ctrl.altered.mind

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.

This video is the opening sequence of the movie, Lord of War.

Music: Buffalo Springfield “For what it’s worth”

With the Republican National Convention wrapping up in St. Paul last week, the experience of playing host to one of the most criticized political group has left behind all kinds of taste in the minds of the people of the Twin Cities. The worst part about the police proactively rounding up innocent citizens and journalists and charging them as ‘terrorists’ under the Patriot Act (seriously, do you guys even know what terrorism means?), is the fact that the mayor and media have remained mum on the journalism crackdown. There are severe cracks developing in this pillar of democracy.

Here are a couple of pictures from a friend’s Flickr photo stream. The first picture depicts riot police prepared to take on a peaceful march about poverty and homelessness.

The most interesting fact I learned today, is that eggs get cooked as a function of temperature, and not time - which means that boiling an egg for about ten minutes is actually the wrong way to cook your egg. Cooking for Eggheads, featured in Discover Magazine, has the details.

Recall that when an egg cooks, its proteins first unwind and then link to form a rigidifying mesh. But not all its proteins solidify at the same temperature. Ovotransferrin, the first of the egg-white proteins to uncoil, begins to set at around 61 degrees Celsius, or 142°F. Ovalbumin, the most abundant egg-white protein, coagulates at 184°F. Yolk proteins generally fall in between, with most starting to solidify when they approach 158°F. Thus, cooking an egg at 158°F or so should achieve both a firmed-up yolk and still-tender whites, since at that low temperature only some of the egg-white proteins will have coagulated.

The gastronomic experience varies widely with the actual temperature at which the food is cooked. Understanding protein chemistry could possibly improve the experimentation process that is carried out in my kitchen in the name of cooking.