Rants of a nerd
Archive for March, 2010
Madrid Photos
0Finally got around to uploading a bunch of photos from my trip to Madrid. This was back in January and the first of the bad winter storms across Europe was under way. Temperatures were below freezing most of the time, and indeed when the temps hit 2 degrees my taxi driver remarked that it was a relatively warm day!
![One of the old gates \](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4017/4412409979_7cf03e2867_s.jpg "One of the old gates \")
There are a few photos from the Museo Raina Sofia. This was the only museum that I visited that allowed photography. However its collection is mostly crazy modern stuff. So I picked a few Picassos and Dalis here. Dali’s Girl at the Window is one of his best and is really worth the trip to the museum. Most people would visit it for Picasso’s Guernica – though I could not really find it to be extra special. The Guernica is one painting they do not allow anyone to photograph. In the neighbouring room, there is a study of the Guernica (included in the gallery above) along with many other details from the grand picture.
Among the three museums, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza was the one I liked best. Strangely, I found the collection of Carmen Thyssen to be the more interesting and nicer. The collection of paintings range from the 13th to the 20th centuries. They had a special exhibit called Lagrimas de Eros (Tears of Love), which featured famous art pieces depicting love and death.
I had very little time after this for the biggie: Museo del Prado. The importance of this museum is stressed in the fact that all three museums are connected by one road called Paseo del Prado. It has a good collection of Spanish art including many by Velasquez and Goya. I especially liked the painting called Las Melinas (The Young Girls), showing the daughters of the royal household.
Among other sights to be seen are Puerta del Sol (Gate of the Sun), Espana (where there is a memorial to Miguel de Cervantes – author of the Don Quixote story), some churches (Madrid Cathedral, San Francisco and San Andrea are in the gallery). Thanks to the extreme cold, I did not venture out into each of these places. I did brave the freezing conditions to get some snaps taken here and there. Was I ever happy to get back into the taxi and warm clothes then!
Right in the heart of the city is an Egyptian temple – Debod – taken out brick by brick and reassembled in Madrid. It was offered to Madrid by the Egyptian government as the temple would have been destroyed under the lake created by the Aswan Dam. Around the temple are some nice walkways (file away for a later visit in better weather) and a breathtaking view over some forests and the city.
For another trip to Spain, there is much to explore in Madrid. There are also the other cities like Barcelona and historical sites such as Alhambra to be seen. Till then…
Mac Day 2
02 years ago
by siva
in Miscellaneous
Well, the first full day with Leopard. Mostly the experience has been decent. Getting some hardware working was difficult. As with Linux, not all hardware makers offer Mac drivers. But the struggle with some basic stuff like keyboard and mouse were unexpected. Even after getting some fixes in, it still freezes sometime with the keyboard and mouse not responsive (if I leave the machine for a while). The last thing not working is the microphone. Sound is playing through the speakers, so this is probably a configuration issue. Perhaps it thinks that the mic port is a multi channel audio out port?
Applications too are not as easy to find as in the alternate worlds. Windows apps are everywhere of course. And Linux distros have had “app stores” for a long time (Synaptic / rpmdrake / whatever). But I like the way of installing new apps: just copy the application install to wherever needed (e.g. the applications folder). Discovering what apps are installed already and how to manage them is still a problem for me. Given that Darwin is a BSD kernel and the underpinnings are Unix style, will a ports type of repository work for mac?
The presentation is very good. However it feels very restrained / claustrophobic in some ways. The fact that everyone adheres to the basic user interface guidelines means that Firefox looks like Safari, VLC like Quicktime and so on. I guess the reason it is so successful is that it is a controlled system. In the same way there is the tight-knit ecosystem of itunes, ipod, etc. where the choices of what is available has been made for you. This feels so wrong for someone coming from an open environment like Mandriva (which is what I’ve been using for the past few years).
The basic reason I went in for the change in operating systems has not been tested yet: that is Adobe Lightroom 2. Unfortunately this nice piece of software is only available for Windows or Mac, and after trying XP for a while, I am not going to stay with it. Being perennially worried about viruses and other harmful software is not something I want to do. Loading the system down with a firewall, anti-virus, etc. is the surest way to slow the machine down to a crawl. I even tried running XP in a virtual environment (VirtualBox), but Lightroom runs like it is moving through molasses in that configuration. Tomorrow I shall test Lightroom out. It will also give me an opportunity to test how the export / import of the catalog of photos works.
Mac OS X
02 years ago
by siva
in Miscellaneous
Tried out Mac OS X today. The install of Leopard went remarkably smooth and here I am typing this blog post from within Firefox for Mac. Thanks to cross platform applications like Firefox, the learning curve is small. However there are enough painful differences.
Firstly the Mac OS does not seem to have an effective application menu. The only options seem to be the search icon at the top right of the screen (works if you know the name of the app, I suppose) and the Applications folder within Finder (Finder is a sort of file manager cum various other things here).
There is no task bar. Open applications add themselves to the Dock. I think they get a sort of blue dot beneath if they are running. Surprisingly clicking the red “x” button on an application only seems to minimize it. Can’t really say.
