Topics of TED Talks

I today noticed on Twitter this link to the description of all TED Talks which have happened so far (16th June, 2011). Immediately, it looked like something worth looking (read: visualizing) into. So I did.

I created a wordle of the topics (after removing names of authors from some topics):

Topics of TED talks, created using wordle

The topics world, new, life and future clearly stand out, showing what TED is really about.

Piled Higher and Deeper

In case you do not know, Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD, for short) is a web-comic which has become notoriously famous over the last 5 years and has recently been converted to a movie! It is one of my favorite comics and it should come as no surprise that when the creator of the comics Jorge Cham came to give a presentation at EPFL (on 17th June, 2011), I walked though rain and thunder to see him.

Well, actually it was more like a 5 minute walk though a drizzle, but heroic nevertheless.

The event was announced on the PhD mailing list, but not to the general public. I got to know of it via Twitter, when Nirbheek pointed it out the same morning!

Think (and do) before pasting a link

TL;DR Try to open the link in Private Mode in your browser before to make sure that others will see it when they click it.

USB drive as a music carrier using Banshee/Rhythmbox

The old ways of sharing music may soon become passé with Amazon and Google both stepping into the cloud music ring, but till that becomes mainstream, here is a nifty trick to easily share music using your USB stick and a music player such as Rhythmbox or Banshee.

My USB Drive/Audio book reader

Declaring software open-source considered helpful

There have been two Humble Bundles released in the last six months:

1. Humble Indie Bundle in December, 2010
2. Humble Frozenbyte Bundle in April, 2011

The summary statistics themselves are enough to challenge some established stereotypes, e.g. the average amount contributed by Linux users has consistently been significantly larger than the Mac OS or Windows counterparts, showing that Linux users are willing to pay more than non-linux users for quality software.

On a larger scale, considering these to be real-world economic experiments, there is still much information buried deeper in the data than can be gleaned by looking at the summary. Here, I look at five-minute sampled data to see what effect making the software open-source had on the sales:

Contribution and purchases data for the Humble Frozenbyte bundle.
The projections show what the contributions and purchases might have been if Frozenbyte had not declared their games open source.

Why /home should be on a different partition than /

Nirbheek had advised me to always keep /home on a separate partition, and it came in handy today.

Introduction

Natty Narwhal is the new Ubuntu release made on 28th of April, 2011. When I tried to upgrade to it yesterday, bad things happened.

While the installation went smoothly up to the step Installing the upgrades, it simply hung after trying to Load lirc module on my HP dv2000 laptop. More so, my laptop became unresponsive. The next step I took (I do not know why I did it), was to open a terminal and type:

sudo reboot

The Problem


This was a really bad idea, as it turned out.

The next time I tried to log on, I was greeted with the unfriendly error:

Kernel crash while updating to Natty Narwhal

5 cm per second

Sometime ago, Nirbheek recommended me a anime movie which I watched and liked a lot.
It was named 5 centimeters per second and it is currently my favorite anime movie of all times. Quoting from Wikipedia:

The title 5 Centimeters Per Second comes from the speed at which cherry blossoms (also called Sakura blossoms) petals fall, petals being a metaphorical representation of humans, reminiscent of the slowness of life and how people often start together but slowly drift into their separate ways

And I remember this fact from the movie well. Also, I was until very recently, in Japan and I missed the Sakura blossoms (and the calamity) by a whisker (about 3 weeks).