koan = 10.5 x 4
Posted on | February 6, 2010 | No Comments
One of the rather bizarre classes I took during college was called ‘Spiritual Care and Healing‘. No, it wasn’t a religious class, but it was certainly a spiritual one.
In it, I learned things like drawing with your eyes closed, writing with your non-dominant hand, journaling for health, imagining white blood cells as members of elite death-squad, the chronicle of Andrew Weil, meditating on raisins, and this Zenic Buddistic maxim called Koan.
Sounds like a bunch of quacks, i am sure, but I actually enjoyed the class. It was very interactive, and full of activities. I sometimes partnered with this nice girl, who later became the wife of my ex-roommate. Oh, awesomeness!!
But also, from those daily journals that I wrote; from the incoherent rambles, quips, and frets, I was diagnoses with something! No, not insanity… I was diagnosed with something more significant: I need the sun! Yes, I was diagnosed that I need the sun, to thrive, and to be happy. I was diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder. I was living in a basement, and I was working in a basement, and it was during a dark Autumn in Indiana, and I was unknowingly depressed! No wonder, I used to hate the rains. I was very impressed that I was diagnosed by Madam Professor only from my writings. I was impressed that she connected the dots, and I was impressed that she could read my handwriting.
See, the class was not all quacks!
This thing about Koan, though, tickles…
I was told that Koans are these hard dialog puzzles. Enigmas of some sort. They are so hard such that the answers can be perceived irrelevant; so friggin hard, sometimes there are too many answers to consider. Or ain’t no none at all.
These could be silly questions like ‘does a dog have Buddha Nature?‘, to which an apt answer can be given: ‘who cares??‘
But there are real hard ones, like ‘why bad things happen to good people‘, or ‘why good things happen to bad people‘, or ‘why mommy and daddy could ever decide to live together‘, or ‘why the tsunami in Haiti‘, or ‘why miscarriages happen‘, or ‘why was I born ugly‘, or ‘why the HIV.‘ Well, you get the idea..
Pick one, and meditate on it for a second. And then a minute. And then an hour. Strange, huh, somehow you get sucked in to the question, and it’s hard to pull yourself out. Each time a candidate answer lurks, and then a better one, and then a better one still, and then you’d realize that the first answer was probably better.
But sometimes you have no choice, though, especially if you are experiencing one. Your life can be a koan. In fact, your life is a koan. Many people try to answer these questions. People even make careers out of them. Even a shrink need another. But a wise man, who has gone to the galaxies said that the answer could simply be: 42.
I sometimes ponder about this koan of mine, for a while, for a long time. Typically, I’d get quite far, but then I’d think, maybe it really is just 42. 42 is just so much easier.
Now, if you have some time, would you help me with this koan: “why would a blogger blogs ?”
Once in a New Year Blue Moon
Posted on | December 30, 2009 | No Comments
New Year Eve happens every year, but a Blue Moon New Year Eve only happens once in twenty years.
No, the moon will not turn blue. But the moon will shine brightly, for it will be a full moon; the second one in the month!
Tomorrow is such a night, guys! How special is that!!
May I remind you that Blue Moon is also quite a nice Belgian Ale? Maybe you would enjoy your Blue Moon eve with a fresh glass of Blue Moon.
Happy for Kubuntu 9.10
Posted on | November 17, 2009 | No Comments
It’s been about one year now from my ‘forced’ move from the Fedoras to the Kubuntus. And I didn’t give in without a fight 
.
Recently I upgraded my 2 Kubuntu 9.04 machines to 9.10, and I have to say that I am quite pleased with the outcome. I am happy to say, that this is my FIRST Kubuntu upgrades that didn’t pose any headaches for me.
My 9.04 upgrade was quite unsuccessful, I had to write a small cron job to kill wayward KDE processes. After I upgraded to 9.10, the wayward processes are no longer there, so my machine got snappier again. Furthermore, it didn’t use to automatically re-size the screen resolution when I plugged in my external monitor. And then, after I manually re-sized it, I had to restart synergy, because the screen boundaries were all wrong. All these issues are now gone.
I am pleasantly surprise that now Pidgin also notify me when I get new messages. Also, gone are the few hiccups that I had with the sound server.
One minor issue tho, GTK error spews!!
I fire up Firefox via a terminal because I run several versions for testing. To my surprise, I got a gazillion GTK error messages in my terminal, “(firefox-bin:2767): Gdk-WARNING **: XID collision, trouble ahead” at nauseoum ex vomitum. Good think that I discovered that it was a known benign issue. It was a problem that was shoved under the rug, and now exposed. I guess I either have to put up with them, or redirect them to /dev/null. Oh well, I shouldn’t really expect for perfection, right?
Better Than Grep: ack
Posted on | October 9, 2009 | 3 Comments
This morning I was thinking about people that I am indebted to, possibly forever. Linus Torvalds is definitely one, not just because of the kernel, but also because he is a good role model.
In terms of tools, I am certainly indebted to Joseph H. Allen, for his own editor.
I also thought of ‘grep’ as a tool that I cannot (couldn’t ?) live without. Although, it’s a bit hard to trace it’s first creator.
But ‘grep’, like it’s mother ‘ed’, has problems. I’ve been content with it for the longest of time, and never thought that anything better was around.
A few months back, a friend of mine mentioned in IRC about a tool, ‘ack’, to be better than ‘grep’. At that time I didn’t need to search for anything, and just shoved it up the closet.
But today, I needed to do a major pattern matching to fix some Unicode issues, and grep just gave me too many false positives from backup files and svn directories. It was horrible, so much that I needed to google “better than grep” (I had forgotten the name of the tool..).
