There exist several different versions of BBC iPlayer. (Even if you don't care about the main iPlayer site, perhaps you might want to watch videos on BBC News one day, which uses the same code.) Here is some (reformatted) Javascript from the BBC's site:

a = glow.embed.Flash.version();
f = "";
f = a.major>=10 ? "10player.swf"
  : a.major<8   ? "7player.swf"
  : a.major==9 && (a.minor>0   a.release>=115) ? "9player.swf"
  : "player.swf";

It is clear that Flash 9.0.115 holds special significance; this was the version that introduced SWF Verification support. The 7player.swf file seems to have disappeared entirely - I get a "404 not found" error. That means there is still one version of the iPlayer which hopefully should not require implementing SWF Verification. Navigating around the site with Gnash declaring itself as version 8 (with a patch applied to fix Glow compatibility), only radio programmes attempt to play using this version, and even then not the live streams. (No, gnash still doesn't play anything, don't panic.) So it would seem to me that fixing Gnash's support for this SWF 8 iPlayer would be a good place to start.

I blogged back in August about my frustration in finding a new laptop that had everything I was looking for. I'd figured I would eventually end up with the Toshiba R700, given my positive experiences with the R200. The lack of stock proved a problem, and the differing specs between the US and UK models also annoying. I started trying to source the Sony and finally found the HD model in stock from Vizik, but the helpful people there talked themselves out of a sale by saying the Full HD was too much for 13" (they also failed to have a 3G Full HD model).

I'd only brought the EEE 901 to the US with me, so after a month of that as my only machine at home I was starting to get a bit fed up; the keyboard is too small for constant use and it crawls when subjected to my normal usage patterns rather than just used as a lightweight network terminal. So it became obvious I was going to have to compromise on what I wanted. And if I was doing that I wanted something a lot cheaper, as I thought I may potentially want to upgrade sooner than usual.

In the end I've gone with an Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830T. It cost about a third of what the more fully featured laptops I was looking at were going for, which was a considerable bonus. The 2 things I ended up compromising on were the SSD and 3G support. And the name; I wasn't entire sure about what the build quality would be like.

As it turned out I needn't have worried; it appears to be perfectly well constructed - no noticeable flex while typing, solid enough, yet still fairly light. The keyboard is pleasant to use (admittedly I'm coming from the EEE, but it's a good size and responsive enough for me). I'm a bit uncertain about the touchpad, which has no physical separation from the rest of the case, but it's been ok so far. I miss the multitouch of the EEE, but it looks like there are some patches for Synaptics multitouch flying around that might eventually lead to useful support. I've ended up with a Core i5 470UM at 1.33GHz - what I ordered was the i5-430UM at 1.2GHz (and that's what the box/label on the laptop said), but I'm not complaining at the slight speed bump. It's fine for my needs. The 1366x768 screen is lovely, even in 11.6". Bright, if sometimes a little too shiny..

Installing was of course fun; it reminded me of when I got the R200 - neither the wifi nor wired interfaces were supported by the Debian installer, even from testing. I found a patch to get the (Atheros) LAN working (and have filed #599771 about potentially getting the support into squeeze's kernel) and that got me up and going. The wifi is a Broadcom BCM43225; too new for the old Free driver and the recently released Broadcom Free code causes the machine to instantly crash (I understand it has some SMP issues). So I'm stuck with the binary blob wl driver from broadcom-sta for now. I have hopes the Broadcom driver will improve though; it seems to be getting active love in the staging tree. The graphics are Intel, so well supported. And I'm getting at least 4 hours of battery life out of it, which I think could be improved with some tweaking.

So, er, yeah. Not what I set out looking for, but considerably cheaper and actually seems to meet my needs pretty well - it had its first weekend away trip this weekend and performed admirably; not too heavy in my hand luggage, decent battery life and no worries about it being too flimsy to survive. I'm still surprised it's an Acer...

