About a month ago, at the end of August, I finished a 10-day Vipassana meditation course. This was probably one of the more extreme activities I have ever participated in, and it's well worth a blog post.
I found out about the course in a ridiculously trivial way, by following a link in a Reddit comment (I wonder if I could track down that comment...). The
website referenced by the comment contained (almost) no new-agey mumbo-jumbo and looked legit in general. I also appreciated the fact that this was a relatively serious and intensive course, which should be enough to form a reasonably founded opinion on meditation in general. When learning sporadically, in small bits, it is hard to say whether the material itself is no good, or you just do not understand it yet and need to study more; I was quite skeptical towards the practice, but wanted to give it fair trial. I was quite impressed that there was a course available in Lithuania, a few hours by train from where I live. Finally, the course was free (by tradition Vipassana is taught without monetary compensation). I went ahead and signed up for a standard introductory 10-day course.
Vipassana (also called insight meditation) is a meditation technique allegedly coming back from Gautama Buddha himself (well, all the traditions like to claim that origin...). It has been experiencing a renaissance, partly due to an
organization set up by a meditation teacher S. N. Goenka which has founded meditation centers all over the world.
The essence of Vipassana is a method of teaching your mind to
act instead of merely
reacting to outside stimuli such as pain, anger of other people or hardships. The technique provided is to monitor your sensations, watch them with
equanimity and suspend any reaction, and slowly it sinks in that all things are temporary and you can choose what to react to and how. That's the basic idea; I don't want to go deep into exposition of Vipassana as there is plenty of information about that (also at the same time the information is almost useless because you have to experience it to really understand it). Instead, I will sure some of the more personal remarks and experiences.
The course took place in an cottage near Kretinga, housing around 50 people. The living conditions were absolutely great, and this would have been a true holiday if not for the regime and the rules. The day would start very early, at 4 AM (ending at around 9:30 PM), and we'd do about 12 hours of meditation in total inbetween, with occasional breaks, but the most gruesome part is that no communication at all was allowed with anyone except the manager of the camp (and the teacher during a specified time). That gets to you after a few days, but still, there are people around you, so it's bearable; on the other side, the senses (touch, smell) become very acute. The food was taken care of by volunteers (students who have finished the course), and I could say it was quite good actually. The goal, of course, was to keep the environment from interfering with meditation, and I think it was done very well.
The presentation of the actual technique also did not disappoint. Each day a new step would be introduced, with the whole day to practice before moving on. Looking back, the pacing worked well. Every day in the evening there were lectures on theory. They were somewhat informative, but also sometimes annoyingly primitive and verbose. The little mistakes, holes in logic and slight doses of mumbo-jumbo almost drove me nuts by the middle of the course, until I learned not to react to them. Despite the shortcomings of presentation, the simplicity and lucidity of the practice and lightness of theoretical baggage really appealed to me. The whole organisation in general gave the impression of complete transparency, with no strings attached, no financial interests in play and no agitation for further involvement.
While there are many meditation techniques, I am happy that I've gone with Vipassana in particular for one reason: Vipassana meditation uses no artificial tools to help you concentrate, such as mantras, visualisations, counting, etc. Such methods make concentration
much easier, but they also create a dependence on the methods themselves. I appreciate the purity of Vipassana in this regard.
Not everything in the practice is roses though. First, a particular worldview supported by Vipassana is presented as "scientific" and supposedly "the right way to live", and if even if you don't agree, "the truth" of Vipassana will become obvious to you with time. This is a distinctive mark of ideologies. The thing that makes everything break is the reincarnation, which is generally assumed as true, even if it's not shoved down the student's throat. Every rationalization of a world view has a "white lie" (usually related to the concept of eternity somehow) at the core, and in this context reincarnation is it. Given what we know now about the relationship between the mind and the body, reincarnation is absolutely ridiculous and completely untenable, and that breaks all "moral" reasoning for practicing meditation as opposed to doing something else. I'm not the first to bring up this problem, there's plenty of material about it online.
The second slippery idea is that the concept of "negative happiness" is central in Vipassana, that is: happiness is defined as lack of suffering. This point is not that unreasonable actually, from personal experience I could indeed call the state of non-suffering happiness, but there is definitely something missing when compared to the state of mind when I'm truly, positively happy. Whether you consider that something important or not, it's definitely there.
Third, Vipassana suggests that it is only you who is at fault when your inner state is disturbed; the world affects you as much as you let it, and in order to find happiness you should learn to control the "interface" rather than the outside world, which will usually not behave as you want. This may be correct, but sometimes it could just be easier to fix the world rather than change yourself, and I have the suspicion that it this is much more frequently the case in the modern world compared to the pre-modern environment. (This is one of the points which break when reincarnation is rejected, as with reincarnation you have the whole eternity to fix yourself.)
While the complaints are serious, they do not mean complete rejection of Vipassana but rather integration among the various other techniques available. The actual meditation technique is still great for gaining and maintaining mental composure, reducing anxiety and improving well-being. Now, if I could only get used to meditating regularly...
If you have the chance, I highly recommend you try out an introductory 10-day course. There is little to lose and a lot to gain. And if you do go ahead, I have two hints. First, do not even think about leaving the course before it's over. Any hardships are temporary and will be overcome quickly. Second, use the time with the teacher, those interactions were very helpful to me. Also, given the "noble silence", talking to someone once in a while will not hurt.
My wife has been pestering me for months to get a replacement for our dead Epson inkjet printer (which didn t last long, mind you). To avoid the nightmare of printer support, which, unless you buy a high-end professional printer which does everything plus the coffee, is usually somewhere between disaster and works sometimes , we spent a long time on manufacturers websites to choose wisely the model.
