Amaya Rodrigo: Of inner peace and struggle
[Nothing related to Debian here, move on if you don't care about my recurring obsession with the end of the world, Cassandra pains, or Big Phat Living Room Revolution yearnings].Although I am still looking for a community of anarcho-primitivists that want to accept me joining their frugal living, and simply slip off the social construct, the system, the fucking face of earth, call it what you will, I could find some comfort in my favourite feminist blogger's take on the subject of my midlife crisis regarding ecology, capitalism, patriarchy, child bearing, overpopulation, meat consumption and all the rumination of consuming thoughts that (still) make my life miserable and have kept me running away from human contact for a year.
[Emphasis mine]
At what point does human culture depart from the Natural? With the invention of computers? TV? Cars? The cotton gin? Electricity? Taco stands? Gunpowder? The printing press? Written language? Shoes? Crop cultivation? Yurts? The wheel? Did humans become unnatural when the good old days of picturesque, endless agrarian toil, feudal oppression, unchecked disease, ignorance, and death from dysentery at 35 turned into the bad new days of urban post-industrial capitalism where a pound of fair-trade organic coffee costs $12.99 and your email inbox is full of spam?
ah. Everything humans do, or have ever done, is natural. We can t do anything else. The idea that modern culture is un-natural is nostalgic and inaccurate. Living off the grid in a yurt is good in some absolute sense, whereas driving an SUV from a suburban bungalow to the stripmall is bad ? Come on. This a romantic, but misguided view. The cosmic reaction to a 20 Ford Expedition is the same as to a sanctimonious Prius: bupkis. The universe doesn t give a fuck about you or your lifestyle choices. It doesn t give a fuck about the economy, oil spills, or civil unrest in Blargistan. It doesn t give a fuck about katydids. Eventually our whole planet will be erased from space, and the galaxy won t bat an eye. The inevitable extinction of our species (imminent, according to research here at Spinster Laboratories) via the exhaustion of available resources is as natural as a fresh-picked peach. As Andre 3000 and other dude philosophers have observed, nothing is forever.
Yes, yes, when people use the word natural what they really mean is free of chemical additives and maybe some of the assorted hippie concepts that go with that narrative. Barter economies, home furnishings made from bamboo, vegan cookbooks, living in the country. While I would argue that it is just as natural for people to put chemical additives in things as it is to not put chemical additives in things, I admit that it is appealing to fantasize that the source of human misery is an unnatural isolation from Nature, and that doing yoga on an organic rubber mat and drinking organic spinach smoothies will put me back in sync with the cosmos.
But alas, I m already in sync with the cosmos, and so are you. In other words, this is it. This is what we ve become, and this is what we get. Which is not to say that a person can t fantasize about a verdant paradise full of songbirds and polar bears and Bengal tigers, untouched by human influence. Only, that world isn t a world we could actually live in. The minute you add contented children, lazy from a carefree day at the swimming hole, eating ripe plums on the porch at sunset to that scenario, natural history changes, and it s right back to our scorched-earth dystopia. Our giant brains use up resources, it s as simple as that.
As long as we re still here, though, we might as well try to make the best of it.
http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2010/06/19/heads-up-art-week-starts-on-monday/
Though the comfort is somewhat ephemeral, because deep inside, I know she's wrong, I know another way is feasible, but I have given up already, I have very well come to terms with extiction, I get an enormous pleasure from the thought of the very well deserved human mass suicide-by-cop^Wnature, and in fact, I trust and hope it will save me personally from facing the hard times ahead, as I am a damn coward, paralized by fear, hopeless about the flock ever getting it (is it so hard, really?), while doing as much as I can but completely overwhelmed by the need of changing a world everyone seems to like just as it is. I can certainly empathize with much more disturbed ways of airing similar anguish, among many other examples, such as The Unabomber, or The Weather Underground. I don't even want to go there as I know violence all too well and it is not fun to be on the receiving end. But I see the screaming desperation behind the motives of acts I am not at the liberty to discuss here. I wonder if consumption of resources in the form of books will numb the disorder or make it worse and what sort of medical arrangement the stablishment has for it. As you click away the previous links will mean nothing to you because a)it is Wikipedia after all, and b)you probably don't even understand what the problem of eating animal corpses is, humans are omnivores after all, and what is all this nonsense about dropping language altogether.
WTF, there was no comfort after all, and I am still a nutjob.
A lot is being said on how Ruby is packaged in Debian and Ubuntu. In this post, I m trying to go through the most common myths and give my position as a Debian Ruby maintainer. Note that those are my views, not necessarily those of the other Debian Ruby maintainers.
Myth: Ruby is completely outdated in Debian and Ubuntu
There s a culture in the Ruby community of always using the latest bleeding-edge version. There s also a culture (though this one has recessed a bit, I think) that it s perfectly fine to change APIs in incompatible ways if it makes the software slightly better.
In Debian (and Ubuntu) stable releases, we try to provide a rock-solid version of Ruby that won t be allowed to change API during the support lifetime of a release. Bugfixes for important bugs can be applied, but that s basically all. So it s not surprising that Ruby in released versions of Debian and Ubuntu is behind the latest upstream version.
