I just found an awesome blog here that features the letters that Srila Prabhupada, founder of the Hare Krishna movement, wrote in the 60s and 70s, that features each day a letter written on that day (following the Western solar calendar). The Atom feed seems to be broken. I have written to the maintainer to see if they can set a feed up.

Firefox have reached their stated goal of one million downloads in 10 days - with six days still to go. Way to go guys! Firefox is open source, free software. It’s technically superior to Internet Explorer in terms of memory usage, ease of use, aesthetic appearance, stability, security, compliance with open standards, cross platform compatibility, and so many other factors. Anyway, I use it and I recommend it to everyone.

Before I begin, just let me say that some of my best friends are gay… no, not even I would dare. Let me say that some of my best friends, including my wife, are married. My son’s parents are married. Many of my workmates at Red Hat and many of my associates in the Hare Krishna movement are married. In fact, I’m married! Yes, you guessed it - we’re about to say something more about same-sex marriage.

I’ve been thinking lately about the controversy within the Hare Krishna movement on this topic, and wondering why some people within the movement consider me to be a left-leaning liberal, while others harangue me for being a fundamentalist. My tongue-in-cheek harmonization of this is that those who consider me a leftist liberal are themselves liberals in disguise, and merely try to recast my ultra-right wing ideology as liberalism in order to avoid having to adopt it themselves.
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One of my projects has reached a milestone today. That is the WSN Ezine project, and the milestone is public beta. You can read about the project and participate in the beta test here.

Before I get started, just let me say that some of my best friends, including my wife, are Americans. My son Prahlad is an American citizen by descent. Many of my work mates at Red Hat and many of my associates in the Hare Krishna movement are Americans and I have a lot of respect for them. Yes, you guessed it - we’re about to go American-bashing.

I know it’s easy to do, and perhaps it’s already been done to death, but I’ve got a bee in my bonnet and it just won’t stop buzzing. You see, it all started like this….
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“I am never lost to one who sees Me in all things and sees all things in Me, nor is he ever lost to Me”…

Yesterday I started a split shift at Red Hat Asia Pacific where I work. We cover the phone calls from North America’s 6pm-9pm, which is 8am-11am local time in Brisbane Australia, and then we handle overflow from the EMEA (Europe Middle East Asia) region in their 9am-11am timeframe, which is our 6pm-9pm. The glories of globalization.

When I say I started a split shift, I was supposed to start a split shift. What actually happened was a different story. Rewind to the day before. I am talking with my coworker Wade: “Dude, the EMEA rollover is not going to happen tomorrow”. “Why not?” “Well you see, there is a big festival on at the temple, so I have been praying to Krishna that it won’t happen.” “What? It is soooo going to happen. You can pray to whatever little Deity you like, but the EMEA rollover is happening!” “It’s not happening man. Forget it. It is off.”
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In other news, while there have been delays due to technical difficulties, there have also been advances.

In the last few days I have had to break out some programming for the first time in about seven years. The last programming I did was Delphi, which is Object-Oriented Pascal, and MS-SQL. It was a little difficult at first, but the programming-fu is definitely still there. I busted out a perl script to automatically mail out the ezine that I have working out. I also had to learn a few things about css (Cascading style sheets) and php (Pre-HTML Processor) in order to hack some wordpress sites.

If you are interested, you can see the online edition of the beta test of the ezine here. It will be changing drastically in the next few months. To receive the email edition (which has different formatting and localized content, and will also be evolving in the next few months), click here.

One thing I’ll be doing is diving into the python code that is used to generate the ezine in order to add greater control over category separation. I’ll contribute all the changes I make to the original code base.

I also updated the main Spiritual Achievers Club site, as well as the Brisbane one.

I gave a class on Romance, Relationships, and Krishna Consciousness. The class handout is available from here, and I also completed the study guide for another chapter of Science of Self Realization, which you can download from here.

That’s about all the news that’s fit to print at the moment….

Slight delays on the second installment of the present series. “When Observation and Scripture collide”. I lost a few files, including my rpm database when my testing version of Fedora came a cropper. I was running Logical Volume Management on top of a RAID 0 (striped) disk array, and things got a busy on the bus when I tried to burn a DVD.

Logical Volume Management (LVM) is cool because you can dynamically resize partitions, and even span partitions across physical disks, allowing you a lot more flexibility for reconfiguring your system as your needs change. The other way cool thing with LVM is that you can take a “snapshot” of a partition at a certain point in time and use that to make a backup. This is useful for obtaining consistent backups of systems in production, especially databases, such as the World Sankirtan.Net servers, which is where my interest lies.

