Me Documented!

This is a quote from the movie Waking life. Its absolutely true!! Its now a year since I have started meditating and even now my mind is not completely free of thoughts. But of course, there has been a marked improvement from what it was a year back. One thing I have come to realize is that persistence is extremely important. The goal of meditation is to take control of ones own mind. Now, one might think that it is easy or simple or whatever but an experiment to testify it is to concentrate on ones breath for 15 minutes. Just observe the breath coming in and going out through the nostril. If one can sit for 15 minutes without any thoughts and without losing focus of the breath then you are an excellent meditator.

Received an email from a friend. Its absolutely hilarious.

The question: Expand (a + b)ⁿ

0.2 version of mozilla-tiff-plugin has been released. This version includes some minor fixes which are

• A message appears in case the tiff file is corrupted
• Scaling has been fixed to GDL_INTERP_BILINEAR. It may be a bit slow but improves on quality of scaled image
• Fixed make clean in source Makefile
• Added gendeb script to the source for easily creating deb packages

All downloads here

For any updates and downloads related to mozilla-tiff-plugin point your browser here

Mozilla Tiff Plugin is mozilla/netscape compatible plugin for viewing tiff images. Features include

• Zoom in - keyboard shortcut '+'
• Zoom out - keyboard shortcut '-'
• Rotate anticlockwise - keyboard shortcut 'a'
• Rotate clockwise - keyboard shortcut 'c'
• Progress bar when downloading images

Currently, a general purpose mozilla plugin for any mime type is mozplugger. Mozplugger works by spawning an application of the users choice for a particular mime type. After spawning the application it reparents the application window handle so that it gets into the browser.

I had been to Vipassana meditation at Igatpuri, Maharashtra. The course duration is 10 days. Not suprisingly, it has been the 10 most exciting days of my life. What an experience! Vipassana is basically based on the teachings of Gotama Buddha, the discoverer of the famous Middly Way. Buddha definately has been the greatest scientist ever! He went to the depths of mind, matter and much beyond to find the real cause of misery, disease and purpose of life. After exploring the whole mind matter phenomena, he figured out a brilliant way to get out of misery, disease etc of any kind. Though the explanation would sound like another theory or philosophy, the enlightened One asks us to not believe anything he says. He only asks us to observe ourself and directly experience everything rather than accept things on an intellectual level. In fact, this is Path of Gyana (Knowledge) in which one knows only what one has experienced and anything else he does not know.So, discard all God, religion, ritual, rite or belief of any kind and enter Vipassana.

To a visitor who claimed he had no need to search for Truth because he found it in the beliefs of his religion, the Master said:

"There was once a student who never became a mathematician because he blindly believed the answers he found at the back of his maths text book - and, ironically, the answers were correct."

To a visitor who described himself as a seeker after Truth the Master said. "If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else."

"I know. An overwhelming passion for it."

"No. An unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong."

I have changed from a non-believer to believer. I have been quite open to different theories regarding the ultimate and out of logical and intellectual reasoning had been a non-believer. But, in the process i became so attached to mind theories that i never really gave a chance for the heart. Yes, i think reasoning is more inclined towards the mind and faith more inclined towards the heart. Both are altogether different trips on their own. I tried one, now am trying to the other :). But mind you, my faith is in the ultimate, not on the mangled religion as i have known it till today. I guess in this process i will be discovering the true ideals of religion as well because ultimately all religions serve the same purpose.

My decision was not made overnight. It happened after some reading and personal experience! As far as reading goes the books initiating the change are

• Autobiography of a yogi - Paramhansa Yogananda
• Prayer of the frog - Anthony De Mello
• One minute wisdom - Anthony De Mello
• Wisdom of the ancients - Lobsang Rampa
• Encounter the enlightened - Jaggi Vasudev

Ok, Ok stop the abuse! I know monitoring sucks! But, its a couple of users who seem to be surfing porn sites. I just wanted to confirm and prove that they actually are spending a huge amount of the company's work time surfing porn or chatting. Ok, there should have been restrictions, but i believed that every user is responsible enough and would respect the freedom given to them. It clearly was not the case!( That theory would probably work in an organization having like minded people with equal progressive pay structures - a weird but kind of ideal concept that sandeep would know :) .)

Anyways, enough of the blah blah. All user machines are configured to network boot and have no hard disks. The operating system for all users is Debian GNU/Linux. The management wanted to visually monitor what the user was doing. VNC was the first thing to come to my mind. With Debian all around, it was just a matter of apt-get and some shell scripting. No log outs, reboots( reboot would be insane....what about my uptime? ) etc to get this whole thingy working.

OpenBSD rocks! Secure by default .. thats what i liked about it. Installation was a breeze. Got all hardware and X running. But audio did not seem to work! I have a Intel 865 mother board and dmesg showed that the on board audio device was detected.

"Intel 82801EB/ER SMBus" rev 0x02 at pci0 dev 31 function 3 not configured
auich0 at pci0 dev 31 function 5 "Intel 82801EB/ER AC97" rev 0x02: apic 2 int 17 (irq 3), ICH5 AC97
ac97: codec id 0x41445375 (Analog Devices AD1985)
ac97: codec features headphone, 20 bit DAC, No 3D Stereo
audio0 at auich0

mpg123, xmms all players seemed to play songs but there was no sound. I tried unmuting the ouput master and a few other with mixerctl but yet there was no audio.