Security is more than bug fixing. Security fixing/updating, the thing most people are exposed to, is reactive security . However, a large area of security work is proactive where defensive abilities are put in place to try and catch problems before they happen, or make classes of vulnerabilities unexploitable. This kind of security is what a lot of people don t understand, and I think it s important to point out so the distinction can be clearly seen. In the Linux kernel, there s yet another distinction: userspace proactive security and kernel proactive security. Most of the effort in kernel code has been protecting userspace from itself (things like Address Space Layout Randomization), but less attention has been given to protecting the kernel from userspace (currently if a serious enough flaw is found in the kernel, it is usually very easy to exploit it). One project has taken great strides with proactive security for the Linux kernel: PaX and grsecurity. There hasn t been a concerted effort to get its pieces upstream and it s long overdue. People are starting to take proactive kernel security more seriously, though there is still plenty of debate. While I did my best to push some userspace protections upstream earlier in the year, now it s time for kernel protections. What to help? Here is the initial list of things to do. Dan Rosenberg has started the information leaks discussion, and I ve started the read-only memory discussion. Hopefully this will go somewhere good.

Last week I was on my first Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS-N), I wanted to attended this summit for couple of reasons: 1. Developer, I m part of Debian Java, working on Eclipse IDE, and as you re developing Debian, you re automatically developing Ubuntu, no? 2. DebConf11 main organizer, I really wanted to see how it s all done on corporate level, for instance we re going with hotels instead of student dorms and so on. 3. Migration to Linux infrastructure, make contacts and have some talks on this topic, because after DebConf11 in Bosnia a lot of institution will most probably open doors to open solutions such as Linux. I went to this summit without any expectations or plans, just said I ll play it by ear. This years UDS was held in Orlando, Florida before Orlando I was planning to stay in NYC for couple of days, therefor my whole plan was to get to NYC, then Orlando then head back home I NYC I spent couple of days here with my cousins and friends, as always NYC never fails to surprise me, and I ll always stop by even if it s only for couple of days I wanted to meet up with couple of Debian people as well, but unfortunately my schedule was too tight so Caribe Royale, Orlando Please note that this whole trip was crazy (in a good way) starting from Sarajevo; on my flight from NYC to Orlando I see a guy that s sitting in front of me is wearing Canonical Landscape tshirt, I approach him and it turns he was Jamu Kakar working on Landscape. Since my luggage was late we had conversations from Debian over Ubuntu to Java to everything pretty much. While we were still at the airport, we bump into two more people going to UDS. As we got to hotel, same moment we walked out of cab there he was Jorge Castro, was he there just to smoke a cigarette or whatever doesn t even matter, what matters is that even before walking into hotel building I knew where reception, my tower and bar was, everything I needed to know at that moment Hotel where everything was held was Caribe Royale and even though I looked at their website I thought there was no way it s all going to be that nice, to my delight it was exact replica. Place is All-Suite Hotel and Convention Center , which meant that both accomodation, venue and everything else was in one place which is 15 minutes later after I checked in, I was at a bar talking to Jim Baker about Java, Jython and Python, exact things I wanted to talk about at that given moment. What I said in these last couple of paragraphs sounds pretty cool eh? Well to me this whole UDS was just like this, everybody was so accessible and open for discussion, from Jono Bacon walking around offering candy to UDS reception staff Michelle, Marianna and others who were always there whether you had a complaint, problem or a praise. I really should stop mentioning names, because I ll forget somebody, and since it s just not fair because I had a feeling everybody was just there for you, whatever it was you needed. Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS-N) Ubuntu, Debian, DebConf, differences? Even though I said I ll play it by ear, from very beginning I thought I d be complete outsider, being part of Debian and all. Quite contrary, I was everything but outsider, and even more there was plenty of Debian people there, including current DPL Stefano Zacchiroli, Colin Watson, Riku Voipio just to name few. There was also a Debian Healt Check plenary. But overall, there are differences between DebConf and UDS. One of the things is that you can attend UDS remotely I m not sure how much is this doable on DebConf, but then again vast differences are that UDS is filled with BOF s (as we would call it in Debian) meetings of different teams, I attended a lot of these, and most of them end with some kind of conclusion. While each day there was (only?) an hour of lectures on various topics, which on DebConf we would characterize maybe even as speed talks . However, everything was high paced, and it all ended up on You think that s a problem? How do you think we could solve it? . I had a feeling even if I didn t say something out loud that someone would hear me and approach me to discuss it. Everything was straight forward, all in goal to resolve certain issue or a problem, which I absolutely loved. Fun It wasn t all work, even though Orlando doesn t seem to be my kind of city from what I saw, it s way too magical for my taste There was a lot of places where you could go to enjoy yourself. Good people at Canonical even offered me free ticket to Disney World, there was a lot of destinations to visit and transpiration was also organized by Canonical. Unfortunately I missed the notorious UDS party on Friday because I had to head home early, but possibly I ll make it next year Even though, hotel was that great and to be honest you didn t have to leave to look for party. My favorite was Universal City Walk, one night I decided to go to see Blue Man Group, best part of it was that I got pulled up on stage by one of the members and was part of one of the acts! This is definitely something everyone should see during his life, one moment you re laughing like a lunatic, while other moment you re just having goose bumps from the performance itself. Amazing stuff. After all I wrote here along with the pictures, is there even anything else I need to say? I believe that even if I didn t play it by ear, this whole trip would exceed all my expectations in every possible sense. Because that s really what happened, those three reasons I was going to UDS for? Far more happened than that. All I can say in the end is that I ll move closer to having a part in Ubuntu development, and yea, I ll try to be regular on UDS from now on See you in Budapest? If all these photos weren t enough, you can find official group photo as well as personal set of photos can be found on: UDS-N photos by 2010 Sean Sosik-Hamor

