From the Sita-pati Correspondence Files.

From September last year (09/2005):

One devotee that I wrote to about using cellphones to preach dismissed the idea, saying that he didn’t own a cellphone, and never would. I also don’t own a cellphone - I believe that history will cast cellphones in the same light as cigarettes. Currently cellphone manufacturers market heavily to pre-adolescent children, even though the government in the UK has warned that growing children should not be exposed to use of cellphones except in urgent situations.
….
Anyway, back to the original point I was trying to make: there is a tension between “simple living, high thinking” and the yukta-vairagya principle.

Since people are using cellphones, we have to leverage this in our preaching. If people are walking around with them on them all the time and receiving information through them, we should try to provide some Krishna Conscious information. At the same time we have to be careful not to deviate too far from our core mission and get involved in an over endeavour.

From March last year (03/2005):

It is still early, but I believe that this is our ideal target for reaching people. Forget waiting for people to go to an Internet cafe to check their mail - we will deliver our content directly to their person.

In the future the devices will have bigger screens and we can deliver a nice flyer.

Something else that could be good would be to capitalize on the “Gauranga” campaign in Scotland. It has one of the highest “buzz factors” on the Net, amongst outsiders, of all our programs.

How about a “Gauranga ringtone”?

That’s just an idle speculation - right now we are not positioned to act on this. We don’t have the capability to project force onto this platform. In terms of developing our force projection capability, I think this is a good direction to keep in mind.

The main point I think is that we just need to be conscious that this appears to be the way things are headed, and to keep looking for opportunities to develop the skills / grab people with the skills / think of practical strategies to take advantage of it as we move into the future.

At the moment the publicity for Mission Impossible III involves modified bus shelters with an infrared transmitter that will download a ringtone and wallpaper to your cellphone for free.

I still firmly believe that beaming a Sunday Feast / Atma Yoga flyer into people’s cellphones is the way forward.

I’ll get a photo of the bus shelter so that you can check it out. I saw another ad for Absolut Vodka with Lenny Kravitz on it, and you plugged your earphones in to one of two headphone jacks on the bus shelter and got to listen to an exclusive track that he recorded for the campaign. Just about blew my ear drums out. There was no volume control.

Gobby - collaborative editing over a network for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s useful for meetings and brainstorming sessions - bring your laptops, use a wireless network, and edit the same document in real time. It frees up one person from taking all the notes. It’s like SubEthaEdit for the Mac, which Candidasa recently mentioned, only it’s cross platform, and is free.

Lightbox JS 2 is out. There is a Wordpress plugin for it available also. Lightbox JS is the method that I use for displaying photos without opening a new window. Give me a minute to put together a post using the Lightbox JS 2 plugin to show you how it works.

In 1998 I purchased a Sony MZ-R50 minidisc rather than buying an MP3 player, as the minidisc allowed me to record 74 minutes in stereo or a whopping 148 minutes in mono on a single disc, which cost around $10, which was a capacity way beyond any MP3 player of comparable pricing at the time. At the end of 2005, however, MP3 player technology has reached a stage of maturity where it has become commonplace and has largely supplanted previous forms such as the ubiquitous tape walkman, the CD discman, and less common minidisc. Devotees no longer swap tapes, they swap files and folders.

Here’s a redux of various MP3 player brands and technologies that I am familiar with, along with my experiences and analysis.

Let me mention a few factors that you can use in comparing players:

• Features - here is a feature list that I consider necessary: built-in microphone, line-encoding (for ripping to mp3 from a mixing desk or walkman), support for ogg (free format).
• Hard Disk or Flash-based. Hard Disk has more storage space, but is bigger and bulkier. Flash is smaller and more energy efficient, but has less storage space.
• Battery life. The longer the better, obviously. Built-in Lithium-ion or Lithium polymer batteries are cheaper and more convenient as you don’t have to keep buying batteries or carrying around a recharger. The disadvantage is that when they go flat right before a class you can’t put in a spare one.
• Connector - a built-in USB connector is great. A USB cable that you have to lug around is not so good. An adaptor to plug into the unit to connect a separate cable to is a nightmare.
• Size and weight. If you are going to be carrying this thing around with you to listen to music and lectures on, the smaller and lighter the better. The trade-off can sometimes be durability, or features (including storage space).
• Obviously price - and you should do a calculation of the features per price, but remember - whatever you spend is completely wasted if the thing ends up as a paperweight because it doesn’t do what you need, and don’t be fooled by a “cheap” price that actually includes your time spent dealing with its foibles.

Let’s start with the most popular and highest profile mp3 player: the Apple iPod.

