Tag Archives: en

Jed McKenna – “Spiritual Enlightenment, The Damnedest Thing”

You know how this famous saying in oriental spiritual philosophy goes, that when a student is ready, the teacher arrives? I think that this saying is entirely true. When the student is ready, the teacher always arrives. Just don’t be literal about it, the teacher does not have to arrive in the shape of a wise old man with a white beard. What arrives really is the knowledge that you are ready for. And it may arrive as a conversation on a plane, a movie, a new acquaintance, or a book.

This book is great. I feel like reading my own thoughts but well organized and neatly put together. It’s a great book and gives this necessary kick to face the reality. Only I would not recommend it. And I don’t. Usually, when I read a great book, I run around advising everyone and their dog to read it. Not this time, though. Even trying to discuss the ideas in this book with people who read it proves difficult, not to mention trying to impose it on someone who is not interested in serious business of demolishing self. So, I do not recommend it. You will find it when you are ready for it. Or you will find something else. It does not matter. This book is not entertainment, it has to be taken literally, just like the books of Castaneda are. So, don’t. Unless you are fed up with the world as it is and want to look for the truth.

If you do, then this book helps a lot to organize your own thoughts and it tells you what you needed to hear all along: forget about external knowledge, you have work to do, work on yourself, so go and do it.… -->

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spamassassin throws errors in amavis cron job

The spamassassin install uses a cron job to do sync and cleanup called amavisd-new-cronjob. This job throws up errors on the Debian 7.

error creating a DNS resolver socket: Network is unreachable at 
/usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/DnsResolver.pm line 235.
plugin: eval failed: error closing socket: Bad file descriptor at 
/usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/DnsResolver.pm line 568.

Looking into it the culprit is the check for whether Bayesian filtering is enabled at all, i.e. these lines:

if ! perl -MMail::SpamAssassin -e "my \$spamtest = Mail::SpamAssassin->new();
\$spamtest->compile_now (); \$spamtest->{conf}->{use_bayes} ? exit 0 : exit 1"
then
 #bayes is disabled - just exit
 exit
fi

Why it does not work and what precisely it needs, I have no idea and no desire to chase the error. Some Perl module or a plugin may be missing. Anyway, since Bayesian is enabled, I simply commented out the above lines in the /usr/sbin/amavisd-new-cronjob file and left it at that.

If you know how to fix it – let me know, please.… -->

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Moving email from one IMAP server to another

Ah, the power of tools! What do you do when you want to move lots and lots of email between two IMAP servers? Sure, you could open them both in Thunderbird and drag-and-drop messages. It would simply take forever and you would be transmitting messages first to your computer and then back to another server. And Thunderbird has a bad habit of timing out. There is a better way.

Login to the server (or you can do it actually from client if transferring back and force is okay). Get mutt. Then open the source mailbox like this:

mutt -f imaps://albert%40example.com@imap.gmail.com/%5BGmail%5D/All%20Mail

and wait for mutt to load the headers of the email. Once it is ready, select all messages by pressing T and entering ~A. Save the messages to your target server by pressing ;s (if you want to move the mail) or ;C (if you want a copy) and giving the destination IMAP server:

imaps://albert%40example.com@mail.example.com/INBOX

And watch the magic of UNIX tools unfold :)… -->

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The Wolf of Wall Street – I wish for censorship

Suddenly got around to watching “The Wolf of Wall Street” a couple of days ago. This junk comes highly recommended and received both good reviews and viewers’ ratings. What a disappointment! I could not make myself to finish watching it.

Is this our new hero? A drug addict, with the motto “you can do whatever you want if you have enough money”? Spare me the story of the movie, I know. Movies serve to educate and lead us to the higher ideals. What are the ideals here? That bankers and brokers are really cool? That raking in money for doing a disservice to people is the new kind of Robin Hood chivalry? The movie is not just useless, it is poisonous to the society. This is the kind of movie that makes one wish for censorship.

I think “a glass of warm spit with a hair floating” is the best fitting description for this film. I am sorry I even watched the half I did.… -->

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ECC memory – what’s the deal?

I remember back in the nineties we were all trying to get the ECC memory for the computers we built. The ECC memory was expensive and we all discussed whether a particular configuration would justify the expense of ECC memory or might just survive without. The amounts of memory at the time were measured in megabytes, not gigabytes, like now. So we all thought that some time in the future, in five years or so, the ECC memory will cost the same as the non-ECC memory and all computers will finally come equipped with ECC memory by default, because the amounts of memory would simply require the use of error correction.

What is ECC memory?
Error-correcting code memory – Error Checking & Correction, ECC – is a type of computer memory that detects and corrects the most common data corruption as the data is passed in and out of the memory. ECC memory has additional memory banks that store checksums of data stored in the memory.

