OK, it’s experimental, but I’ve set up an htdig search engine that searches Vedabase.net. You can check it out here. At the moment the index is updating, so don’t be surprised if you get zero results for a while. (Update: Saturday 30th October 2 pm - The robot has crawled over the site and the machine is now building the index. Please be patient.)

My goal is to make the online vedabase as useful as the folio one. At the moment, even with my Firefox Google search bar you can’t get anywhere near the goodness you get with a folio search. Let’s see if some tuning on a htdig engine can get it any closer.

Here is a little something I whipped up today. It’s a plugin for Firefox that adds a search engine for Vedabase.net. With this plugin installed you can search all of Srila Prabhupada’s books from your Firefox browser. Enjoylo =) You need to restart Firefox after you install it to get access to it.

Make sure that Firefox’s searchplugin directory is writable by the user who is running Firefox if you find that the engine doesn’t install.

If someone has a better icon for it, drop me a line. Right now it’s using a 32×32 b&w icon. It should really be a 16×16, but when I resize this one it doesn’t look so good, and I’m useless with graphics.

Here is where I read about how to write the search plugin. I also read this entry on Jon Udell’s blog, which is where I got the one click java install method from.

A Google search is not as good as an folio infobase search… hmmm…. I wonder if I indexed it with htdig could I get better searching…

Miles Heyden is on a mission to spread Krishna consciousness around the University and the city in New Mexico. From the Daily Lobo.

This one is (ironic) funny: The British Royal Navy has officially recognised one of its members as a Satanist for religious purposes. His mother, a church going lady in her 50’s, says that her initial negative response to her son’s conversion was “due to ignorance”, and that after reading the 11 commandments of the Church of Satan, she’s convinced that it’s not so bad after all. She says: “”There is a rule saying you can be sexually promiscuous and enjoy life, but most people in today’s society do that anyway.”

Says something doesn’t it….. Read the article here

You may recall in an earlier article I contended that the US was a nation of fat people, based on the “medium” sized tshirt that I ordered from there. Well, now it’s official. According to this article on CNN: CNN.com - Report: Americans growing taller and wider - Oct 27, 2004, the average Body Mass Index of an American is 28. Anything above 25 is considered overweight.

Canakya Pandit says: “There are is not enough gold, grains, or women in the world to satisfy the desires of even one man with uncontrolled senses.”

Well, there isn’t one yet, but I came across a comparison of the official positions of different major denominations, and this one looks like the best fit to me:

Lutheran (ELCA)

• Worshipers: Welcome to participate fully.

• Pastors: Requires all nonmarried ministers, regardless of sexual orientation, to be celibate.

• Same-sex unions: Has not taken a position on the blessing of same-sex committed relationships.

On the one hand it’s inclusive, and at the same time it manages to nicely sidestep the really thorny issues. Actually, I think it’s a work of brilliance, especially when you compare it with the other positions. It doesn’t condemn anyone or anything, either explicitly or implicitly, but it doesn’t let down any standards either.

Read the comparison here.

Lately I haven’t been posting very much. I have been working on a few different things.
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From this article about a recent panel of technologists who spoke about overhyped and underhyped technological advances in the present to near-future:

“Kinghorn also hailed unglamorous albeit useful advances. The ability to define and encapsulate best practices in a repeatable way to improve business processes will be big, he suggested. These efforts, he said, will bring real dollars to a company’s bottom line.”

This is hardly a technological advance in the sense of gadgets. It’s more an understanding of what makes systems work. Reproducibility, scalability, stability, consistency. These are all factors that contribute to making a working system with competitive advantage. Two great empires spring to mind, the Roman Empire of the Mediterranean, and the Inca Empire of South America. The principle contributions of both were standardized systems that enabled reproducible behaviour. Henry Ford’s assembly line was another more technologically-oriented example.

Doing things in a way that is reproducible adds value to the organization in a way that individual success does not. On the other side of the coin, it also contributes to individual success. As Zig Ziglar says: “The way to get whatever you want in life is to help enough people to get what they want”, a principle also demonstrated by the Godfather.

It’s also the basis of the old saying: “Give a man some corn and feed him for a day, teach him how to grow corn, and feed him for life”.