The BelHac in Gent, Belgium, is about to end. A friend of mine and me arrived on Friday, when the event started with interesting talks about Haskell in Industry and a reception. My hacking was less productive than I wished. It might have been since I did not have a project of my own (as I had at the Hackathon in Z rich). After revising the Debian Haskell Policy, I worked a bit on the integration of distribution data on Hackage2, the next generation Haskell code repository, and submitted a patch to cabal-install to have a cabal checkout command which checks out a project s code from the version control repository mentioned in the package description much like debcheckout does for Debian package. At the lightning talks I advertised that in a real lightning talk I ll give exact timing information once the video is uploaded, but it might have been well under 3 minutes.

Google Code-in, Google s contest to introduce pre-university students of ages between 13 and 18, to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible, is starting on November 22, 2010 and Debian is one of the 20 organizations selected to take part.

If you are student interested in contributing to Debian, you can find more information in the wiki page http://wiki.debian.org/GoogleCodeIn2010.
A list of tasks is available at http://wiki.debian.org/GoogleCodeIn2010/Tasks and if you a Debian Developer, you still can add tasks by filling the template provided in the top of that wiki page.

You can join the IRC channel #debian-soc (on irc.debian.org) and the Debian GSOC mailing list to talk about your ideas and applications or if you have any question.

Debian mailing lists' standard policy is to allow posts from unsubscribed users. That of course fits our standards for opened development but has the drawback of allowing a lot of spam to reach our mailing lists. This spam also clutters the mailing lists archives. However, 1.5 years ago, listmasters established a well-working system to clean out spam from the mailing lists. It basically works in four steps:

1. first, spam can be "reported" by anyone meeting it. While you are reading the mailing lists, reporting spam is as simple as bouncing the offending mail to a dedicated address: report-listspam@lists.debian.org. I, for instance, use a mutt macro to set ESC-L as a "report spam" hotkey. Spam can also be reported when browsing the mailing lists archives and clicking on the "Report as spam" button;
2. when a given mail has been reported as spam more than five times, it is then "nominated" for review;
3. nominated mails must the be reviewed by volunteers in order to confirm they really are spam. The review algorithm is complex but, in short, when a mail has been confirmed as spam by 3 reviewers without being qualified as "ham" by anyone else, then it is considered spam;
4. such mails are then removed from the mailing lists archives.

Steps 2 and 4 are performed by a weekly script that runs on Sunday mornings (5:00 UTC, IIRC) How can you help? Process nominated spam We need more reviewers for step 3. At this moment 2 people are doing this on a regular basis (every Sunday with the morning coffee). Some others are working on this in a less frequent way. It seems that 1 or 2 more regulars reviewers would guarantee that we can cope with the nominated spam incoming flow. Only Debian developers can do that step. They should read instructions, ask for a password, then start reviewing. The first 1 or 2 people joining this will have a quite big amount of nominated spam to process, for their first effort. However, as most of these have been classified as spam by at least the two people doing this for months....the amount will slowly decrease. I, for instance, now only spend 5-10 minutes reviewing the nominated mails every week. Report spam Everybody can work on reporting spam. You can start by doing this on mailing lists you read by just bouncing spams to the spam report address; If you want to do more, you can join existing spam cleaning efforts, such as the one running for debian-boot or the one running in debian-l10n-french (the latter probably more for French speakers). Or you can of course start a similar effort for your pet list. To be efficient, this effort needs to gather 5-6 people who will process the mailing lists archives systematically. Let's clean out these archives!