Apple iPod / iPod Nano / Photo iPod / Video iPod

Link

This unit sets the standard for design and cool. According to my Universal Principles of Design book, aesthetic design contributes to a sense of ease of use, and that’s definitely a factor with the Apple iPod. However, it has one area of weakness, and that is that it is a unit designed for consumers. The idea is that you buy songs from the iTunes online music store and download them to your iPod. The unit has no built-in production, that is to say recording, capability. For devotees, who are interested in recording classes, conversations, and kirtans for later review and distribution, it’s a critical area of weakness.

You can get a third party add-on from Belkin to enable the iPod to record. However, the strengths of the iPod and its focus do not lie in this area, which is a pretty crucial area for devotees, who are not catered to by the existing system of content creation and distribution that the iPod is designed as an integral part of.

Personally I would view the iPod as incompatible with the standard devotee lifestyle for this reason. It’s strengths lie in areas that are irrelevant or even detrimental to devotee lifestyle, and in areas where the need is greatest - in recording new content to supplant the current cultural output - it is sadly deficient.

That’s not to say that don’t think it’s a cool device with a great design - for what it is.

iRiver H-series

Link

This machine seems to be the devotee workhorse. The H-120 and H-140, with 20GB and 40GB hard drives respectively, were the first generation of player / recorders. The H-340, with a color LCD, is the current model. This machine is solid engineering - of sturdy construction, well built, with a well designed interface, good feature set, and good post-release support.

The H-120/140 has optical in and out (not that you ever use it, but it’s practically unique in the market space for this feature). Optical in/out allows pure digital transfer to and from machines such as hard disk multi track recording systems, minidisc decks, DAT units, and other high-end audio equipment. Not much use for anyone except those who are doing specific high end stuff using old gear that doesn’t support USB transfer of digital data. I’m not sure if the H320/340 still has this - but you can live without it. However, it demonstrates the engineering of this unit.

I skipped over this unit, even though others around me bought it, for a couple of reasons. One is the size of the unit. It’s feature packed and solid, but also chunky. It will definitely last a long time. Looking back, if I had to make the decision again, I might make it differently, but maybe not. Carrying that thing around in my pocket for the last year would have been a trip.

This thing has what you need - built-in microphone for “voice recording” (read classes, kirtans, etc…), line-in encoding, which you use to hook the unit up to a mixing desk or stereo output to capture classes or convert old tapes / records to mp3. It also handles a variety of formats - mp3, wma (yuck!), and the awesome, free format ogg.

The H-140 has a battery life of around 12 hours. For a general hard disk based solution this is a good one, when you think about it from a recording perspective. From a playback perspective, the unit is quite big and heavy, relatively speaking.

All in all, however, for most people this is a good choice. The engineering is excellent and the unit will stand up to some serious bashing. The post-release support is excellent as well, something that I did not factor in when making my original mp3 player purchase.

After the player is released, iRiver continue to develop the firmware for it, and release new functionality. After the H-120/140 was released, for example, support was added for ogg and also for deleting files on the player itself. Other mp3 player manufacturers do not continue to develop new functionality, restricting themselves to fixing bugs - for a while. After all, they don’t make more money by putting resources into a unit that you already paid for. iRiver’s commitment to developing the unit even after it has been sold is a major plus.

Recently I got my hands on a new H10 - a 5GB hard disk unit with a color LCD. It is smaller and more portable, and promises a 16 hour battery life. It looks good - the start up time is much faster than the H-140, which is important when you have to start it up and start recording as fast as possible in order to not miss the first few sentences of a class, or the opening of a kirtan.

JNC SSF-M3

Link

This is the unit that I got instead of the iRiver H-120/140. It was at the time the world’s slimmest 20GB mp3 player. I have also seen the 40GB version, which is larger. Between 20GB and 40GB I don’t think you can really tell the difference. Unless you are using it to store DVDs or movie data, you can’t listen to everything on either a 20GB or 40GB player, so the extra weight and size of the 40GB one is not such a good tradeoff.

The main consideration for me in getting this one was the size (along with the necessity of supporting the free format ogg). You carry it around with you all the time, whether you are recording or not. And most of the time you are listening. So the smaller and lighter it is, the better.

It doesn’t have a screen on the unit, or even a full set of controls. It also doesn’t have a USB connector or line in on the unit. The screen is in the remote, as are the full set of controls, and the USB connection and line in are on a small adaptor or a base station that comes with the unit.

This is a strength and a weakness. If you lose or break the remote then the unit becomes essentially worthless. You have to carry around the adaptor to get access to all the functionality of the unit.

The main strength of this unit is the size. You can slip this thing in your pocket and forget about it. You can’t do that with an iRiver. The headache is in carrying around the adaptor as well as the cable.

