22.12.2007: on blogging

On Blogging

The last time I have blogged, few people told me that it sounds somewhat patronizing or such (especially that it may sound so to people that do not know me). Well, I have to admit that it is hard to write in a decent tone — the intention and motivation behind the text is oftentimes hard to express. Certainly, better writing skills would probably help — or choosing easier topics. But that is how I am — and afterall, you never learn much when you only do things you already know how to do.

So please, dear reader, take no offense in my blog… If you know me, you can probably see through my writing and understand what I mean. If you do not and still enjoy it, the better. And if you do not, please accept my apology — but in that case, it probably was not meant for you.

Yes, I know the blog is aggregated in a few places, and I will probably have to do something about this — aggregate only subsets of the blog, appropriate for each of the aggregators. But pretty please, bear with me, I am lazy and it always took me ages to fix even trivial problems.

posted 22.12.2007 5:29 tags: english personal

22.12.2007: on sharing happiness

On Sharing Happiness

I just wanted to say, that it is great when someone writes you just because they have good news and want to share them with you. Last night that happened to me again — an old friend of mine, Jemima, IM’d me. So thank you Jemima for that, what I said, I really meant. And let me wish you (and your little one) all good again — it cannot hurt.

(And this all made me think that I have again somewhat lost contact with some of the people that are very dear to me — yes, I mean you Bart, Alex, Kevin and also you, Maks, even if you probably do not think of me that way (or you do?) … whom have I forgotten this time? Maybe Enrico — you are far away as well, these days. I just hope all of you are doing well.)

(Ah, and I also miss one further person, who I have known as Helielf and met her or IRCNet very long time ago — if you read this, thanks to some bizarre coincidence, please mail me, or something… I have lost all contacts to you and I miss you. Wondering if you even remember me — who knows what nick I have used at that time? I have noticed you used the name Haruka for a while, but have no idea if that is still true. But if we never meet again, it has been a beautiful mandala, thank you.)

posted 22.12.2007 5:29 tags: english personal

16.11.2007: on self-reflection

On Self-Reflection

I have a need to write some things down recently, I don’t really know why or so. I have acquired a few new (and great) friends recently, mostly here in Brno. Also, I have more motivation than ever to try hard to live a good life. It has always been a hard way to follow for me, to be all those things that I find great in other people. How they can handle situations smoothly, what they know and what they can do. And it is great to see such people, and yet it is hard to not envy them. But envy not, since it is a great evil. One never knows what the other people have to go through, and it is just plain unfair to envy them. But I am drifting away from the subject at hand. What I have noticed as well, that I have changed in subtle ways, patterns of thinking. Self-reflection is somewhat cautiously sneaking into my mind. Two independent events have reminded me of that today.

Recently, I have been participating in online discussion more than I have used to, especially with people I do not know, and with which I often tend to disagree, and this is putting me in a new kind of situation. And to be honest, I am not really handling it all that well. What has made me think about this was Boudewijn Rempt’s comment on the dot. He handled the task at hand so much better than myself, even if it was his ego that was in the line, that has made me actually stop and think about it. And as I have written in that thread, I admire Boudewijn greatly for that calm reaction, of which I would be almost surely not capable. So here I am, trying to learn from that. My memory is indeed very short, but I also take this writing as a way to train that.

The second event was that a friend of mine (I do not know him long, but I call him a friend nevertheless, although I know not whether I actually deserve that) has told us something to the effect that one should learn. Meaning that one should learn from own mistakes, and no, I no more see the empty phrase behind those words. There is something in that, and it is a very interesting experience. Going through situations you have encountered and realize where you have made mistakes and what you could have done better. Actually admit, that even though the outcome was fairly good, that you have made some silly things. It is indeed a very interesting experience, to admit a failure when you are not pressed to by any external means. Liberating, maybe.

