Well, I m back in Kansas after a bit over a week in New York for Debconf. I didn t have time to write much, so I ll probably be posting about it a few times.
I already wrote about
the trip to New York, and now will say just a bit about the time there and trip back home.
I have to start with a quote from Jacob. We went on the Q train from Coney Island a few stops down to Brighton Beach. It s elevated, and provides an excellent view of the amusement park. Jacob s excited comment, face pressed to window, was:
Wow! I see lots of everything!
Which, come to think of it, sums up NYC itself pretty well.
Speaking of faces pressed to windows: this was Jacob s default mode of operating in NYC. Get into any subway car, bus, whatever and he wants to stand on the seat nearest the window and look out it. It s a real problem if no such seats are available. More than once, though, we ll get on the subway and he ll run to the nearest window seat to claim it, no matter who will be his neighbors for the next few minutes. And after a few days of this, Oliver started picking up on it. Pretty soon both boys wanted to be pressed to the windows watching interesting things (to me, it was a dark tunnel with occasional lights, but interesting to them) go by.
Which brings me to today. Today was Oliver s first time flying, and Jacob s second though he was an infant the first time he flew and doesn t remember it.
Jacob has been perhaps cautiously optimistic about flying. The idea of it was exciting, but then again it s something completely new, which he doesn t care for so much. So we had no idea what to expect.
What was got was excitement. And lots of it. From the La Guardia terminal, Dad, is this our plane? No, not that one. Well, is THIS our plane? No, not that one either. Well, is *THIS* our plane?
At this point, a parent has to confront the question: which is worse, causing serious disappointment to a 3-year-old and possibly inviting a meltdown in the middle of the D concourse, or a bit of harmless encouragement that might not be 100% literally true?
Uhmm . that might be it (Ah, so I went for the literally true but still exciting route ) YAY!! *jumping and clapping*
Terah reminds me at this point of our security adventure. I, wearing socks, carried Oliver (1 year old) through the security checkpoint at La Guardia. But oh! I failed to remove his shoes (not really shoes). TSA made me go back through, put them in the bowl, and run them through the scanner. A nearby pilot, getting screened, noticed this and made this ironic comment well within TSA earshot: Look at his face! He s gonna get us all! Good thing you re checking his shoes! Terah and the pilot both just about bust up laughing. Meanwhile, I m carrying Oliver through, and the agent that made me take off his shoes had this look of I m sorry, I know this is stupid, but I have to. (For an excellent pilot s rant about TSA,
read this).
Anyhow, we got on the plane, and of course Jacob nabbed the window seat.
There was plenty interesting to see. At each step of the way, I told him what was going to happen next, so there wouldn t be any surprises. I told him once we got in the air, and got a breathy Woooooooow .. I told him, Jacob, we are flying! And his reply has to be his best quote of the week:
Dad, I don t know that I ve ever been a butterfly before!
I pointed out that we were above the clouds, which was also exciting. About every 5 minutes, he d poke me, and say, Dad, look out the window. Look down. WE ARE UP IN THE SKY!
Meanwhile, Oliver slept.
On the second flight, Jacob slept (and was in a very foul mood when he woke up on the ground) while Oliver tried his best to squirm out of the seat and onto the ground.
Now, to wind up this post, I would like to leave you with some statistics and photos comparing my home with New York.
| Item |
NYC |
Marion County, KS |
| Land Area |
469 sq mi |
954 sq mi |
| Population |
8,391,881 |
12,952 (6871 excluding the 3 largest towns quite some distance away) |
| Population Density |
27,532/sq mi |
14/sq mi (7 if excluding large towns) |
I think of this as a wonderful difference! I ve said before how much fun it is to spend some time in NYC, where we can just walk to a fruit stand, any number of grocery stores, restaurants, etc. And finally, I leave you with two street scenes. The first is from our hotel s front door.
That s our fruit guy there, and the bagel and roll place is across the street by the RadioShack.
Now, the street view from our front door after we got home:
OK, so that s sort of misleading. You can t actually see the street scene because it s on the other side of the hill. That s just our driveway to get to the street. (Not that the street looks much different. It has the weeds growing on the sides instead of in the middle, as one notable difference.)
We loved New York and I m certain we ll go back again. It s also nice to be home and enjoy the peace of the countryside.
Thanks to Debconf for a wonderful conference a topic I ll have more to say about in the coming days.
A fresh release of RQuantLib
is now on CRAN and
in Debian.
RQuantLib
combines (some of) the quantitative analytics of
QuantLib with the
R statistical computing environment and language.
This follows the 0.3.3 release from last week
and has again a number of internal changes. All uses of objects from
external namespaces are now explicit as I removed the remaining using
namespace QuantLib;. This makes things a little more verbose, but should
be much clearer to read, especially for those not yet up to speed on whether
a given object comes from any one of the Boost, QuantLib or Rcpp
namespaces. We also generalized an older three-dimensional
plotting function used for option surfaces -- which had already been used in the
demo() code -- and improved the code underlying this: arrays of
option prices and analytics given two input vectors are now computed at the
C++ level for a nice little gain in efficiency. This also illustrates the possible
improvements from working with the new
Rcpp API that is
now used throughout the package,
Full changelog details, examples and more details about this package are at
my RQuantLib page.
You might remember that I 
When I started working on WebKitGTK+ I was a web developer, writing IT applications using Python and Django, and building features for content portals running Plone (argh). Even though I was an Epiphany user ever since it was forked off Galeon, I still had to use Firefox for my work, because I couldn t really live without Firebug.
It should come as no surprise, then, that one of my first patches to WebKitGTK+ was actually 
Time to introduce what I've been working on for these past too many
months..