Building roads is a good example. Both the Roman and Inca civilizations were built on a network of roads that interconnected the nodes of the empire. If we work at building roads as we go forward then our own individual forward progress may be slower, but others will more easily follow us. The overall effect will be greater.

Of course “trail blazers” also have value in scouting out possible directions and providing inspiration, proof of the possible, and a challenge to comfortable inertia.

The Queensland, Australia RSPCA is running a campaign that causally connects violence toward animals with domestic abuse. It is the result of a study by Dr Frank Ascione which links the two.

While it’s encouraging that they are finally understanding these things and raising consciousness of these important issues, isn’t it funny how no-one seems to see any connection between the widespread violence killing tens of thousands of people all over the globe today, and modern societies’ mechanized and systematic slaughter of animals? What did they have for dinner last night at the RSPCA?

The other day I went to see Richard Stallman, of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project. For those who don’t what the GNU Project is, it is a 20 year old project to develop a free operating system: GNU. These days most people know of it as “Linux”, after the kernel that it currently runs on. For those who don’t know what Linux is, never mind.

Stallman is known as the “Father of Free Software” (That’s free as in “freedom”, not free as in “gratis”). He is the author of the GPL, the General Public License, also known as “copyleft”. In contrast to most licenses, which typically involve various restrictions on the end users’ rights to use, modify and redistribute, the GPL explicits grants and encourages use, modification and redistribution, and forbids limiting these freedoms, which Stallman sees as inalienable and fundamental rights.

The result is a system in which rapid innovation takes place, as evidenced by the growing success and community that surrounds the GNU/Linux Operating System. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft called the GPL “a cancer” because it asserts that any derived work based on a GPL licensed work must also be licensed under the GPL. The effect is to spread freedom, liberating software code from restrictive licensing that allow companies and individuals to monopolize and exploit software for profit.
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In a previous article I discussed some Vedic perspectives on property ownership and specifically intellectual property ownership. To summarize: “All property is theft”, as Rik Mayall would say. We are born with nothing, and we leave with the same. In the meantime we have access to resources whose creation we played no role in, and yet somehow we develop complex legal and ethical systems to justify exploiting these resources and denying access to them by others. Witness this ridiculous patent to see just how bad things are getting.

Patents go one step beyond copyright. I copyright my CD, so that you cannot make unauthorized copies without my permission, and without paying me if I so demand. I patent the CD and you cannot make a CD, or anything like a CD without my permission.

It’s ridiculous really. Any invention (which is really a discovery, or something re-creative or re-combinative, rather than something really creative), is the product of the human brain, which one cannot claim authorship of. Therefore any invention is a derived work. So even within the Western model, any rights to copyright or patent should belong to the original author or inventor of the human brain, taking us right back to the Sri Isopanishad’s original assertion: “Everything animate or inanimate that is within the universe is controlled and owned by the Lord. One should therefore accept only those things necessary for himself, which are set aside as his quota, and one should not accept other things, knowing well to whom they belong.”

The modern Western approach to property and ownership is not the only one. In many cases where Europeans have encountered other cultures they have supplanted traditional understandings of property and ownership with their own. Many traditional cultures see themselves not as the owners of the land, but as the servants. The land was here before they were born, and it will be there after they leave. Therefore their role is one of stewardship.

Modern Western “civilization” continues to slide further and further into a pathologically dysfunctional state, neurotic and riddled with social cancers, and the concept of patent ownership, most recently being applied to software and genetics, is yet another symptom of this descent.

Updates to my blog will be sporadic for a while. At the moment I am having to rationalize my time quite heavily, and updating this blog is one of the casualties. I am working a little bit on the ezine project, a little bit on the final section of the study guide for the Science of Self Realization, and using a lot of energy at work at the moment. We are waiting for some other engineers to start work in our department, and in the meantime a few of us are covering the whole load. It’s not a whole lot of work, but the hours are really odd and the lack of regulation is taxing.

I estimate the current situation to last for one month. In the meantime, read the beta edition of the ezine for your entertainment and edification, and even sign up to receive it in your email inbox in HTML or Plaintext format. Send feedback and help the development effort.

Just one cup of coffee a day is enough to cause addition, according to this report quoting researchers at John Hopkins University.