The JNC doesn’t have the ability to delete files from the unit itself, needing to be connected to a computer to do this. JNC also don’t do much in the way of post-release engineering of the firmware.

iRiver T20

The iRiver T20 is an example of a flash-based mp3 player / recorder. Flash players have lower capacities than hard disk ones. If you have a laptop computer with a large hard drive you can often store your library there, and transfer files to and from your flash based player, rather than lugging around your entire library on a hard drive. After all, you can’t listen to 20 GB of mp3s at once.

The T20 has 1GB of storage and what I would consider a good mix of features, with iRiver’s solid engineering. It has a slide out USB connector, line-encoding, plays ogg, built-in microphone, good eq (including user definable), can delete files and folders from the player itself (doesn’t need to be connected to a computer) with the latest firmware. It’s very small and lightweight (about as big as a Bic lighter) and has up to 14 hour battery life.

iRiver do great engineering. They build things that are robust and very usable. Their units are solidly engineered, not at all flimsy or whimsical, and the feature set of their hardware and firmware is great.

Weaknesses: it needs Windows in order to upgrade the firmware (you have to use their software to do it - which doesn’t run on Mac or Linux), and also to order the tracks - they don’t play in alphabetical order on the device.

Compared with JNC’s 1GB SSF-5100 the T20 has a Lithium Polymer battery built-in (which recharges via USB) to the JNC’s AAA removable battery, 14 hours battery life ot the JNC’s 9, support for mp3, wma, and ogg to the JNC’s mp3 and wma, and iRiver’s proven post-release firmware support.

Sony

Link

Sony make some of the best engineered gear, with the smartest features. My MZ-R50 minidisc is still going strong almost 8 years later (the MZ-R50 is considered to be the best model they made). The Li-Ion battery is still going strong, and I use the built-in compressor and microphone preamp to go into the line-in on an mp3 recorder.

The Sony NW-HD5, for example, has a whopping 40 hour battery life on its Li-Ion powerpack.

However, I would not recommend buying Sony because of their corporate stance on consumer freedom - they don’t believe it. For example, later versions of the MZ series of minidiscs had USB transfer capability - but you could not transfer digitally from one MD recorder to your computer, and then to another MD recorder. The idea there is to stop people from “pirating” Sony’s proprietary copyrighted content, for example by putting Sony Artist X on your MD, then your computer, then a mate’s MD. What it does in effect is effect is stop you from recording a kirtan or class on your MD, and then digitally transferring to anyone else.

Forget it.

The NW-HD5 does not support the free format ogg. Sony uses a compression technology called ATRAC3, which is technologically brilliant - smaller filesizes than mp3, but completely controlled by Sony, and even more restrictive than mp3. They only allow it to be interacted with using their proprietary software interfaces. The recent scandal involving Sony copy-protected music discs installing root kits on Windows machines shows the ridiculously extreme restrictions on consumer freedoms that they like to impose. I don’t recommend buying Sony at all, in spite of their technical and engineering brilliance, for those reasons.

Less is More

Whether you opt for a small lightweight player / recorder with a few hundred megs of RAM, or a full-on multi-gigabyte hard disk player / recorder will depend on your usage, and also the other gear you have. One thing that I’ve noticed is that you can’t listen to everything on even a 20GB unit. I used to joke when comparing my 20GB with other devotees who had 40GB units - “40GB? Anything above 20GB is atyahara (overcollecting)!” While I was in Peru, Raivata lent me his 64MB Diva mp3 player. I could put only one kirtan from Harer Nama and one class at a time from the Contemporary Urban Preaching Seminars. I can play that kirtan verbatim on harmonium, accordion, and mrdanga, and I can give that seminar verbatim. That’s the power of concentration. With a 40GB unit you can have every recorded Prabhupada class in one place - but will you be able to listen to them?

Gone are the days of having one tape and playing it until it weared out. Now you can grab gigabytes of lectures and kirtans from other devotees, all in one hit.

Less is more. I’ve now gone backwards to a lower spec’d mp3 player - trading off storage space for size and speed (it’s flash based). It forces me to constantly make decisions about what will be on there, as there is simply not enough room to just keep putting all kinds of things on it. That’s a good thing.

A definite sign from Krishna that pure Open Source will form our technology platform (yes, my tongue is in my cheek when I say that, and yes, I am deadly serious ):

Our Sukanthi Radha devi dasi makes a guest appearance on sankirtan on the Linux Australia mailing list…

> I also see the two core events of LA being the conference, and Software
> Freedom Day. They are usually going to be ~6 months apart and encompass
> between them our technical and community roots and values. SFD also gives us
> a chance to get our values out to a broader audience, to recruit and
> continue to grow our community (this should be at the top of LUG minds atm,
> how to qualitatively grow their local communities), as well as help some
> people out who may not have heard of how FOSS can help them otherwise

While I have been sceptical of SFD (I’m currently sitting in a coffee

shop in Brisbane looking out the window at a nice - both looking and in
manner - Hare Krishna girl approaching people in the street. It’s a hard
gig and people are often very dismissive). I’ve always wondered what
makes us different from them given the seemingly low success rate.