The RAID 0 thing is just about raw speed. The hard disk is the slowest component in the computer. While everything else is all about electrons - the hard disk is about motors, heads, and magnetic platters. By using two hard disks and “striping” the data across them, one disk is seeking while the other reading. Voila, less time spent waiting for the hard disk to get back to us.

Fedora Linux supports both LVM and RAID 0 in the kernel. I not sure what’s going on with my system yet, but I can’t read DVDs without crashing the system or burn CDs or DVDs reliably. I de-LVM and de-RAIDed the system and am opting for stability (which right now also means no DVD or CD/DVD burning).

The next step, once things stabilize a little for me with the Fedora test, is to do RAID 0+1 with XFS. The guys at work tell me that the XFS filesystem is noticably faster than ext3, although it doesn’t have as robust error recovery. RAID 0+1 means striping and mirroring. It’s gives RAID 0 performance for reads, and is slightly slower than normal for writes.

I’ll be rewriting the second installment of the series before I go doing any other changes to my system, don’t worry about that. Expect it in the next few days.

In the previous article I talked about transient sense perception. The Vedic idea of transient sense perception is that one life you are a human and see certain things a certain way, then your human body dies and you take birth in the body of a dog, or whatever, and see and hear different things in a different way. Or maybe one life you are a Republican, and then you’re born a Democrat. Whatever. Anyway, the modern standard of transient sense perception is given in the following statement by Kylie: “On a night like this, I wanna stay forever… I feel like I’ve known you forever”. Now that’s really transient sense perception.

Vedically a person who considers this body and this life to be the all in all is considered to be like a cow or an ass. What to speak of a person who considers one night of one week of one year of one lifetime among millions to be the all in all.

Not that I think that Kylie is like a cow or an ass. Y’all know I got a lotta love for Australia’s most famous daughter - it just that I really do think that she would have better luck keeping a man if she got more into the Vedas.

This is the photos of Janmastami page. It weighs around 1MB so be warned if you are on dial up. You can read my Janmastami report on this page. Click on more to begin.
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Lately I’ve been discussing with friends the role and relationship between Observation, Reason and Scripture. I’ve written a piece about it, and I’ll post it in parts. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to examine various scriptural controversies, such as the fact that there are no dinosaurs in the Bible and that the Vedas say the Moon is further away than the Sun. If you have any others that you wish me to consider, please email them to me.

At one end of the spectrum are those who find any use of reason highly suspect and flat-out reject any observations that seem to contradict their scripturally-based version of reality. The Church officials who refused to look through Gallileo’s telescope are an example of this breed. On the other end of the spectrum are mundane intellectuals who want to subject everything to their rigorous “scientific method”, and end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater, finding that scripture becomes increasingly irrelevant to their academically driven quest for understanding.
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I had an interesting conversation with a young, scientifically-minded lad the other day. We were sitting in Govinda’s vegetarian restaurant in downtown Brisbane over a couple of plates of spicy pakoras, rice and dhal, and he was sharing his realization with me.

“I was working with electricity, making circuits and things, and I saw how the electricity could be manifested through different circuits in the form of heat, as light, as sound, or as movement, and then I realized that actually all those things had to be the same thing at some fundamental level.”
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Critical praise for the Virtual Pen of Sita-pati das: “refreshingly unhippie-ish in its leftness. He is able to express his beliefs and views without being too attached to some leftist ideology that should be your point of view if it isn’t. It is rare to run across a liberal writer who doesn’t feel compelled, with every word he or she writes, to cram some liberal orthodoxy down the throats of everyone from the moderates on over to us conservatives.”

Now, that’s high praise indeed, and very generous, coming as it does from someone whose blog I described here as “an extreme right wing rag”.

Check out the whole article here.

We had a network outage at World Sankirtan.Net over the last night due to router problems. We’re in good company - Aniruddha is reporting similar, although unrelated to our, problems over at his site. This morning I had to reconfigure the WSN server to operate with a new IP address, which means a whole lot of pain - editing DNS entries, changing routing tables and interface bindings, and general mayhem.

On top of that at work we are dealing with the inevitable teething problems of the new Update 3 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which came out a few days ago. Software is complicated and there are many, many interoperating components. I spent last night configuring a friend’s new laptop and PDA to work with his wireless network, shared printer, and shared email with his secretary. With every feature that you add, you clock up more complexity, and thus introduce more possibilities for failure. That’s why military equipment tends to the basic and robust. It just has to work. I always remember the nursery rhyme we sang as kids:
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(This is my offering to Srila Prabhupada on the occasion of the 108th anniversary of his appearance. You can read other offerings here in the official Vyasa-puja book)

Dearest Srila Prabhupada

Please accept my obeisances, unworthy though they are, offered with whatever humility this puffed up fool can muster.

