the stuffing from your documents.

Brief Description
With this add-in you can permanently remove hidden data and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint files.

The webpage details the apps that this works with. Often I have seen the size of word documents and such grow uncontrollably. I still work with MS Office, and this would have been very useful had I know about this earlier. I owe one more to Karl for this tip.

I take a lot of interest in questions of sustainability – a sustainable environment, sustainable economies and in general, sensible, sustainable living. I guess I am a sucker for people, and companies who keep their footprints small, and clean up after themselves.

A couple of months ago, I read about how Timberland was about to add labels to its products to explain to customers as to how it makes an effort to reduce its environmental and social impact (I think I read this in Newsweek). It looks like they have come around to it, finally, by adding “nutriional labels” to their product packaging. I leave it to Joel Makower to analyse the good and bad of it (and he does a pretty good job.

The point of this post is something else – since I am such a sucker for the environment and responsible corporations, it is a shame that corporations that spend money and time on improving their environmental impact don’t make it well known enough. I would gladly buy products that are made by such companies and choose them over products from other companies — now if only we had some way of knowing which corporations are not “Evil”.

On the same subject, I found this list of the 100 “most sustainable companies” at Joel’s blog too. Alright, I first saw it at worldchanging.com but we all read wordlchanging everyday, now don’t we?

I read up on Benford’s Law recently, which explains one of the many things that I have always wondered about. You see, my apartment number is 15029, and a lot of the apartments in my complex have a number starting with a 1, and so it is with a friend’s apartment complex I had been to the day before.

Also known as the first-digit law, it says that a number in things such as the front page of the Times, or on tax return forms have a 30-odd percent probability of starting with the numeral 1. In other words, if you look at real-life source of numerical data, the probability for different numerals being the first in the numbers is not the same.

This article also opens with a compelling classroom exercise in probability. The professor asks the students to toss a coin 200 times and write down the sequence of heads and tails observed. He often identifies fakers, who just write down a seemingly random sequence (in stead of actually tossing the coin 200 times), with surprising accuracy. The key is the fact that in 200 coin-tosses, the chances of 6 consecutive heads or tails appearing is surprisingly high, but not many fakers would think this would be so, and would avoid writing sequences with 6 consecutive heads or tails!

Interesting stuff – good examples of “laws” or truths of daily life that are just sitting out there, waiting to be written down as a “law”. Hope I stumble across some, sometime. Carthik’s Law – that would be the day, hell yeah!

Archive Thunderbird Mail Messages – Extension
Some of the best extensions are never on the mozilla extensions page – go figure! This one archives old messages automatically to enable pack-rats like me to preserve the old without clutterring the inbox.

Tricks of the Trade: Car Audio Engineer
Test the speakers, wires, and polarity all in one step!

Tricks of the Trade: Trainer
…ask them “What questions do you have?”

Google Proximity Search – What’s missing from Google’s advanced search feature. Now I can finally search for words/phrases that are not one single phrase, but seperated by at most 3 words.

Naomi Watts < -> Pink Floyd – turns out her father was the road manager of ze favourite band.