Wordle

This is a Wordle for my recent blogs, five of them to be precise. It does a count of words used in the blog and draws up a word cloud to show which word has been most used.



Head to www.wordle.net to get a word cloud for your writings. It is pretty self explanatory.

What animals among your desktop icons?

There will always be icons on a desktop, i.e. if you are a normal user. Some people go ahead and do stuff without any icons on their desktop, quick launch or start menu. These are the geeks. It is sad that they , in their pursuit of being efficient remove all signs of desktop icons.

These icons are not a random bunch of images just put in to the program. These icons create a brand image for that program. This is part of what I wanted to talk about here. I wanted to know what animals live among your icons on desktop or where ever you store your icons.

I have my RocketDock configured with my most used icons. And from among them are the following programs that use animals.

Firefox – Fox

Pidgin – Pigeon

GIMP – a Fox with a paintbrush in its mouth (or is it a dog?)

IrfanView – A red splattering of what looks like a cat.

These are the programs I am currently using more. But there are some very famous programs that have an animal in them. Specially in case of Open Source programs like Thunderbird, Songbird and definitely worth the mention is LINUX, whose mascot is a Penguin and many linux distributions have animals in their brand like SuSe which has a chameleon. BSD has the Devil, which cannot be said to be an animal.

Microsoft has few of the most boring icons; these as a rule try to depict what the program will do.

These are the icons I remember for now, will update this post once I find more. I will look stupid if I have missed some real important ones, but I leave it up to you guys to mention them here, with a link to the image.

As a departing thought, I consider Songbird to have one of the cutest icons ever!

Update: A few of my friends pointed out that MySQL has a Dolphin in its icon. Another says that all Mozilla S*** has animals in their icons. I agree.

Am I Old?

"Everyday, more than three billion minutes are spent by computer users on Facebook" says once email forward, listing the 10 things that changed our lives. It listed Social Networking as one among them.

It has been true for a long time that the younger generation are quick on the uptake of new technologies. They use these things like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace and other similar technologies day in and day out.

Among the few technologies of my time were Personal websites, blogs, web search and email. We were champions of anything to do with these technologies. But, now I see myself stepping away from the Facebooks and Twitters. I just can't find the time. Maybe once in a month is too much time spent.

This begs the question, "Have I become old?" or rather "Have I grown out of the "younger generation?""

Maybe, maybe not.

A recent discovery by a BBC survey puts the onset of old age at 27 where as the peak being at 22. Scientifically, I am getting old.

On the other hand, One is as old as he thinks he is. I can do a lot of things that people of my age seldom do. This makes me feel younger too.

Old age is without a cure and an inevitable reality for most human beings. So I will go ahead and slow down my pace and catch up with the wisdom of my 28 years of life.

In Twos

A shoe was thrown at Mr. George W. Bush. The guy who did it became famous and so did the shoe and the entire exercise. So much so that another guy repeated this possible fad with the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.

There is a certain pop culture that seems to have surrounded this event. People rallying for these guys who threw the shoe at these leaders. Both the guys having landed in prison for committing this act and breaking some bones in the process.

In another part of the world, Airplane engine failures have resulted in miraculous crash landings not resulting in deaths. The Hudson river crash landing was quite iconic in the fact that a major airliner crashed in the water without getting anybody killed. The Captain of the flight Captain Chesley Sullenberger was hailed as a hero in these desperate economic times. Well, somewhere (Australia?) someone (Steve Bolle?) was taking notes.

It could be a coincidence but maybe History repeats itself in some way.

p.s: don't forget to click the links.

URL Shortenings

Ever had a long long long URL that you had to send out to a friend on IM or email? It was so long that it stopped being a URL? A good example of these types of URL are shopping site URLs.

like this:
http://cgi.ebay.in/NEW-4-3-GPS-CAR-NAVIGATOR-HOLUX-NAV-55A-WITH-WARRANTY_W0QQitemZ380093271536QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_203?hash=item380093271536&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=66%3A1|65%3A1|39%3A1|240%3A1318

Phew! That was long. You might already know a few sites like www.tinyurl.com that shorten/make tiny your long URLs. But here is a comparison of five of them that I found from this link.

Here is a comparison. I've put my Google Reader Shared Items as a test link.

Test link: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/15393105146633867508

Resulting Short links: (no. of characters excluding the 'http://')

http://tinyurl.com/8uu4rd (17)

http://is.gd/eloE (10)

http://bit.ly/jGb (10)

http://snipurl.com/9c2v5 (17)

http://cli.gs/GYgrnj (13)

looks like is.gd and bit.ly tie for the first position. Get more info by visiting the sites and reading the article linked.

(Un)happy New Year

Not a Happy New Year

Every Year, we 'celebrate' a Happy New Year! It is not always 'Happy'.

People make a step into a year in a drunken delirium. Unfortunately, these are also the most vocal, cacophonous of the celebrators, disturbing the midnight peace of the sleeping masses.

This year is even worse for some nations. Palestine for example is faced with a violation of its independence at the hands of Israel. 380 dead and counting. This appears to be a more serious attack than the recent Mumbai attacks. Indians had the option of defending themselves, killing the terrorists. What can the Palestinians do? The mighty military operation being conducted on it has left hospitals overflowing with dead bodies of innocent citizens. Being bombed in the name of smoking out Hamas, Israel nor the Hamas are ready to back off.

There is very little to celebrate and these senseless celebrations should be auguring in better times, but that is not the case. With fire crackers going off, I write this at an unearthly hour.

May peace prevail this year in spite of random incomprehensible chants of "Happy New Year!" by drunken drivers on the roads

Variations on Website

Recently a couple of my friends decided to get married!!

Right!!

What to do now?

Apart from the usual courting, Date Fixing and stuff they decided to create a "Wedsite".

NO!! that was not a spelling error my dear friend. That, was one hell of a play on the word "website". I really liked it.

But mind you, the Wedsite and the play on website brought another immediate thought to my mind. It was "Deadsite" a place whee people (terminal patients maybe?) will go to talk and discuss about their deaths. It is a macabre thought but quite possible.

I can imagine promoters of such sites labelling their websites as deadsites. I have thought about other variations on the word website but haven't really come up with anything apart from the occasional unfunny ones like "Breadsite" - A place for breads  :)

Can you suggest a few?