The ability to take your data and configuration and go home, as well as
everything being free software, means Branchable follows the vision of the
The svn repository used to draft the Debian Project News just passed the
sixth hundreds commit. If my calculations are correct, that's quite
more than the number of edits done, back when the DPN was drafted in the
wiki. I take it as a hint, that the new work flow works better than the
old one.
However, playing a bit with statistics (done by horrible shell one
liners ;)
I noticed, that - while every Debian Developer may commit to
the subversion repository - not that many commits from other DDs where
made: Of the 602 commits so far, only 70 where done by other DDs:
In the evening today (Tuesday), the Debconf organizers arranged for a screening of the Creative Commons licensed film "Sita Sings the Blues" by Nina Paley. I went to see it as I had missed it when it was first released among tales of trials and tribulation at the hands of copyright meanies.
So first let me say yay Free Culture!, boo Intellectual Property! etc. etc. Now we have that out of the way...
"Sita Sings the Blues" has two main narrative threads: The breakup of Ninas relationship with her boyfriend and the Ramayana particularly a story from the uttarakanda about how after Shri Rama returned from Lanka, Sita had to undergo the agnipravesha to prove her chastity and even after she passed that test was eventually banished to the forest. I had an adverse reaction to this film. In fact I stayed to the end to be polite but I left afterwards as soon as I could. I had almost a physical feeling of nausea and I was surprised by this. Since then I have been pondering why this is so.
It's not that its blasphemous. Shri Rama is not just a "perfect man", he is God (an avatar of Vishnu Bhagavan as is briefly touched upon in the film) for millions of people so, well, yes it is blasphemous but its more Rowan Atkinson style rather than Norwegian Black Metal style blasphemy. One never gets the impression that the author hates Hinduism or Indian culture the opposite in fact. And in fact it is not uncommon in our culture to speak of Sita and Rama in this way. They are not remote authority figures but as familiar to us as our own friends and family and the Ramayana is not just about events that happened long ago it is relevant to our lives right now. Even the "good woman done wrong by big dumb male jerk" narrative is not unknown. (See the Uttararamacharita of Bhavabhuti for instance.) though I would suggest reducing the Ramayana this way is akin to treating the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as a book about towels.
Even the milder criticism that it is not accurate is offbase because although the Sanskrit poem by Maharshi Valmiki is the canonical rendition of the Ramayana, there are other well-known versions. Not just in Sanskrit, the Hindi retelling by Sant Tulsidas called Ramacharitamanasa is more popular than Valmiki. Also speaking as someone who has preached Ramakatha "professionally" I can tell you that even the priests do not stick to the letter of the text. It is encouraged and expected that they will riff on the basic stories adding or removing details according to the needs and taste of the audience. And the device of the three narrators made me smile as this is exactly the kind of discussions that go on after hearing the Ramakatha. (I must say Paley picked a notably illiterate trio though.) One place where this fell flat was when they discussed the alleged discrepancy between Sita living simply in the forest and dropping a trail of jewellery on the way to Lanka. Although I can imagine someone at some point saying, "Do not question these stories" not at this point. Even the most retarded westernized Indian would know that removing ones ornaments is a sign of widowhood. A married woman would only do that in extremis certainly not just merely because she was a hermit. In a few cases some extra details might have helped the story. It was not explained that Ravana does not just have rakshasas in his command but he is one himself. (And he certainly wasn't a good guy until one day he got up and kidnapped Sita.) Shri Ramas brother Lakshamana accompanied the couple into the forest to Lanka and back but he only pops up (for no apparent reason) at the end. But look at me, I'm turning into one of those people who rant about Star Trek continuity errors or complain that the Romans in a gladiator movie have the wrong helmets for that time period etc. One has to cut a storyteller some slack and I entered the screening determined to be charitable.
It's also not because I don't really see much connection between the two stories. Getting dumped by someone who simply loses interest in you hardly seems equivalent to being trapped by a moral code that doesn't allow for individuals feelings. Paley could have easily made "Princess Leia Sings the Blues" and it wouldn't have changed the significance much. But in India people make far more tenuous connections between the epics and events in their own life so one can hardly complain about that.
Aesthetics are not the problem either. The first version of the Ramayana I ever read was the Amar Chitra Katha comicbook version which partly influenced the visual style of this film. (In fact you briefly see it in one scene when different editions of the Ramayana flash by.) Hindu popular culture is very gaudy. (See Ramanand Sagars '80s Ramayana Hindi TV serial, which was very reverential, insanely popular and tacky beyond belief.) The animation in this film is very good and quite artistic.
"So Jaldhar", you might be asking if you've read this far, "what exactly is your problem with this film?"
I have read the Valmiki Ramayana in Sanskrit with the commentaries from beginning to end. I've read other Ramayanas in Sanskrit, Gujarati, and English. I have read the comicbook, I've read anti-Ramayana polemics. When you learn Sanskrit in the traditional way the first lesson, in the declension of masculine gendered nouns ending in vowels is rAma.h rAmau rAmA.h ... I am well aware there are different emphases, different interpretations in various versions. Why can't I accept this as just another take on a story that has shown its fluidity over and over again? It's just...wrong on a subrational level. How can I put this? Imagine you are flipping through the TV channels and you see your grandparents amongst Lady Gaga's backup dancers. Or you came home one night to find everything that was on the floor meticulously glued to the ceiling. Over the course of my life (to hear my mother tell it my first exposure to the Ramayana was before I could speak.) I have developed a mental bond with this story a certain idea of how it should be. I think so has Nina Paley. And this is the problem. "Sita Sings the Blues" is Nina Paleys Ramayana not mine.
I maintain NBD
I have an irrational emotional dislike for python. (I know, I
know).
I needed to build nbd in a clean environment. So I set up the
environment, install openssh-client (to get the sources across) and then
do apt-get build-dep nbd.
That pulls in python.
Something is wrong with this world.