Dooh, did I really miss something out. Ack not only removes false positives, goes recursive by default, but also color codes the result! I was so blown away, I had to blog about it.
So Andy Lester, I am indebted to you! For those who’ve never tried ack, check it out here: http://betterthangrep.com/
Python Daemon Code
Posted on | September 22, 2009 | No Comments
No! I will not claim that I have the code for you!
But I sure know where you can find it. Here: A simple unix/linux daemon in python.
I tried it when I was trying to daemonize a my python program that reads and processes emails. Works like a charm. Thanks a lot Sander Marechal!!
Highlight of the day, I’ve been plagiarized
Posted on | August 27, 2009 | 1 Comment
It’s often said that for recorded artists to have really made it if Weird Al Yankovic has make a parody of their works. Weird Al’s selection on a parody source is a recognition that the tunes of the original work has sunk in to the subconscious ears of most Americans. Otherwise the parody will not work, listeners would just think, ‘what a stupid song?!?!’
Personally, I would be really honored if Weird Al parodied my (non-existence) work.
Yesterday, someone identified himself has James commented on my post Swoopo is a Scam, agreeing with me, and claimed that he has more insights about penny auctions in his blog. James Brown claims to be an internet lawyer from Southern California.
To my utter surprise, I saw my own post, verbatim, posted in that blog. James Brown posted it, claiming to own the story. He went as far as posting the first comment on it.
Obviously, I don’t feel too good. James is quite likely not a lawyer that he says he is, and he is not Weird Al. And posting my article without sourcing, that not really a parody, not even syndication, just plain and simple theft.
James, I am not happy with you!
CK12 Got Slashdotted today!
Posted on | August 13, 2009 | No Comments
This morning a friend of mine, Ken Lim, congratulated us for being slashdotted. Of course this was in context of some of CK12’s books recommended by the state of CA for classroom usage. Earlier this summer, Govt. Schwartzenegger called for the submission of free open text books in digital format to be used in California high schools in 2009. The submissions were to be judged based on CA standards to make sure that they are suitable for classroom usage.
As any other Slashdot posts, this one was a fertile topic for heated banter between proponents and opponents of free and open textbooks. One of these exchange threads talked about Richard Feynmann’s experience when he was asked to serve on State of California’s Curriculum Commission to choose Mathematics books in 1964. Per his own published words, the methodology was ‘idiotic’.
I hope that in this day and age, this is no longer the case. At the very least we know that these submissions were scrutinized, and the result is openly published in here. And the highlight is that out of the 16 digital textbooks submitted, 10 of those digital textbooks met at least 90 percent of the California State Board of Education’s adoption standards and 6 of those 10 were CK-12 FlexBooks. In addition, only 4 met 100 percent of the standards and 3 of them were from the CK-12 Foundation: CK-12 Single Variable Calculus, CK-12 Trigonometry and CK-12 Chemistry. Now go shop for quality text books, for free, here.
Whimsical poetry of the day
Posted on | May 27, 2009 | No Comments
My checkin log of the day:
Revision
xxxx
Author
ezra
Date
2009-05-27 15:34:24 -0700 (Wed, 27 May 2009)
Log Message
bug-xxxx uz was being lazy and fuzzy so checkin is done by ez. sorry for such a whimsy.
Kubuntu 9.04 Quick Review
Posted on | May 11, 2009 | 5 Comments
I just upgraded my work laptop from Kubuntu 8.10 to 9.04. I did the upgrade over a wired connection, and it took me about 5 hours to download and install all the packages.
The upgrade went smoothly, and I couldn’t find any major configuration hiccups that renders my box useless so far.
There are a few things that I like right away when I booted up the first time. The main thing is that things render more correctly. The default font selections are generally smaller than in 8.10, which is really good, because it was too big. Check boxes render correctly, which is great because web pages with a lot of checkboxes, like Gmail, used to render awfully before.
I also noticed that some javascript rendering animations that didn’t work in firefox in 8.10 are working now working. This and the rendering issues are very important to me as a web developer.
Now the bad part… The color theme!! The default color theme seems to me as an unfinished work to me. The color choices are fine for common windows and tools. However, KDE Plasma widgets seem to use inverted colors for background, but they do not invert the text colors! Semi-black on semi-black just do not work in computer screens! I’ve done some color tweakings to get it to be acceptable, but it’s not pretty yet. Shouldn’t the default color theme be at least usable?
The second complain that I have is the speed! The Kubuntu 9.04 Release Page claims that Kubuntu 9.04 is faster than 8.10. Plasma seems to be hogging my processors much much more than before. As I write this blog, several times Plasma seem to suck all the juice that my processors have, and make the desktop freeze for good minute !
Another thing to consider for Kubuntu user is the retirement of K Network Manager widget. They have replaced it with Plasma Network Manager widget. This widget is not added by default to your toolbar, so you need to add it there, and re-configure your connection.
I realize that this is just a quick review, written the same day after my upgrade. I may find more things that I like/don’t like with it. However, I thought I’d write my first impressions.
I am not totally happy with this release (not Kubuntu in general, just the release), but I am not totally dissapointed either. Half a year ago, when I first installed 8.10, I really wasn’t happy with the quality. However, with time as updates came, it became more stable. I am eagerly waiting for updates from Kubuntu in the next few days to make my workstation better.
Twitter discovery, 5/11/09
Posted on | May 11, 2009 | No Comments
Discovered via @christinelu that @jack_welch and @SuzyWelch are twittering! A must follow…
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