All glories to you! All glories to you! All glories to you!

May you be glorified throughout the three worlds. May missionary preachers of Krishna Consciousness spread your uncommon glories through every town and village, through the entire universe, including to the subterranean heavenly planets where otherwise there is no krishna-katha.

The sun of your physical presence has set. Sometimes it feels as though night has fallen, and above our heads in the firmament one by one the stars are going out, leaving us alone in the night of separation; but your Bhaktivedanta purports shine as brilliant as the risen sun, dispelling all the darkness and lethargy born of ignorance, if only we come out from the darkness of our day-to-day life of pressing illusory engagements and take the time to bathe ourselves in them.
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1 am: Checkpoint. I slept in an hour more than I had wanted to, but I let my body manage my wake up time so I must have needed it. Last night I took rest at 9 pm. I would have rather have done it at 6pm or 7pm but I ended up at a friend’s house fixing their wireless connection in the evening. Janmastami requires a lot of preparation, and I kind of blew it there. I drank a cup of water before taking rest, but I’m still a bit dehydrated. My arm is sore as well, nervous tension? It’s my arm with my watch on it, so maybe I was worried about not getting up in time.

It’s amazing what a cold shower will do to change your perspective on life. From the warm fuzziness of post-sleep to the crystal clear sharp consciousness of alert wakefulness in under 30 seconds, or your money back.
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Today is the anniversary day of the appearance of the Supreme Personality of Godhead in this material world in the form of Sri Krishna. Devotees all over the world spend the day fasting and engaged in devotional activities - so we’ll also be doing that.

Tonight my new band will be playing at the temple. MC K-OS is on the backburner at the moment, and “The Funk All-Stars Kirtan Band” is the order of the day. We did our first gig on Sunday night at Govindas. A more comprehensive report will be filed in the next few days, along with photos.

Tomorrow is the appearance day of Srila Prabhupada, the founder of the Hare Krishna movement. I wrote an offering for him, and I will post it tomorrow.

In the meantime, here is something that arrived by mail this morning…
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This is a little long, but I have been thinking about how to present my thinking on this matter coherently for the last few days, and it’s a complicated matter. I’ve paged it to make it a little easier going. There are 9 (short) pages, so be sure to read ‘em all before hitting the send button. I spent quite some time thinking about and preparing this, so please do the same before sending me comments. I appreciate thoughtfulness. Although there is an argument for same-sex marriage here, it is more a consideration of the subject than any kind of advocacy. Let me reiterate my mantra: “I do think that a culture of committed, responsible relationships is far more favourable to spiritual advancement than promiscuity, of any type”. Please read that statement twice and think about what I am saying there. OK, that’s my rhetorical slogan (wouldn’t it be so more punchy if it was something like “No Gay Marriage in ISKCON!”?) - now let’s have some intelligent consideration of the matter at hand. Casting our thoughts back to the earlier piece about the relative nature of vice and virtue, let us examine the idea of marriage. What is it and what is it for?

For anyone out there with mad css skillz, World Sankirtan.Net needs designer(s) to help with design. At the moment BB Govinda Swami, Braja Bihari das, Indradyumna Swami, and Jayagovinda das are still waiting on design updates to their blogs. Bhakticandrika in Perú is helping out with some design, but she is swamped with work and still getting to grips with css.

Personally I’m more of a technical guy than a designer. It’s a good opportunity to do some service for these senior devotees. Drop me a line if you can help.

Great Rappers of the Vedas Part Two - Freestyle MC battles of the Later Vedic Age

As promised, Part Two. As you will remember from Part One in the series, we ended by discussing the general mood and use of rap in the earlier Vedic Age. Well, in the later Vedic Age, extending into recent history, and even the present, the mood began to change. The original mellow tunes were replaced by vigorous one-on-one battles between Vedic MCs, each one trying to establish themselves as the golden mic controller.

Vedic rap has always been about two things: style and substance. The topic of modern freestyle battles revolves principally around glorifying the MC and denigrating his opponent. Contests are judged on style and to a limited degree substance, in the sense that the topic doesn’t get much wider than this. In Vedic freestyle battles however the substance can be many different things, and there are very strict rules for style that are observed. I will give two examples today to illustrate this point.
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