Same goes for things long forgotten. Where you have made mistakes, even though you have been always righteous and positively convinced about always doing the right things. You may be wondering whether I have been on crack all the time, but, well, that is not the case. I cannot tell how this came about, and yes, I have realized those mistakes and again forgotten them and so on and so forth. But hey, I think it may be better this time. If only a little…

posted 16.11.2007 6:11 tags: english personal

14.11.2007: looking back

Looking Back

The past year has very much changed my life. A long time ago (around the beginning of this year) I have written that I have met Lucy. That happened over a year ago. In fact, it is just few weeks since it was a year. Lucy wrote me a beautiful letter at that time, picturing some of the moments in our life. I am very grateful for that letter. I am also much happier ever since I met her. Of course, there were problems (and there are problems)… None the less, life is fairly easy, and I am staggering on the path to becoming a better person. Lucy is a great help in that respect. Many things have straightened out over that year. A few got a little more wrinkled, but often due to smiles and seldom due to frowns.

I have also mostly fixed the long-standing issue of a place to sleep and live in Brno, having recently moved in. I now live near the school (~15 minute walk, maybe less when in a little hurry), more or less in the city centre, with great connectivity to most of the places I need to visit. The previous place is just too remote for me. The new one is also a better building, or so I think, not a concrete-and-iron from-a-single-template building so typical of the socialist era, but solid brick building with high ceilings and thick walls. And it gives a much homelier feeling too.

And what am I doing lately? Well, day job and school (both study and TA and research) take a fair amount of time, the rest I divide among Lucy, friends, learning to play the recorder, reading, writing and the many other things I (try to) do. I have even started to practice embouchure and breathing with an oboe (double) reed (and also with Lucy’s instrument). The idea is that i have the intention to get a bassoon (which is a double-reed as well) and start to learn and practice. And I also hope, that the practice from oboe will give me a head start to that. Maybe even that I could play both. I know that I won’t ever become a very good player, but I want to at least try. And I want to have some fun with it, too (it is great to be able to play an instrument, however impractical the woodwinds are, e.g. compared to guitar, which is probably much more social… one day, I may learn that too, though; wink). I still believe that with enough determination, i could become a semi-decent amateur. Call me foolish if you like, that is how I am.

I have also considered blogging technicalities, and I probably will, if i find the time for that. It may also help me sorting things out. Probably need to consult the various people I work with, what they think about that, though.

posted 14.11.2007 2:15 tags: english personal

22.07.2007: toolbox upgrades

In the past something-over-half-a-year (wow, time flies like crazy), i have shuffled my (virtual) toolbox fairly significantly.

In the desktop department, I no longer use the full KDE desktop, only a few applications from KDE 3 (that is mostly konqueror, plus some of kdeedu). I still use amarok, although by now mostly just to manage my iPod, since it is outright laptop-hostile. Most of the time, it’s better (and much more power-efficient) to use iPod hooked into usb for power, at least as long as the music is there. For the rest, i now use the commandline players to play single albums (just music123 for most formats).

For the window manager, i have opted for xmonad, after briefly using ion3 and a faint attempt at wmii (which didn’t quite work for me). Xmonad, however, works great and its simplicity is quite amazing. Despite its absolute minimalism, it is, after some getting used to, much more usable than the rest of WMs i have used. For terminal, i use urxvt, which is lighter and apparently also faster than konsole (i may reconsider that choice when KDE 4 konsole comes out). With xmonad, i don’t really need tabs anymore, i’m not sure why, but it may be related to more general change in my workflow.

In the version control department, i am now using darcs for all the projects where i decide. I no longer use svk, since i no longer really know how to. Not working with it for a while, i lost the ability to use it efficiently (which possibly hints at the fact it is somewhat too complex). On the other hand, i am much happier with darcs, also since it is much more forgiving about mistakes and generally very deterministic. It requires some insight to be used efficiently i suppose, but this is mostly due to differences with more traditional systems (i believe).

Today, i have finally moved my ikiwiki to darcs, which was the last thing using subversion/svk (well, i have only been able to use it through ssh and local svn for some months now, so i generally didn’t use it at all). This hopefully means that i will be able to add more content to this page and blog as well, since it is less effort now.

