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# 12 Oct 2003 13:58:30 <Om Mani Padme Hum>...</Om> |
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This is a digital Tibetan prayer wheel with the prayer/mantra "Om Mani Padme Hum" written in Tibetan script:
By the way, I tried writing this here in HTML-escaped Unicode:
ༀམཎིཔདྨེཧཱུྃ༔
(this is ༀམཎིཔདྨེཧཱུྃ༔, if you're interested), but Safari and other browsers decompose the sub- and superscripts. Internet Explorer for the Mac just renders garbage. This forum software doesn't currently support UTF-8, which I suppose would work correctly...
Update: UTF-8 doesn't work either, although it makes the characters show up correctly in Safari's "View Source" window.
Anyway, the idea is that simply by downloading one of these images to your hard drive, the drive's spinning will cause the prayer to be repeated and you will gain the appropriate blessings. Indeed, simply by viewing this on your browser it will be stored in the browser cache or virtual memory file and therefore spin several thousand times per minute.
Should a census researcher come to our house today, I would declare myself as a Buddhist - both because it's true in a certain sense and to skew the results a little. I have read several books about Tibetan buddhism and have visited the Karmê Chöling meditation center in Vermont. I found that although their emphasis on tradition and ritual didn't work well for me, it's certainly beneficial for many people. I myself am more inclined towards the less formal Zen and Taoistic aspects of Buddhism.
There's a very appropriate Zen saying that says, more or less, "in the hands of the wrong person, the right means will work in the wrong way". In other words, the benefits of a digital prayer wheel will accrue only to those who already are aware of, and aligned with, the traditional Tibetan practices.
Should you be interested in Tibetan Buddhism I can highly recommend Chögyam Trungpa's books Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and Transcending Madness, among others. (The Karmê Chöling center is led by Trungpa's son, Sakyong Mipham.)
Thanks to Boing Boing and Caio's 42 for the link. |
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| # 10 Oct 2003 11:22:30 Wunderkammer |
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The Schockwellenreiter refers to Julian Dibbell's excellent text Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man: | Quote: | Because even if it’s true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it’s also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.
A Web log really, then, is a Wunderkammer. That is to say, the genealogy of Web logs points not to the world of letters but to the early history of museums - to the "cabinet of wonders," or Wunderkammer, that marked the scientific landscape of Renaissance modernity: a random collection of strange, compelling objects, typically compiled and owned by a learned, well-off gentleman. A set of ostrich feathers, a few rare shells, a South Pacific coral carving, a mummified mermaid - the Wunderkammer mingled fact and legend promiscuously, reflecting European civilization’s dazed and wondering attempts to assimilate the glut of physical data that science and exploration were then unleashing.
Just so, the Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization. |
My opinion exactly - very much worth reading. Thanks for the link, Jörg! |
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| # 08 Oct 2003 11:42:27 Re: Back to the old drawing board |
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| Rainer Brockerhoff wrote: | | The rumor sites say that Panther is heading for release before the end of the month, that the Golden Master release is already being duplicated, and even that work has already begun on 10.3.1 |
Apple just posted the news on their main page, October 24th is the official release day. There's a neat counter showing how many days, hours, minutes and seconds are left; it imitates one of those mechanical clocks. Interesting how people feel this compulsion to imitate mechanical gadgets electronically...
| Rainer Brockerhoff wrote: | | It seems that I finally have achieved some sort of critical mass or energy to start working again on my software on a regular basis... |
I noticed that this morning I was done with my news/RSS feed reading in less than an hour, and that I followed up much less links than usual. Apparently my usual news sites and weblogs are concentrating on stuff like California elections, Washington shenanigans, the baseball season and other regional/ethnic issues - it's all even more opaque than usual. So... do I suddenly live in uninteresting times?  |
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| # 07 Oct 2003 19:27:05 Back to the old drawing board |
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(This post will be cross-posted to the XRay support forum)
It seems that I finally have achieved some sort of critical mass or energy to start working again on my software on a regular basis. There were some false starts in the past, but this time actual progress is being made. I've already made serious progress in adapting XRay to Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther); nearly half of my bug list is done already.
The rumor sites say that Panther is heading for release before the end of the month, that the Golden Master release is already being duplicated, and even that work has already begun on 10.3.1. As I'm under NDA I can't comment on that, or on specific features beyond what's already published on Apple's site. All I can say it everything works beautifully now, and it's so fast that I was seriously inconvenienced when I had to go back to 10.2.x (Jaguar) for a few days...