Since a few days, I have started to notice that the "Debian" changelog that normally ships with packages no longer appears with a number of recent package updates. Is this intentional?

Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu / Skolelinux DVD, which is supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard. Even schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu working using this DVD. The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started installing recommended packages by default. We want the same set of packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD. I created a patch for debian-cd in BTS report #601203 to do this, and since this change was applied to the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space. A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that those needing these applications are few and can get them from the Debian archive. Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages were using most space. A few large packages are well know; openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont. But I also discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB. The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package. I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond documentation. Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the free X driver should work. With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the DVD more useful again.

My recent experience with Mozilla ThuderBird, IceDove. With KDE 4.x, the KDE team took a radical step of ripping apart most of the stuff and rethinking many of the designs. Quite a bold move. Many people appreciated KDE's efforts to start afresh while others moved away from KDE. For some reasons, I decided to stick to KDE. Maybe it was because of the awesome flexibility KDE provided provides to customize the DE to one's personal taste. Or maybe because I was too used to the KDE way of doing things. I stayed with KDE while 4.0 was released and stayed with it up till very recently. I started to lose my patience with the PIM Suite. I know the PIM team is also going to some very radical changes which will bring very innovative stuff later. But, at the moment, the KDE PIM suite is very broken. Broken not in the first impress, but broken when you regularly use it. It leaks memory like anything and keeps doing lots and lots of I/O. I hope some day the KDE team decides that they do need a core team, a core team that could take care of important tasks, making sure that the imporatant tasks are Continuously Usable. It takes time to earn the reputation but it takes a lot lesser time to lose it. Anyways, having been a KDE (PIM) user for long, I had been bearing the PIM torments up until, I recently saw a colleague using IceDove. There was a time when the Mozilla suite was in itself terribly slow. But things seem to have changed a lot. Both, the browser and the PIM suite, have improved a lot lot in terms of functionality and performance. Performance is very important. What good is a feature if its performance is terrible and it hinders the usability. Some of the things that really impressed me were:

• Indexing
• Organization

Indexing: Nepomuk might be good one day but that day is yet to be seen. I patiently wait for that day to come. Well, don't have much choice. Have been patiently waiting for it since KDE 4.0 was released. KDE has great ideas with Nepomuk which is good. But realisticly, what all do you want to see indexed ? There has to be a realistic line drawn. The browsers already have indexing for the history. Amarok, the player, also does indexing. It can tell you when your last favorite song was played. For pictures, I have the awesome KPhotoAlbum that cannot be beaten by anything. But above all, the most important thing to index is your conversation. Those emails that you send daily. And indexing is no good if you can't find the information you need, later. IceDove has filled that place. It does an excellent indexing (in terms of performance) and presents a very user intuitive way to narrowing it down to, when looking for a particular information. Organization: The other great thing about KDE PIM is its ability to break down its applications into small parts and glue them together into a new, well integrated application. Yes, Kontact. It is used to be the best PIM application. Used common libraries to make the suite more efficient than the rest. But all this was used to be. Today, kpart itself might be Kontact's problem. We have different applications glued together that if built with a common design, could have benefited a lot more. Take for example: kmail, knode and akregator. They are all very important parts of the PIM suite. Yet all three are different. The only thing common amonst them is is that they are available from the same Kontact shell. kmail has a different navigation. akregator has very nice aggregated folders but the same cannot be available in knode and kmail. knode, while still okay, has been rotting for some time. So it was time to see how IceDove performed when testing it up against this Use Case. The good thing about IceDove is is that it has one single uniform interface to most of the PIM needs. I can use the same window and the same interface for all my rss feeds, my emails and my leafnode newsgroups. That has a big benefit in itself. I have only 1 integrated interface to look at and only 1 interactive method to learn. There aren't different keystrokes for different applications. All is one in IceDove. And I think one of the main reasons for Mozilla's success is its plugin architecture. It is very difficult to satisfy everyone's needs. In the same way, it is very difficult for one group of developer's to be able to innovate differently. This is where Mozilla rocked. They provided a solid foundation with basic standard interface and let new fresh minds to do the rest of the innovation. Turns out it has worked well. So, with my PIM needs satisfied, I thought KDE was serving as nothing but just a mere shell. So, now was the right time to do the thing I always thought of doing. Switch to GNOME. GNOME looks elegant at first look but that is it. I wanted to take a screenshot of an application to report a bug. I fired up PrntSc key to let the screen capture utility pop-up. It did not have the opiton to select just the application window. Hmmm! Time to return back to KDE and use the Mozilla PIM suite and hope the KDE PIM team learns and does the right thing.