I am still using emacs (GNU emacs 22, xemacs didn’t quite work for me when i have tried it — i have a somewhat nontrivial setup, too). I intend to try out vimpulse at some point, in addition to viper, to supersede my emacs-lisp hacks for visual line selection.

I have also started working on replacing my internet-facing services, since they are running in an “emergency” (ie, not really working well) mode, after the xen system broke down completely (it was mostly un-upgradable due to fragility of xen packages and of the whole xen system — and since the setup relied on working xen for even basic internet connectivity, upgrades were extremely painful). I am migrating to a solution based on user-mode-linux, and moving all the services to a less power-hungry and less noisy machine (an oldish pentium 3 box).

When this is complete, i should be able to read my private mail sanely again, since currently the spam filters don’t work and my inbox is mostly trash. This is unrelated to the xen breakdown, my mail used to be handled by a machine at a company i used to do admin work for. However, they removed my accounts (and therefore access to my mail) without a line of prior notice. I still have control over my domain at least (although there will be a problem when it gets to expire, i will have to arrange a transfer with the said company, i suppose). Morale of the story: never do that. (Yeah, and in the spirit of the post, i am still using mutt for reading mail).

posted 22.07.2007 2:57 tags: english personal tech

22.01.2007: how things are

How Things Are

17.1.2007

I haven’t written a blog in aeons. I have been busy with life, as many of you know. For one, i have a girlfriend (her name is Lucy)… And, no matter what i have thought not so long ago, things are better than ever before. She’s probably all that i have been looking for. We spend most of the weekends together (she lives and studies in western Slovakia, while i’m in the west-neighbouring Czech Republic (Moravia) — somewhat surprizingly, this doesn’t seem to be a problem so far).

Anyway, that’s probably boring for those of you that aren’t me (ha), so to move on to other things. Work and school is busy these days (exam tomorrow (aaagh)), so i don’t have much more free time than that i spend with Lucy. Despite that, i have done some cleaning-up on libept and adept codebases after importing them (with tailor) into darcs. Will blog about that separately i suppose, when i have more time and more stuff to report on.

The exam tomorrow is on graph algorithms, and i should be actually studying instead of writing this, but i never change, do i?

19.1.2007

So the results of the exams will be available following monday. No idea whether i’m going to pass or not though. Anyway, i am sitting in a train to Slovakia, alone in a compartment, the window open wide, wind in hair. Sun is obscured by clouds at times, air is somewhat colder than it used to be. Maybe winter will finally arrive?

Another exam is monday (same day as i get the results from yesterday’s one)… Algorithms for NP hard problems. I’m still somewhat undermotivated to learn, and apart from that i should be hacking dmeventd (work stuff), working on my bachelor’s thesis, learning to play a (soprano) recorder, learning russian and probably a ton of other things. Ah and adept, libept and friends need some attention too. I suppose i am a lost existence, given my total laziness.

The train is speeding towards Breclav, last (and the only one apart from Brno on my route) station in Czech Republic.

As usual, i intended to blog a ton of things, but can’t recall of one them… That’s life, i will hopefully get to blog a bit more again.

posted 22.01.2007 1:16 tags: english personal

08.10.2006: power management on a linux laptop

I have been using powersave until recently, but I have gone from unhappy to fed up. I also have acpi-support and laptop-mode-tools and hell knows how they all interact. To add insult to the injury, powersave loves to crash or get stuck at times and dbus screws up at times too, which in turn screws powersave. Oh dear.

So i have ditched powersave, left laptop-mode-tools and acpi-support around. And i wrote a perl script, i have called it “pm” to handle things i used powersave for. Primarily dpm (device power management) in linux, suspend to ram/disk, battery monitoring and friends. Right now it’s ~250 LOC with comments, and more importantly, i know how it works. And it can do things powersave can’t. So i am basically happy.

