About a month ago now I wrote about a website called Aardvark that combines the power of social media with searching. Search engines by themselves are great, but you’ve got to know some of the tricks of working the Google machine and its counterparts.

I received an email earlier today from Aardvark’s CEO, Max Ventilla, letting me know that they are now equipped to work with and take advantage of the power of twitter. I never knew aardvarks and birds could have produced such a symbiotic relationship as this.

The formatting of how to use Aardvark with twitter is very straight forward. All you need to do is the following three items:

1. ask a question
2. make sure you have a question mark "?" in your tweet
3. include @vark in your tweet

That’s it! Couldn’t be much simpler.

When you ask your question just sit back and relax. The folks at Aardvark will send your question to the right people and then direct message you back with their answer.

Great stuff. I’ve been trying to participate answering questions as much as possible when I can. Even when I can’t the interface and functionality of letting things go by or "passing" on them has been well thought out for the user base.

Before you get started, you do need to register with using Aardvark on your twitter account.

When I started my computer earlier today I noticed something different along the very bottom of my monitor. It was something new in the Windows Start taskbar that I hadn’t seen before. Something had invaded my system and put something there I don’t remember asking for in the past.

There was a new button sitting right next to my "Start" button. I was familiar with the name on the button, as I’ve been generally pleased with my experiences using their products.

It appears in a recent update to my Google Toolbar, which I don’t remember approving automatic updates to my toolbars to be installed with no warning.

My first thought was "Do I really need to give Google anymore real-estate on my computer?" Particularly in my Start / Taskbar? However, I’ll give Google the benefit of the doubt here and see how I like it. Hoping I can remove it later, but I didn’t see any options for that at the time I was digging around in my toolbar settings for how the update got applied automatically.

When you click on the button you’re presented with the following options to choose from. I can see how this would be helpful.

My second thought was that with the ability to start programs and its similarity to the Windows Start button, could this be a foreshadowing of what a Google OS would start to look like?

Anyone else seen this and already using it? What do you think? I’ve got to say that I do love the Google Toolbar as it lets me access all my favorite items / bookmarks on the web, regardless of what computer I’m on.

Image Source: Snagit images from my personal computer. Earth image from www.sxc.hu.

Every Sunday, I perform a set of jobs on all my computers. They help optimize the system, save hard disk space, increase security and privacy, etc.

Clean: Using CCleaner, I clean the PCs including all the browser caches and various other application caches. (Read my introduction to CCleaner here.)

Disk Cleanup: I run disk cleanup ($ leanmgr) on all the drives.

Registry: I run a registry cleaner (these days CCleaner itself) to clean the registries, after taking a backup of the current registry set.

Virus Scan: I run an entire PC scan, not just the scan across the “commonly infected areas”.

Defragment: Using the disk defrgamenter ($ defrag –a <drive>), I first analyze all the drives and if necessary defragment the recommended ones.

Updatedb: I update the Cygwin file index.

Backup: I take a backup of all important data on my Transcend Extensible Hard disk. A good idea, don’t you think?

Image Sources: CCleaner, Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter.

find is an elaborate search program with a number of features. Unlike the Google Desktop Search and locate, it doesn’t index anything but processes the request on the fly. Thus it is slower.

find is one of the most useful commands when you also have to search within unknown files and make further operations on the result set. It does a recursive search, looking in all subdirectories.

The first set of arguments is always the paths where the search should initiate. $ find /home /tmp <remaining arguments> would search based on the remaining arguments in /home, /tmp and all their subdirectories. If unspecified, the default path is taken as ‘.’, the current working directory.

To search for a specific filename pattern, –name <regexp> is used as the next argument. $ find /home /tmp –name *.sh returns all .SH files present in /home, /tmp and their subdirectories.

Instead of piping, to perform any operation on each of the results returned, –exec is used. $ find /home /tmp –name *.sh –exec grep todo ‘{}’ \; –print searches for the string todo in the above returned files. grep does the search and ‘{}’ implies that all results need to be processed. The –print prints the final output, the actual lines containing the specified string in the files.

Instead of grep, it could be chmod or chown or any operation that can be done of files. These above options are the most common use cases of find.

There are a number of other options to refine the search like complex expressions with boolean operators, the maximum and minimum depth of subdirectories that need to be traversed, the modification times and permissions on files, the file types, etc. You can read about all these in the manual page.

Every once in a while, there is some file that you know you’ve saved but yet can’t find it. Windows Search comes handy at such times but is very slow. Windows Desktop Search, a new utility that is now being shipped with the Windows OSs and being given as an update works using indexing. I think it was started to beat the competition of Google Desktop Search.

IMHO, both Windows and Google Desktop Search consume too many resources.

e.g. Windows Desktop Search recommends Pentium 1 GHz Processor and 256 MB RAM, 500 MB of free hard disk space,… A process that starts automatically all the time. Note that we don’t search for files on our desktop all the time and mostly have an idea which file sits in which folder. A desktop search is for that occasion where we’ve “lost” some file, now and then.

Cygwin provides the best alternatives: locate and find.

locate coupled with updatedb helps you find any file (even hidden ones and those in temporary cache folders) in your system.

When you run the updatedb ($ updatedb), as the name suggests, it updates its database creating a simple index of all the files that are present in the system, with full paths. The first time you run it, like any other indexing application, it takes a few minutes to index the whole system. From the next time, it barely takes a minute, if you run it periodically, that is. I run updatedb about once every week to keep the index fresh.

After updating the file index, you can start using locate.

$ locate <substring-of-filename>

gives you all the files on your PC which contain the substring in their filenames, within a second. Even the files that accidentally got saved in some obscure temporary folder can be retrieved easily.

There are more options to update and locate files with extra preferences but I never had to use them much. The default usage suffices.

The great thing, apart from the speed of retrieval, is that this is not resource intensive and a dedicated process is not always running on your system for it. Of course, you need Cygwin installed.