For some reason, 60G of free space on my notebook suddenly turned into 60G of movies. Bownian motion, perhaps. Unfortunately, in this particular case, I absolutely don't like to let a movie (or book, for that matter) unfinished, so I watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Johnny Depp; so far, so good) from start to finish. After the first half hour I started wondering if the plot is going to start. The reptile party in the hotel lobby was a short entertaining interlude, but to the end, no plot manifests. I'm left wondering what this was all about. Quantum of Solace on the other hand is good entertainment. Probably not one of the best, but still worth watching if you like her majesty's secret agent. Going back to movies I've seen before is something I like to do as well, so having another evening in company with the unforgettable Leon (the professional) was time well spent. I didn't give up on Terry Gilliam yet and met The Fisher King. While the story is completely different, it does feel a bit similar to 12 Monkeys in terms of set design and atmosphere. Speaking of Terry Gilliam: I'm curious how his current attempt at The Man Who Killed Don Quixote turns out; so far I've only seen him losing this movie in the documentary about the aborted last attempt: Lost in La Mancha. On the funny side, Dogma and especially The Wedding Crashers were worth watching. If you have to pick one, it's the latter one. Dogma feels a bit forced in some places. Returning back to the opening theme: seeing Inland Empire was another evening that left me confused. The main story is interesting enough, but I have to admit that I just couldn't follow where all the other sub plots tie in, or if they even are supposed to. And I'm not only talking about the rabbit family (those felt a bit like the Middle of the Film in The Meaning of Life and were quite in order.)

I ve just read the Wikipedia page about Unparliamentary Language [1]. I recommend that everyone read it, if only for the amusement value, among other things it links to incidents where elected representatives acted in a way that would be expected of primary school children. The general concept of having rules about Unparliamentary Language is that MPs are permitted to say anything in Parliament without the risk of being sued or prosecuted, but certain things are inappropriate the most common example is directly accusing another MP of lying. One of the main aims of rules against Unparliamentary Language is to prevent attacks on the honor of another member. Having just witnessed a mailing list discussion go widely off track when a free software project was denigrated, it seems to me that we could do with some similar guidelines for mailing list discussions. The aim would be not to just prevent excessive attacks on the honor of other members but to also protect the honor of the free software projects. So for example one might recommend not using a particular program because of design decisions which seem dubious or a bad security history, but saying it s crap would be considered to be inappropriate. Not that rejecting a program based on design decisions or a history of security flaws would be uncontroversial, but at least that gives objective issues to discuss so if there is a debate it will educate some of the lurkers. Note that I m not claiming to be better than other people in this regard, I ve described software as crap on more than a few occasions. But I will try to avoid such things in future. Finally does anyone have a good suggestion for a Free Software equivalent to the term Unparliamentary Language ? It seems that to a large extent the support of certain ideas depends on having a catchy name and I can t think of one.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unparliamentary_language

Hello I m a Perl author working on a Debian unstable system. The great thing about Debian is that a lot of Perl modules are available though Debian packages. I follow Debian way of life to the point that I no longer install my modules (under development) with sudo make install (or its Module::Build equivalent). I ve often been bitten by weird test errors due to old version of module lingering in /usr/local. Now, I always create Debian package of my modules under development with dh-make-perl. This way, I avoid installing Perl module in /usr/local and my developement versions are cleaned up when actual package are availalble through Debian unstable. () This method has an unfortunate side effect: I never test installation the CPAN way. And Config::Model did fail to install with CPANPLUS. Now here s a way to create a barebone Debian chroot with cowbuilder to test CPANPLUS installation. First create a new chroot: $ sudo cowbuilder --create --distribution sid

Loging into this chroot (the bindmount option is necessary for cpanp to work correctly) : $ sudo cowbuilder --login --bindmounts /dev