It can suspend and resume pci devices (using id<->function mapping) and report their status. It has a very slim suspend wrapper, that just locks screen, syncs drives, remembers power states of pci devices and asks kernel to suspend. After resuming, it restores power states, does chvt voodoo to wake up my intel graphics and sets drive spindown timeout (something, somewhere screws this one up).

I also added a “summary” output, that i run using watch on one of terminals in my screen session, that reports cpu frequency and scaling policy, system temperature, battery state (including charge/discharge rate in watts and remaining capacity in mAh), harddrive state (when spinning, also temperature and number of spinups in the drive’s lifetime… if you know how to get those two without spinning up the drive, tell me). Then power states of devices (usb, ethernet, wlan, sound, modem, pcmcia, smartcard controller and isa bridge). And as a cherry on top, a list of processes and pids that have recently caused block reads from the drive (needs vm/block_dump enabled in kernel), so you can find out what caused drive spinup.

That is about it, now for the catch. It works for me, it probably won’t for you, at least not out of the box, unless you have same laptop as me. The pci ids of devices are hardcoded (although not hard to change near the top of the script), so is the screen lock function and probably a bunch of other things. It shouldn’t be hard to make a similar script for your system using mine as a starting point though. Another thing that is missing is a nice reporter for KDE to be put on the panel or somesuch.

Also, since the script is simplistic in its design, it assumes lots of things about both kernel (tested on 2.6.16 stock debian) and userspace utilities (acpi, hdparm, smartctl) and (oh, coarse-grained evilness), that you have sudo (needed for hdparm at least).

Another assumption is that you have single battery and single cpu. But for all the limitations, it goes that if you are going to use a script like that, you probably know enough to extend it to multi-battery and/or multi-core situations. The script definitely needs a hacker-nature :-).

So for the brave, the script is to be found on the pm page.

posted 08.10.2006 10:07 tags: english tech

26.09.2006: on friendship

I have written that friends were those who kept me from going under. And that was so. And that experience makes me biased. But i believe in friendship and i believe that a man cannot stand alone. One needs someone to lean on, when times are tough. And tough times always come, sooner or later. When times are good, we tend to forget about it. I so have. But now i am reminded. And i am desperately trying not to forget. And i have learned something. Friends do not go away. They do not forget. I have mostly forgotten them for a year. I didn’t need them, or so i have thought. But they were there, when i needed them.

It is so easy to underestimate people. It is so easy to not give them the trust they deserve. And mistrust is a great enemy. If you do not trust, even a best friend cannot help. They may try as much as they want, but you will never find relief in them. It is too easy to spoil someone’s effort to help you. If you do not want to be helped. When you are afraid to lean on someone, lest they may step aside and let you fall. Just let it go. People are good. And if they let you fall, do not blame them. Everyone has their limits and can only carry so much weight on their shoulders. No matter how much you want to help someone, when the weight is too much, you just break and both of you fall.

And that is why it is important to have friends. To have more people to lean against. So the weight is not too much for them. So they are able to support you. And one has to trust each and every of them. They won’t let you fall. Don’t worry. Don’t you worry.

Make friends, it is easy. Smile. Make people feel good. Give them a little support when they are down. Help them out with little things. Talk nonsense, go out and have a beer. Trust them.

I have known many people over the time. And only very few of them have let me down. And those that have not made up many times for those few. I feel so lucky. And i wish for other people to make a similar experience. Don’t be discouraged if someone lets you down. People are good. That is a good belief. A good start to keep one’s sanity.

I hope you find yourself in these words, Elenna. Just a little bit.

posted 26.09.2006 12:26

17.09.2006: a time to live and a time to die

Yesterday, i have learned that Rob Levin, also known as lilo, has died. And together with him have died his little dreams. I know it is now too late, but i wanted to say thanks for what you have made possible. I will miss you.

posted 17.09.2006 9:43

10.09.2006: weekend with family

So i have travelled to Slovakia again, for a weekend this time.