Now that I’ve tried Windows, Mac and Linux, it is easy to see where a lot of “inspiration” for new features and look-and-feel items have come from. Apple is clearly the leader in many aspects. However, I think KDE with the Plasma desktop have managed to really out-innovate Apple in some areas. Notably on the widget / plasmoids space (and not to forget the Plasma Netbook).
Windows is really the poor cousin here, it seems. I haven’t used Windows 7 to comment on that, but KDE and Mac show up XP and Vista in a bad light. The fact that a default install of either a recent Linux distro also throws in several applications further demonstrates the head that open source / free software has made in making the operating system usable out of the box.
P.S. Firefox for mac seems to have problems in laying out the WordPress dashboard.
10 billion itunes songs
02 years ago
by siva
in Arts and Culture
So apparently Apple has sold 10 billion songs on itunes. The store has been up for a few years now and is currently one of the biggest music retailers in the world. Ergo it is reasonable to expect that the best sellers during this time would reflect the best music of the decade. Maybe the top seller would be an all-time classic? The top three songs are:
3. The Black Eyed Peas – Boom Boom Pow
2. Lady GaGa – Poker Face
1. The Black Eyed Peas – I Gotta Feeling
This site has a listing of the top 10. All of the top 10 are very recent hit songs. Even Kesha made it on the list!
How does that happen? Perhaps the growth rate of itunes is so rapid that the newest hits are automatically the best selling ever. Perhaps the buying public are teenagers and they listen to these songs the most. Perhaps in ten or twenty years we will hear Tik Tok on the radio and think back to the good old days when music was good!
A fallout of the digital age is the shrinkage of time between fads. A decade or so back, movies used to run for several weeks. 100-day runs were reasonably common. These days the movie has gone to TV and DVD within 100 days. The rare blockbuster like Avatar plays for a couple of months. Part of the reason for this is the explosion in available media for consumption. The Economist has got the data deluge on its cover this week (have not read it yet). So there is utter fragmentation of the viewing public. Niches have become easier to fill. For example, smaller movie theaters don’t mind showing offbeat movies that appeal to smaller audiences as compared to the larger auditoria. Equally it is rare for a “cross-cultural” movie (or album or book or …). Perhaps the Black Eyed Peas and Avatar are examples of these breakout cultural examples?
Weather Scares
02 years ago
by siva
in Miscellaneous
Funny Story.
The winter storms that have lashed Western Europe and the US in the recent past have gotten people on the edge. So when news reports of an amateur weather forecaster predicting 40 inches of snow for the coming weekend came in, it started a near hysteria. Normally a prediction of this sort would have been met with scepticism, but coming on the back of two particularly nasty storms (and confident statements from newsmen that the forecaster had predicted both of these earlier storms), people were only too ready to believe it.
Now the guy says that he was misquoted. That it was only a worst case scenario and not what he had forecast.
What does this say about the spread of rumours? The internet seems to be particularly good at spreading rumours and stoking mass hysteria. Over seventy years ago, Orson Welles caused panic in New York as his radio adaptation of H G Wells’ War of the Worlds was taken as a news programme (despite many announcements that it was a dramatization). Nothing seems to have changed since then in terms of our gullibility.
PS: This reminds me of an old Archie Comics joke. Mr Weatherbee tells Miss Beazley, “rumours are like butter.” To which she replies, “because they are easy to spread?” The Bee retorts, “no, because they are so hard to unspread.”
PS3 Woes Be Gone
0It looks like the date related problems faced by many ps3s around the world are now gone. I took the less risky path of not turning on the console. So I guess I will know for sure when I power it up in a couple of days time…
In other gaming news, the ps3 exclusive Heavy Rain has been getting some very favourable reviews. It has a metacritic score of 88, and in general has gotten reviews that praise it for its non linear story. Apparently the game pushes the emotional quotient and has as a basic concept a “actions have consequences” twist. Unlike other games where you can die and respawn, here it has consequences on your game. Similarly killing someone eliminates that character from the rest of the game – meaning that if that character could have helped you in the future, no luck.
This is the way that games ought to be. Just as in real life, action (or inaction) has results that affect how things pan out later.
I have been enjoying playing Unchartered (the original game) and it is a blast. Again the development of the story and the detailing of the game is just amazing. It is also a bit of an in-between game (action and platform gaming elements), but it works well and the switch between platforming and action does not feel forced. Now if only they could get GT5 out the door…
Playstation 3 Error
0Apparently there is a widespread issue with the playstation that has appeared over the past day. It seems many of the fat models are having trouble with the date setting today, leading people to suspect that it might be a leap year bug. I haven’t turned the system on today and perhaps it would be wise to turn it on after a day or two just to see if it fixes itself.
This is seriously bad. Date related computer software has been fixed for decades. Even y2k happened 10 years ago, when the ps3 wasn’t around. Hope they fix this quickly. Reports suggest it does not affect offline gaming, which is what I do. Hope that is the case at least.