We chose the HP Laserjet P1102, which, according to HP, has a full support level and is even part of their recommended models.
Yet, after plugging it in, it took me quite some time to understand why it would behave as a brick instead of a printer. First, I thought it was a bug in hplip. Then, I soon discovered that the printer advertised itself as a storage device instead of a printer. What, a buggy firmware?
Thanks to a random question on Launchpad I discovered it s not a bug, it s a feature. It s named HP Smart Install and it turns out it s yet another stupid idea to support OSes that are too dumb to detect your printers automatically: the printer advertises itself as a CD drive, until you install the driver that will make it switch back to being a printer.
What happens to those who don t want this feature that turns your printer into a 10 kg, read-only USB drive? Well, HP has a solution in the Smart Install FAQ:
I m almost finished with sort of re-bootstrapping Debian/m68k (I
can use etch-m68k as well as what was in unstable at the moment as
dependencies, so it was not that much, still, 305 binary
packages build from 84 source packages, most for unstable (very few
for unreleased, with very responsive maintainers, thanks all, who
will include the patches in their next uploads) is a bit including
rebuilds with newer versions, more patches, more testing or newer
dependencies installed. I ll probably upload on Sunday evening, as
I ll be off for 2-4 days at least from then (see below). Ingo tried
to test on real hardware, but as Murphy wants a hard disc failed
we ll still try to get something done over the weekend. If you want
to have 
This might save someone a good deal of sifting through ancient posts on
obscure forums: if you wonder why your SunBlade 1000 workstation refuses
to boot off a freshly burned DVD, keep in mind that the standard-issue DVD
drive in those machines (typically Toshiba SD-M1401) is pretty picky about
the DVD media type used. Trying to boot off DVD-R discs invariably failed
for me with a "read failed" error, while the same image burned onto a DVD+R
blank worked like a charm.
In the comments of the article explaining 
The 
The Russian l10n team is the first team to reach one of our
translators' Grails: all debconf templates translations are now fully
translated in Russian, in testing.
Russian is the first language to reach this ever (I formerly announced
100% completion for a few languages, but that was in unstable: we
never tracked testing up to now).
It means that, in theory, on can do a full installation of all
packages in squeeze (in case some crazy folks want to do this!) and always be prompted in Russian.
French and German are lagging very close to this, the only missing
bit being the udev package, which had two consecutive urgent uploads
that couldn't include a full translation coordination. For these,
we're indeed waiting for another udev upload, but I already nagged
Marco about this..:-)
Portuguese should make it, though I still have to track 7 packages for
it. Swedish is only missing 2 packages. I'm less sure that Czech and
Spanish (the other two teams working hard on 100% completion) will
make it.
It is widely considered good style to include
With increasing popularity of 
My fellow Republicans and I got a nice early Diwali present on Tuesday. ~65 seats in the House ~6 in the senate, ~18 governorships and control of ~20 state legislatures. (Some races haven't been formally called yet.) A few disappointments though. no majority in the Senate and Harry Reid and Barney Frank were not defeated. Still overall its an election to celebrate. Here are a few thoughts.
The Election System Is An Embarassment
Once again there are several races where the outcome is in doubt because of technical problems with voting. Whatever politics we have, can we agree that it is damn stupid that we still can't get something as simple as counting ballots right?
Prediction: The 2012 Republican presidential candidate will come from the Tea Party.
While I may be a Republican, I am also a Cosmopolitan East Coast Elitist so the Tea Party didn't move me much. There were a couple of cases (NY and DE atleast) where their candidates were subpar and cost us victory but the best of the new Republicans also came out of this movement. I would rather vote for one of them than Romney, Huckabee, McCain, Gingrich etc. (With the exception of Sarah Palin who is just too polarizing I'm afraid.) The Tea Party itself will subside in a few years as all populist movements do. (Ask the Hope'n'changers.)
Young People Are Dumb
Part of leftist mythology is the idea that one day "the kids" are going to rise up against the mean old corporate overlords. It ain't going to happen. There was a huge upsurge in first time voters in 2008 but that was because Obama was a novelty act not because they had suddenly discovered the merits of Keynesianism. Now Obama is old and busted so they won't vote anymore. (Not until they have kids and a mortgage sometime in the future.) They'll spend time make cool ironic signs for the 
Today, Zoe is six months old. The last three months certainly feel like
they've taken their time, but a lot has happened.
Developmentally, she's doing great. She's now in the 70th percentile for
height (up from around the 25th percentile), and 31st percentile for weight
(up from the 25th percentile). She cut her bottom front teeth a few days
ago. Crawling is imminent, I'd say. She can already scoot around in reverse,
and by a combination of shuffling and rolling, doesn't seem to be having
problems moving around the floor.
We started her on solids at five months, and she's taken like a duck to
water to pureed pumpkin, sweet potato, beans, zucchini, apple, pear, banana
and avocado. Speaking of water, she's also decided she likes to drink water
from our glasses whenever she sees us doing it. Hilarity usually ensues,
closely followed by a change of outfit.
She's sleeping well, only waking up once a night under normal circumstances,
and that wake-up is getting later and later. She loves her baths. She usually
lets out a series of loud sighs as soon as we put her in the bath.
She got her first cold a couple of weeks ago. It coincided with her first
day in ad hoc daycare, but Sarah and I were both sick as well, so I think
it's more likely that she caught the cold from us than from daycare. She's
still battling it, but it hasn't really bothered her all that much. She's
just a bit snotty. The 
We should not be so cocky. While the technical world is more structured and predictable than other areas, it has its limits too. One can only see so far down into complexity before predictability is lost in the detail. That s where we get so called Heisenbugs . Looking out to the future we can only see so far as well.
Recently I ve been reading 