For developers, porting any complex application to Panther may imply some reprogramming. There are many new APIs and resources in Cocoa, but to use these one has to write a Panther-only application. I'm already seriously tempted to axe 10.1.x support - in fact, 10.1.x users should for the near future continue to run XRay 1.0.5, as I no longer have any machine available that is capable of running 10.1.x! To complicate matters, new facilities to build applications that run on several versions - conditionally disabling features if run on older systems - don't exist in 10.1.x and are somewhat primitive in 10.2.x.
The new GCC 3.3 compiler also brings some changes. Granted that one can keep using 3.1 (or even 2.97), but with a few restrictions. The new compiler generates better code and is more strict about some constructs.
Regarding XRay, I've reread all user e-mails I received this year and I'll try to incorporate most reasonable suggestions. If you have suggestions, now is the time. I expect to release XRay 1.0.6 a week or so after Panther comes out - just to make sure that nothing broke with some last-minute change.
1.0.6 will be strictly a bug-fix and mandatory Panther-support release. Why? XRay was my first Cocoa application and now, going back to the code after nearly a year, I find that some parts were not as well written as they should be. I was concerned with getting stuff working and published, and made several design decisions and implementations which I now know to have been, shall we say, less than optimal. In particular, running 1.0.5 under Panther reveals some serious bugs and crashes which are due to my misunderstanding and faulty workaround of certain Cocoa specifications and limitations.
Progress from Jaguar to Panther means that several bugs seem to have been fixed on Apple's side, though I don't have any specifics yet. On the other hand, some hacks that I used to get certain features in Jaguar no longer work, so a few features will be unavoidably lost.
To a certain extent, Panther's Finder has new capabilities that make some of XRay's permission changing features redundant. XRay was always intended to be more a viewing tool - as you can tell from the name itself - the changing facility works only for certain attributes anyway. I think that rather than working hard to duplicate stuff built into the Finder, my time will be more profitably spent in writing new plug-ins and viewer facilities.
I have had many requests to build batch processing capabilities into XRay 1.1, and have made a few false starts on that. One deterrent are the aforementioned design decisions. XRay is built around a one-document-window-per-file paradigm and all its consequences regarding saving changes and so forth. The "Change enclosed items" is a limited batch facility for file permissions only, and strained the paradigm somewhat. Building batch processing into XRay would mean a whole new user interface, as well as a new plug-in interface, both designed for efficient changing (rather than viewing) of attributes.
Therefore, I regret to say that batch processing is not viable for implementation into XRay as it exists today. After releasing 1.0.6 and updating some of my other software for Panther I plan to start work on XRay 1.1, which will be a complete rewrite - practically from the ground up. This will be Panther-only and incorporate whatever I learned about writing Cocoa applications in the past two years.
In parallel, however, I'm planning to write a completely new application for batch file processing. Registered XRay users will not be forgotten, I assure. Details will be published as soon as possible... |
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| # 07 Oct 2003 18:30:23 Re: 15 nanoseconds of fame |
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| A spike in my access statistics appeared for Monday (after Technorati delisted my site) - the number of visits increased a little, but byte volume and file count about doubled. Go figure. Back to our normal service... |
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| # 06 Oct 2003 12:18:02 15 nanoseconds of fame |
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I see from my link cosmos at Technorati that yesterday this weblog briefly made the Top 50 Interesting Recent Blogs list. It's off the list again today...
There was no spike in my access statistics, nobody famous linked to my site, I didn't publish anything controversial - or so I think. So it must have been something quantum. Or perhaps the coconuts?  |
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| # 04 Oct 2003 16:55:12 Saving daylight? |
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(Um resumo, em português, deste post está na minha página principal)
It's that time of the year again when the Brazilian government decides, by decree, when and where Daylight Savings Time begins. Last year Mac OS X users in Brazil had serious problems with that, as Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) had the wrong dates inside the Unix tables that most of the system uses, and another (different!) wrong date inside a legacy table embedded into one of the frameworks, which was used by the Finder and some other applications.
In 2002 I published a patch to fix the Unix tables but couldn't change the framework table. In addition, some - though not all - users reported a problem with their system snapping back to normal time on New Year's eve. So this year, I'm waiting until someone else publishes the correction...
At this time, I haven't got a system running Jaguar in order to test what will happen this year. The legacy table was finally removed in Mac OS 10.3 (Panther), so at least it will act consistently for all system calls and applications. However, it seems that Panther is considering DST as starting on Oct. 12 instead of the decreed date of Oct. 19.
Mac OS 9 users will have no problems, as there is a convenient double checkbox in the Date & Time Control Panel to allow the user to set DST manually. I've filed an enhancement request with Apple to put a similar checkbox into Mac OS X, but there's little or no hope of this being done anytime soon (if ever).
The problem in Brazil is even more complicated, as DST is observed only by certain states in a manner not consistent with the timezones used when DST is not in effect. Additionally, the government may decide to extend or abbreviate the DST period at any time. So a manual checkbox would certainly be the easiest way around the problem.