I have been painting window frames. Since i have a new iPod (4G nano, black, yummy), i could also listen to music (Tristania, In Flames, Kamelot). The last time, it was somewhat of a patience exercise, but this time… I guess i got better at painting and maybe i have become more patient, too :). It was pretty enjoyable, more than i would have thought a work like that could be. And i am sure the music helps, too.

(The next day)

And to continue the last blog… There, i have concluded that hardship was important factor in becoming better:

And apart from hardship… Problem is, hardship alone, if it stays the same, is not enough to make people change. It is the change from contentment to unhappiness, that drives people forward. Because in that change, one starts to change, and hardship together with dynamics helps a lot. Static, unchanging hardship will only do little to change a person. One can get used to it, like to anything else. Like to contentment. So an initial change can start a cascade. Like for me, breakup caused a domino effect. The change alone brought a lot of hardship with it, and i had to change to accomodate to it. And the change in me provoked more changes and so on. I have learned many new things, or, things i have learned before but went unnoticed took my notice. And in light of such things, i had to change again, because i knew i couldn’t be happy any other way.

A human being is as good as dead, when captured in a period of stagnation, in an unchanging moment that lasts. Only through change, through dynamics of life, we are alive. A man that does not change is a statue, a dead piece of matter, only useful as a memento. And that was what i have become, and now the statue is again starting to move, to breathe, to live. Because there is just no perfection that one could capture in a moment. No matter how perfect a moment, if frozen, the perfection decays, the little cracks are noticed. That is why trying to freeze time is futile, trying to preserve. One cannot enter the same stream twice. Life is a constant change, and this constant change is its only manifestation. Take the change away and you take the life away.

The past is important. The past is what resulted into present, and present is what makes future. Every moment, in a succession of moments, is important. But without the moment before and the moment after, the moment does not mean anything. The moment is void, without predecessor and successor. We move in time, and the motion is what becomes important, not the points we moved through. They are only important in the relation to our trajectory, not in isolation. And so is the direction which we take, the vector of our motion, and the shifts in direction.

There is no eternity, only the eternity of its own absence. Immortality and death are the same, the very same notion. Because every time we change, there is a little death and a little birth. And immortality is only possible in staticness. Immortality is a point in time, without motion. And without motion, there is no life to be.

And same goes for relationships. Make a relationship immortal and you make it die. Relationship needs a possibility of death to live. Like humans, like every living being. Without death, there is no life. The transition from being into non-being is essential, because it is the precondition to change. As i have already described, every change is a death followed by rebirth, but the entity reborn is not the one that has died. And therefore, without the ability to die, there is no ability to change. And death, the conventional death, as we know it, is just a death without rebirth. Something dies, and there is nothing more to take its place. But… The death makes others change. And therefore, the one who dies definitively, is again reborn, as part of those others that have died, but haven’t died, but are reborn. And the one definitely dead enters those new, reborn creatures, as a little fraction of them. And the cycle of life is closed, and the change can perpetuate itself.

Every day, i die a thousand times. But there are deaths that are important and deaths that go unnoticed. And most of the important ones are only noticed in retrospect, by a being that resulted, after many hours, or days, or weeks or even longer. And many more deaths. We only exist through our succession, because only what is born from us remembers what we were. And the very moment we are born, we die again, and a new being remembers. The memory lives on, but the beings are already dead. And the memory changes as well, because memory itself does not mean anything, only the being possesing it can give it meaning. And every successive being that we become gives it a slightly different meaning.

And so the delicate, complex dynamics of individual life are established. Not only the living being changes itself, but the memories of the previous beings change. There is certain gravity toward stagnation, because often the changes are only very slight, and the being remembers his predecessors that were fairly happy and tries to remain so. Because the bigger the change, the bigger risk. And therefore all beings are susceptible to stagnation, to the stasis cell of past success. Because past success is one’s own enemy, even if it is something that is a precondition to one’s own being. So we need to learn to live with our past success, but to not try to revive it. The effort to bring back past is a wasted, contraproductive effort. It seems so, it is almost natural, that if there was happiness in the past, restoring the same past will bring the same happiness. But there, that is not true, in the light of previous paragraphs. The trap is so obvious, that description is probably redundant, but let me do it once again anyway, maybe because i have fallen in it so many times already. Yes, the trap is in the stagnation, in absence of new things. Because even if one cannot restore the original condition no matter how much he tries, one can, and that is for sure, replicate it very closely. And that way lies a trap, a temporary (or even permanent) thermal death of stagnation.