In the chroot: Run cpan to configure CPAN: # cpan

Hit return to configure CPAN automatically. Then install your module: # cpanp i Config::Model

Or, if your module is not yet uploaded: # cpanp i http://<path-to-tar.gz>

Once you quit, the chroot is restored to its barebone state. Et voila. I tested full installation with dependencies the CPAN way without mucking up my system. Many thanks to Christian Kuelker of Cipux project for his comments that enable me to improve Config::Model All the best

In the comments of the article explaining how to generate different dependencies on Debian and Ubuntu with a common source package, I got asked if it was possible to apply a patch only in some distribution. And indeed it is. The source package format 3.0 (quilt) has a neat feature for this. Instead of unconditionally using debian/patches/series to look up patches, dpkg-source first tries to use debian/patches/vendor.series (where vendor is ubuntu, debian, etc.). Note that dpkg-source does not stack patches from multiple series file, it uses a single series file, the first that exists. So what s the best way to use this? Debian should always provide debian/patches/series, they are supposed to provide the default set of patches to use. Any derivative cooperating with Debian can maintain their own series files within the common VCS repository used for package maintenance. They can drop Debian-specific patches (say branding patches for example), and they can add their own on top of the remaining Debian patches. It s worth noting that it s the job of the maintainers to keep both series files in sync when needed. dpkg-source offers no way to have stacked series files (or dependencies between them). If you want to use quilt to edit an alternate series file, you can temporarily set the QUILT_SERIES environment variable to vendor.series . Just make sure to start from a clean state, i.e. no patches applied. Otherwise quilt will be confused by the sudden mismatch between the series file and its internal data (stored in the .pc directory).

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My latest patch for Org mode has been accepted by Carsten today. It adds support for custom category icons in all views, like agenda or todo. You just need to configure org-agenda-category-icon-alist and it will work out of the box.

With increasing popularity of Flattr (114,057 has gone through the Flattr system in two months), several people start to recommend what things to flattr. I'm not going into this business, however they seem so find interesting things for me so you might like it as well. The Flattr Free and Open Source Software by Rapha l Hertzog is actually thing which has attracted me to the Flattr. It collects recommendations how to tag your free software on Flattr and each month it publishes five recommendations which projects to flattr. The other thing I've noticed is list made each month by Evgeni Golov, which I've mostly noticed because increasing popularity of phpMyAdmin on Flattr, because he was really fast in advertising it :-).

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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 Rally to Promote Comedy Central but even the prospect of legalizing pot won't get them to the polling booths in sufficient numbers to defeat the oldies. Why? Because young people are dumb. Prediction: War With Iran If you're President Obama what do you do now? Bipartisanship? Yeah right. Look at what happened to Rep. Cao of Louisiana, the only Republican to vote for Obamacare and one of only two GOP congressmen to lose on Tuesday. Obama actively campaigned for his challenger. Any of the new Republicans who try and compromise with the President will end up under the bus sooner or later as they well know. The President could go full retard with the socialism (progressivism, liberalism whatever. It's all the same.) All his initiatives will be shot down but he can claim to be a martyr to the party of No. (Who will be joined in the Senate by Lieberman and whatever centrist Democrats who are up for reelection in 2012.) But this seems to be the path to a one-term presidency to me. Maybe that's what he wants. He could retire comfortably to the deanship of some Ivy League law school and make a lucrative killing on the rubber chicken circuit. But lets assume he wants to get back in the White House in 2012. One way to get back in touch with the voters is to start getting serious about foreign policy which has either been a joke (Remember the reset button?) a travesty or just copied from the Bush administration. In particular the Obama administration has completely failed in stopping Iran from gaining nuclear technology, sponsoring terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, and oppressing its own people. War with Iran would enhance his standing with Conservatives (hey it works for me!) most liberals would go along with it and the extreme Code Pink type loonies can safely be ignored. I say it happens before November 2012.

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 NoseFrida has been very handy for dealing with this. She had her six month shots today, and seems to be tolerating them fairly well. Sarah says she hardly even cried when she got them. She continues to be a remarkably happy baby. She always wakes up with a smile, she really only fusses if we keep here away for more than a couple of hours, or haven't fed her on time. Even with this current cold she has, she's still stayed very happy. We feel incredibly lucky to have such a wonderful baby. The next big adventure is to try a babysitter.

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.