ctrl.altered.mind

Carbonated soft drinks are generally called ‘Pops’ here in the upper Midwest, but ‘Soda’ is gaining some ground too. I wasn’t aware of a strong debate underlying the name for the beverage until I came across this interactive map. You can click on the map to get the generic name for soft drinks by US county. Just in case you need to stay abreast of the local jargon while venturing to unfamiliar corners of the country.

Talk about an inverse generation gap when it comes to technology! Not only is my dad on Facebook now, probably spending way more time on a social network than I would bother to, but he’s also beaten me to creating a Facebook group. Not that I was in any such race, but it is anecdotal evidence of the amazing reach that Facebook is commanding around the globe. If you know my Dad, it wouldn’t be too hard to guess his group has something to do with Maritime Shipping.

Social networks are successfully adding (active) members from demographics that, until recently, were not even considered a target market. Facebook, of course, is quickly headed towards becoming the 800 pound gorilla in this domain with an estimated 175 million profiles (and growing). That is about 1 in 34 people on the planet, which is pretty impressive for a website that has only been around for around 5 years, even if you discount for the number of inactive and duplicate profiles.

Facebook maintains general statistics on their press page, if you would like some more numbers.

I just upgraded my blog to the new Wordpress 2.7 release. Took all of three minutes (just a single click to reconnect the database, most of the time required was for uploading the new files to the server).

The new version of Wordpress (my blogging platform of choice) has a very cool new social news aspect to it. The dashboard shows popular blog posts from around the world that are related to the content on your own weblog. This is exactly how I found this interesting photoblog post by Matt Mullenweg, who apparently just visited the Taj Mahal in Agra with Om Malik, a well-known web and technology writer (and founder of the GigaOm network of technology blogs).

Here are some pictures taken at the Minnesota Orchestra last week. It was a wonderful evening marked by the splendid performance by the conductor Osmo Vänskä and the very talented ensemble. The Orchestra Hall itself presents a very interesting architecture - an open glass structure laced with whimsical blue tubes. The pictures capture a glimpse of the ‘falling rock’ structure that lends itself to the acoustic perfection of the Hall, and comprises of over hundred cubes embedded into the walls and ceiling. The Orchestra performance itself was scintillating, and ebbing with energy thanks to an effusive conductor.

I received this set of powerful images with descriptions in an email forward. Links and certain updates within the descriptions have been added by me. I am assuming the pictures are licensed for free-use, and all rights belong to the respective owner(s).

Heavy Arctic Icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent in Resolute Bay, Nunavut Territory, Canada.

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The goal of this presentation, the 10th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism, is to evolve a taxonomical basis for the disproval of Creationism. The elaborate explanation of the phylogenetic tree of life, and illustrations of the twin-nested hierarchy of genetics in this ten-minute long video are simply outstanding.

In other words, if you didn’t really pay too much attention to taxonomy in college but wished you should have, this video will freaking blow your mind.

Nico Di Mattia is phenomenonal, and his most popular speed-painting projects are simply exhilarating.

Iron Man ::

The Dark Knight ::

I wrote a tutorial back in Dec 2007, on getting the free mediatomb application running (with Fink) on Mac OS X Leopard for streaming media to a Playstation 3 system on your home network. This tutorial gets a lot of visitors even today, and therefore I wanted to post an update which should resolve any further unanswered questions. At the time of writing, I had documented some issues encountered while getting mediatomb version 0.10.0 to install and run correctly on my OS X machine. Since then, the application has been updated and several issues have been corrected. The current version 0.11 of mediatomb installed correctly on my system with no failures (removes the big step of patching the string_converter.cc file).

I shall assume you have Fink correctly installed and running on your system. If not, there is a tutorial on the Fink website (or refer to my previous post).

Fetch a copy of mediatomb by executing the following operation in Terminal -

$ fink fetch mediatomb

Next, install.

$ fink install mediatomb

You will need to initialize the mediatomb application by running the following command (assuming you chose the default path during the Fink installation) -

$ /sw/bin/mediatomb

This should create a .mediatomb folder in your home directory, with the config.xml file included for mediatomb settings.

This config.xml file has also been updated to include helpful comments on the updates required to run mediatomb with a PS3, as follows -

Make the necessary changes, and you should be along on your path to streaming your media effortlessly to the PS3. As always, you can let me know in the comments if something did not work for you. Good luck!

I just spent the last few minutes applying name tags to the pictures in my Picasa Web Albums collection, and now Google knows exactly what I look like.

Picasa Web Albums is the online arm of Google’s Picasa photo organization program, widely recognized as the best photo management application in terms of speed and features. My usage of Picasa has been restricted to the web albums feature (which comes with 1GB of free storage), since I have been using iPhoto on the Macintosh — Google does not currently provide a port of Picasa for OS X (it has been promised for over two years now, but is rumored to be launched ‘later this year‘).

Back on topic, Google recently updated both the web and desktop versions of Picasa and added a new people-tagging feature. The feature is a big step beyond a similar tool offered by Facebook, in that Google automatically attempts to identify faces in your pictures automatically (Facebook requires you to manually click on every face in each picture). Once the person tagging feature has been enabled, Picasa takes a few minutes to recognize faces from all your pictures (depends on the number of pictures available, of course). The face recognition works amazingly well, and the system does a good job of grouping multiple pictures of the same person together. Once done, a user-friendly slider interface allows you to name each person that Picasa found in all of your pictures. This drastically cuts down on the time that would otherwise be required to perform a similar exercise manually.

So, what are the advantages of name tagging your pictures? For one, it makes it easier to search for all pictures that include a particular person, in your collection. This can be a daunting task with even a small collection of photos, and especially so if you have a lot of group snaps.

Another feature of this system, good or bad, is that Picasa links the tagged pictures of a particular person to the profile of that person in your Google contacts list. Therefore, tags are not just a label, but cross-linked with Google profiles. This would translate to photo management benefits across all Google services that are tied in to these profiles, especially social network websites like Orkut. This is not unique to Google’s Picasa, as Facebook handles tagging the same way, creating cross-links to profiles that match tagged pictures.

I found this comparative piece via reddit, but it has been floating around on the internet and a multitude of blogs for a while.

I’m a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight….

If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you’re ‘exotic’ and ‘different.’

Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, you’re an American story.

If your name is Barack you’re a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, and you’re a maverick.

Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.

Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, then you’re well- grounded.

If you spend 3 years as a community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, help register 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, 8 years as a State Senator of a district of 750,000 people, chair the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people, sponsor 131 bills, and serve on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works, and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you don’t have any real leadership experience.

If your resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town of 7,000 people, 2 years as governor of a state of 650,000 people, you’re qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 daughters, all within Protestant churches, you’re not a real Christian.

If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, left your ill wife, and married the heiress the next month, you’re a Christian.

If you teach responsible, age-appropriate sex education, including the use of birth control, you erode the fiber of American society.

If you staunchly advocate abstinence-only education, while your teen daughter ends up pregnant, you’re responsible.

If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, you don’t represent America’s family values.

If your husband is called ‘First Dude’, has a DWI conviction, didn’t register to vote until 25, and was a member of a group that advocated secession of Alaska from the USA, yours is the quintessential American family.

And, finally, if you’re famous for your quick temper, you’re the one to have your finger on the red nuclear button.

OK, much clearer now.