...or perhaps a GUI viewer/editor for the timezone files... if only I had the time... |
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| # 03 Oct 2003 18:41:25 Young coconuts! |
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The ever-interesting J-Walk Blog writes about a site which features, you guessed it, Young Coconuts: | Quote: | | I guess all of the coconuts I've eaten have been old coconuts. |
Indeed, all coconuts I've seen in the US are old (ripe) coconuts - they're usually sold with the hard brown shell exposed, have relatively little milky-white water, and the white flesh inside is about 10 mm thick. The site talks at some length about the superior virtues of "young" coconuts and then directs you to look for them at an Asian or Mexican market. Failing that, they offer to ship coconuts in from Thailand.
Here's a picture from the site:
They apparently whittle the coconut down to a candle-like shape before shipping. Here in Brazil you usually buy what they call "green" coconuts, as shown in the background above. Also, from the picture I deduce that their coconuts are older than we're used to here; green coconuts have even less flesh than those, often it's just a millimeter-thick layer of transparent jelly. But the water is very abundant and completely transparent.
Their prices are of course outrageous: US$7.99 for one, US$46.99 for a case of nine... we pay between US$0.17 and US$0.30 each at the local fruit market. This already has a few thousand Km shipping (by truck) built in, as they usually come from the north-east coast. |
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| # 02 Oct 2003 14:16:51 The Nigerian SCO Connection |
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Jon Udell points at an Ars Technica article called The Nigerian SCO Connection: | Quote: | DEAR SIR/MADAM:
I AM MR. DARL MCBRIDE CURRENTLY SERVING AS THE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE SCO GROUP, FORMERLY KNOWN AS CALDERA SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL, IN LINDON, UTAH, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. I KNOW THIS LETTER MIGHT SURPRISE YOUR BECAUSE WE HAVE HAD NO PREVIOUS COMMUNICATIONS OR BUSINESS DEALINGS BEFORE NOW.
MY ASSOCIATES HAVE RECENTLY MADE CLAIM TO COMPUTER SOFTWARES WORTH AN ESTIMATED $1 BILLION U.S. DOLLARS. I AM WRITING TO YOU IN CONFIDENCE BECAUSE WE URGENTLY REQUIRE YOUR ASSISTANCE TO OBTAIN THESE FUNDS.
...
...THEREFORE IT IS OUR RESPECTFUL SUGGESTION, THAT YOU MAY BE IMMEDIATELY A PARTY TO THIS ENTERPRISE, BEFORE OTHERS ACCEPT THESE LUCRATIVE TERMS, THAT YOU SEND US THE NUMBER OF A BANKING ACCOUNT WHERE WE CAN WITHDRAW FUNDS OF A SUITABLE AMOUNT TO GUARANTEE YOUR PARTICIPATION IN THIS ENTERPRISE. AS AN ALTERNATIVE YOU MAY SEND US THE NUMBER AND EXPIRATION DATE OF YOUR MAJOR CREDIT CARD, OR YOU MAY SEND TO US A SIGNED CHECK FROM YOUR BANKING ACCOUNT PAYABLE TO "SCO GROUP" AND WITH THE AMOUNT LEFT BLANK FOR US TO CONVENIENTLY SUPPLY. |
They stopped short of using the Nigerian fractured syntax, unfortunately.
If you have no idea why this is funny, here are some news articles about SCO.
I think it's about 10 years since my company received what we believe to be one of the first Nigerian scam letters to make its way into Brazil... by snail-mail, yet! Unfortunately I didn't keep it. At the time their standard tale about hidden funds was quite plausible and I remember one of my partners seriously arguing for answering the letter. |
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| # 29 Sep 2003 18:36:24 What, is it that day already? |
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Must have been that bug I picked up in Paris. After several days of running around and feeling too tired in the evenings to post anything here - or anywhere, for that matter - I finally found time and energy to write something new. It's a new installment in the Interesting Times series, and I hope to post the English translation later tonight. Meanwhile, the Portuguese version can be read here.
Update: Here's the English version. I can't resist quoting this little bit of dialog: | Quote: | (Embratel was the government's telecomm monopoly)
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(sometime in 1992, trying to lease an Internet connection)
Me: "I want an Internet connection."
Embratel Salesman: "OK. I suggest a 2400 or 9600 link, the price will be X cents per packet. That's 20% of what it costs to send a TELEX. Isn't that revolutionary?"
Me: "A packet means how many Kbytes?"
Embratel Salesman: "What? It's 64 bytes per packet!"
Me: "And if a user decides to download a larger file, say, 500 Kbytes? It'll cost hundreds of dollars!"
Embratel Salesman: "Don't worry, that will never happen!" |
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