At the time, the calculations showed that with the “typical” desktop the error rate in the memory would be sufficiently low and not present a danger. However, the amount of memory in a typical computer has increased by several orders of magnitude since then. Only while we talked about a few hundred megabytes of memory the errors were negligible. Once you step over the gigabyte threshold, memory errors become a statistical reality. Without the ECC memory, we accumulate errors in our data and algorithms every single day.

It is surprising that with the current state of technology we are not using ECC memory everywhere, just as I thought back in the nineties we would. At least, for your own good, do get ECC memory on the computers you use.… -->

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Ego is a tool … and we are all insane …

What is “ego”? The part that thinks of itself as “I”? Ego is basically a tool for existing in this world. Ego is the tool that we create in order to perceive a coherent world and be able to communicate about it with others, who have developed the same tool, in a coherent manner. It is a perception and communication tool.

Now, why do we associate with it? Or, rather, why do we allow ego to take over and associate itself with the totality of our being? This is the same as if I made a hammer, held it up and say “I am hammer!” and the other hammer next to me would go “Hey, nice to meet you! I am a hammer too!” People who associate themselves with various objects and tools usually end up you-know-where for being incoherent with our common agreement that we must associate ourselves with a single universal tool – the ego. The situation is insane. Well, it is perfectly sane from the point of view of the hammer ego but it is insane from the point of view of the human being.

We develop a very complicated and beautiful tool, it is a wonder that allows us to talk about this world, have conversations through other tools of the same kind, enjoy all sorts of things and suffer enormously from the hole deep down that keeps reminding us that we are not the tool. Yes, the tool is wonderful, but it remains a tool. No matter how beautiful the tool is we should be able to put it aside at will. Now that we made the tool, the task is to unlearn it, to make us able to put it down and pick it up when necessary.

Now, how does one disassociate oneself from one’s ego?… -->

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The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

I finally got around to watching the “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty“. This is a great movie and it resonated strongly with my thoughts and feelings. I am putting it up there together with “Interstate 60” for the thought-provoking, ego-crushing, soul-searching value. The movie plot takes several interesting and unexpected turns. The life converges from a total disparity between imagination and reality to the unison of the soul and the world. Oh, and what they say about the landscapes is completely true: breathtaking. Definitely worth watching.

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The three pillars of self-importance

The human drama originates in our deep seated conflict between our perception of being the center of the world and the oh-not-so-obvious realization that we are basically nothing. Each human being considers himself to be the most important thing in the world, the center of the universe. Of course, the universe exists within the eye of the beholder, so it is natural to feel that way. If only it was not for our nearly subconscious feeling that we are all, well, less than grains of sand on the shores of time, that we are so inconsequential as to be non-existent for all practical reasons. The conflict between these two leads us to create the three pillars that support our life drama and reinforce our feeling of importance:

  • Perception of wrongness tells us that there is something wrong with the world. Somehow we feel that we are qualified to judge how the world is wrong and what has to be done with it to make it all right.
  • Illusion of separateness deceives us into thinking that we are separate from everything around us, that we somehow can act on that system outside of us and retain our own wholeness.
  • Certainty of free will causes us to swell with self-importance and indulge in our little plays of life while postponing and ignoring the big questions that matter.

If we were but to strike down these three pillars, we would see that there is not really anything left to us. Those three synthetic concepts keep us all righteous and important, protecting us from the world, making sure we cannot see the truth that lies beyond.
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“Democracy” at work – Scotland’s independence referendum

The people of Scotland voted in a referendum to end Britain’s rule on 18 September 2014… The official result of the referendum is negative, saying that the majority of people voted to stay under the British rule. The event demonstrated clearly that the so-called democracy is just a never-ending farce that has nothing to do with people’s will or interests.

The referendum had a very large turnout – according to official data 85% of people came out to vote. What does that tell us? It tells us that the question of Scotland’s independence was taken to heart and people became politically active. We know that the population usually becomes politically active when they wish to influence the government to make changes and they recognize an opportunity. The population remains largely passive when it finds the status quo agreeable or sees no chance of influencing the situation. The large turnout indicates the rather strong desire of change in the masses although the official result states the opposite.

Note that the preliminary polls, widely publicized by sources like BBC, Bloomberg and others, indicated that the referendum results will be negative with 52 % of population against the independence of Scotland. Under this premise, why would a large part of population suddenly become active? If they wanted to keep the status quo, all they had to do was to stay at home in front of the TV. There is only one explanation: the population became active precisely because they wanted to demonstrate their disagreement with the preliminary results. They all went out and voted because they wanted change and they noted that the change is close, they only need a couple percent to sway the balance. That is the kind of incentive that activates the electorate and causes large turnout: a desire for change and the impression that a single vote may decide the future of the country.

My guess is that the CNN accidentally published partially correct numbers when they announced the preliminary results where the Yes vote achieved 58%. That would be perfectly logical under the circumstances: the preliminary polls show 52% against (that’s what they put on the first line) and the final result was closer to the 58% in favor due to the high turnout of the population activated by the circumstances. I think, Scotland voted positively on their independence but… -->

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