(Later that day, outside, on a nearby hill)

And now, like before, there’s nothing more to stand between me and myself. I sit in the grass, alone. My being alone complements me, in a way. There are waves in the grass, as air moves. Music is playing, apart from the few houses i can see downhill, my only connection with the rest of people. And this what belongs to me, this paper, this pen. This book by Italo Calvino that Enrico Zini has given me. If on a winter’s night a traveller. But it is late summer. I can see vineyard in distance, on a slope different from mine. I call this slope mine because i am the one sitting there. And the time to collect the grapes is close. And here, next to me, an apple tree, with red apples on it.

And a white butterfly in the distance, beating the air with its light, small wings. And i blow away a tiny spider who has lost its way on my trousers. I feel being part of all this around me, and still so foreign. And the butterfly appears again, but it may be a different one.

The sun shines behind my back, alhtough i sit in shade of a tree. And neither the sun nor the tree are my enemies, or my friends. But still, i feel sympathy for both of them, one gives me light and warmth and the other shields me from too much of it. And the setting, the scenery soothes my senses, my mind, my feelings. Here, i am close to the loving mother of us, living beings, the nature. Here she is tender and forgiving and caresses my hair and it feels good.

And these feelings, i would love to pass on, to other people, so they, too, could feel well. But i see that this is not quite possible. Although these lines will hopefully give something to someone, they probably can’t carry what i feel. And i would bring someone with myself here, so they could feel it with me. But presence of other person would spoil it, it would be something else then. Maybe beautiful in a way, different from this one, maybe very pleasant. I love people, and when i see them happy, it fills me with gladness.

(And in the evening, on a train…)

And here i am, moving with speed, from one place to another. The speed, sound of loud music in my ears, the landscape drifting away. I could say i was happy, happy in the sense of change, everything changing around me, sun setting behind distant horizon, the train moving through the country. The semaphore lights. In the headphones, heavy guitar riffs competing with the roaring of the train. Cold air blowing in my face, flowing in my hair.

And now in another train, sitting in a compartment with stranger, a girl, trying to guess who she could be, from her dress, from what she is reading, from cues. Who she could become. What she means to me, a passing stranger on the path of life. I have been reading the Calvino book till now, but i thought i could write down my thoughts before they perish, like they do. It is fairly silent now here, even while we are on a train. The engine and the outside are muffled, the window and the door are closed. We are in a strange kind of privacy with this girl, neither knowing anything about the other. I, writing this text here, she reading some sort of magazine. Looking up from what we do at occasions. The train is accelerating now, and the sounds are more intense. It is a bit shaky, too. My hearing is still lightly impaired from the loud music from the previous train.

We arrived to a station. Short stop, then another long motion. Always toward Brno, toward my flat, toward the night and tomorrow. The girl is reading a horse races program. Here, i intrude her privacy and write that here. I hope she wouldn’t mind. I don’t have a name other than “the girl” for her, since all the words we exchanged was me asking whether i can sit down in the compartment and her answer. And i suppose i won’t say anything and she won’t, neither. Maybe a goodbye.

And now, we share a sort of almost intimacy. Two lone people in a compartment, tired and waiting to arrive somewhere. An invisible bond between us, doesn’t mean anything, just that element at random brought us there together, for a short moment. Chances are, we won’t ever meet again. And still, she is almost falling asleep, with her feet up, like if i were a trustworthy friend of old. And i feel sympathy for that, i feel honoured by a trust given by a complete stranger. She seems comfortable, feeling safe. And it feels good to have that trust, it feels important. It nearly gives warm fuzzies.

(To be continued, further…)

posted 10.09.2006 10:08