In development branches, we are following the latest upstream versions quite closely. Debian 6.0 squeeze , to be released by the end of the year, includes Ruby 1.8.7-p302, and will include 1.9.2-p0 (the currently of Ruby 1.9.2 in squeeze is currenty a SVN snapshot from beginning of august).
There are people interested in installing a packaged Ruby that just works, and other people interested in installing their own version of Ruby (through RVM and such). People in the Ruby community tend to forget about the first category, and consider that, because they install Ruby from source or with RVM, that should be the solution for everybody.
We need the Ruby community to respect that different people have different ways of using Ruby, and to stop recommending that everyone using Debian and Ubuntu should install Ruby from source.
We also need to leverage the backports services for both Debian and Ubuntu to provide a way to install the latest upstream version on stable releases. The only reason why we are not doing it yet is lack of time.
Myth: Ruby is split into a myriad of packages in Debian
In the past (pre-2005), a decision was made to split some libraries from the standard library into separate packages. This was motivated by:
It is a while since we managed to get 
PS This post also gives me a chance to comment
on a so called 
... or, 'yellow pages.be'. Or something.
I like it that there is an on-line version of the Belgian yellow
pages. Who wants to look up a phone number in a huge book, anyway? And
that's ignoring the fact that it isn't any good for the environment.
I also like it that the yellow pages are now no longer distributed by
default on paper. You can still get them, if you so wish, but you have
to explicitly request them.
Of course, searching an on-line database is also faster than flipping
through pages until you find what you're looking for. What's more, you
can limit your search to your location rather than whatever
shops just happen to be in the version of the book that is distributed
to your house. That makes it much more efficient, since rather than all
thousands of computer shops in the whole province, you'll find the
computer shops in your municipality. Or the ones that are in a radius
around your address, if you choose that option.
Rather, that would be the case. But for some
unfathomable
Russel Garlick writes on behalf of the KohaCon10 Organising Committee:
Two weeks ago, Maria and I completed
We managed to complete this challenge without facing major problems or
pains, and after the first five our six days, our legs seemed to have
gotten used to the daily effort and it started to be easier and easier.
Our morale kept growing as days passed and we advanced east. When I
started walking on a cold and rainy morning in Hondarribia, after barely
no rest in the night bus to Ir n, I thought for myself that it was
improbable that we'd manage to get anywhere near Catalunya, that one of
us would get injuried way before, or we'd just give up and go for the easy
beach vacation in the Basque Country.
This adventure through GR 11 has been incredibly positive for us for
several reasons. We've learned a lot about ourselves and strengthened our
relation, and now I know how powerful drive can be; to get somewhere, no
matter how far, it's really easy if you just believe you can do it and
desire to get there.
Maria and I are proud of what we've done, and no wonder we're looking
for new challenges. An obvious one would be repeating this experience,
going through the French side of the Pyrenees, but for now, the Corsican
GR 20 seems the most appealing. We'll see, next summer!
OCaml compiles native executables in static mode. It allows to have a minimal set of dependencies when delivering an executable. It has also disadvantages like the size of the executable and problems arising when considering libraries update -- but this is another topic. There is still one strong dependency that you should not forget when you want to deliver a product for most of the Linux distributions: dependency on the glibc version.
Trying to run OASIS compiled with Debian Lenny, on CentOS 5.5:
The 
I'm now using 
there was a recurring catchphrase during DebConf10, worded something like
"Debian derivatives are also our users", that appeared quite often
in talks as well as in hallway chats.
DebConf continued until Saturday, but Friday the 6th was my last day as I left New York that evening. I m a bit late in getting this summary written up.
...awesome.
OK, I'm writing this while I'm still in USA, but there are so many
things to say about these weeks that I can't write them in only one
blog post. And, still, this one will be quite long as it will talk
about hacking, running and sightseeing...:)
Let's start about hacking: after all, this is the first reason for
being there in US, isn't it?
I cam to DebConf with a very long TODO list and, for the first time in
seven DebConfs, I'm pretty happy with what I achieved from it:
FrOSCon was a blast. I had two booths of my own MirBSD and FreeWRT as
well as shares of Debian and Grml. Well, MirBSD was run by Benny and gecko2
because I just didn t have any time for it, despite XTaran s help with the
FreeWRT booth. All I did was the initial setup of both booths, while at the
same time answering about three questions regarding FreeWRT in parallel.
Wow. What a little small, open hardware can do to you. XTaran and I had fun
and we ll do FreeWRT booths again; I managed to flash my two FON2100 devices
( La Fonera the FON2200 can use the same image, says nbd of OpenWrt) and
will fix the port s remaining few bugs I found; XTaran will try to push the
WL-500gPv2 development. The social part was nice as well, although I think
the greek restaurant in the city will not be visited by me again. Anyway,
if you didn t attend FrOSCon, your own fault
Since the BitTorrent tracker used by MirOS is down, here s the link to 