ALC’s comments after the last SFD may be changing my mind a bit though.
It seemed that a lot of people were very receptive and just didn’t even
know of the existence of Free Software.

Reconciling this with the “Shouldn’t vendors be doing this” feeling is
an interesting one. As well as my rather intense distaste for preaching
and people trying to convert me to $whatever. I am interested in
discussing these things - it’s an interesting one.

I use the Hare Krishna example as they always seem polite (a lot of
other groups aren’t - e.g. somebody raving about how I was obviously
going to hell for leading a sinful life out of a loud megaphone. Got to
love Flinders St station at night). Shouting at people for not using
Free Software is obviously a no-no. It would certainly turn me off it.

How much advocacy should we be doing? it’s a tricky one. My thoughts are
full of contradictions - but I do encourage discussion and debate. I am
certainly not going to hinder or discourage enthusiasms though.
Facilitating enthusiasms is the name of the game!

I just came in to work this morning and encountered it in my inbox in the middle of a whole slew of Linux community related material.

The stringent laws of material nature that rule the living entities with an iron fist are malleable strings for playful tunes to the Supremely Artistic and Stylish Personality of Godhead, Sri Krishna.

I will not be so bold as to say that I have seen God, but I have seen signs along the way, and I am encouraged.

OpenOffice.org (OOo) is an open source free office suite for producing word processor documents, slide presentations, spreadsheets, and now with version 2.0, databases. You get the drift.

Here are the reasons why we should be using it:

1. It has no licensing fee for its use. Many people are using an unlicensed copy of proprietary office suites, i.e: one they haven’t paid to license.
   • This is definitely illegal, and is ethically questionable. It is better to use one that we are legally licensed to use.
   • Using illegal software exposes you to the risk of having your premises raided and hefty fines imposed. Especially if you are an organization, rather than just an individual, the consequences are grave.
   • Using a legally licensed office suite that has no licensing cost rightly situates you legally and ethically, and saves you money in doing so.
2. It uses open formats for its documents
   Openoffice.org fully supports the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, recently adopted by the Massachusetts State Government as their document storage format. Your data, when saved using proprietary formats such as the .doc and .ppt formats used by Microsoft, is stored in a secret format that is not legally accessible using anything other the proprietary software that created it.
   • With proprietary formats, although you generated the documents, you are not free to open them without paying a licensing fee to use the proprietary software. You have legally ceded control of that information to the proprietary software vendor, as you cannot legally access that information without paying to use their software - forever.
   • You force anyone else with whom you might wish to share the information to either a) pay to license the proprietary software in order to access the document, or b) use an illegal copy of the proprietary software to access the information. Presently OpenOffice.org can view, edit, and save documents created in Microsoft Office. However, this functionality has been reverse-engineered and cannot be guaranteed to always be present.
3. OpenOffice.org is available on more platforms than proprietary office suites.
   OpenOffice.org is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Microsoft Office is not available for Linux. Microsoft’s refusal to support the ODF (Open Document Format), claiming that “no customers want it” even though the State Government in Massachusetts has kicked out Microsoft Office from 80,000 machines because it doesn’t support it, and their refusal to a) provide Office for Linux, or b) allow their formats to be legally opened in Linux, are part of a strategy to limit people’s freedom of choice and maintain vendor lock-in at both the operating system and application level.

OpenOffice.org is technically equivalent to other proprietary office suites in terms of functionality for 95% of people who use it. Only very advanced users requiring highly specific functionality may find that it does not do exactly what they want. I have been using it since v.1.1 and it has done everything I need to do.

OpenOffice.org is free in terms of both cost, and in terms of free speech. I recommend that everyone download a copy and start to use it, and use the ODF formats for document interchange, rather than continuing to use proprietary office suites.

Thank you.

Flock - the “social web browser” - is the latest cutting edge of web browsing technology. It’s an open source derivative of the Mozilla browser, just as Firefox is, but with a lot more bling bling. The great thing about open source is that you can take whatever anyone else has done, and build something more on top of that.

There would be no commentaries of the acaryas if the scriptures were copyrighted. I chose the Creative Commons Licence for my literary output for this reason. Not because what I write is on the same level as the scriptures or the acaryas’ commentaries, but because that’s the Vedic culture - information is Free.

I’m posting this from the right-click blogging interface included in Flock. It has more RSS integration, support for social bookmarks (you share them via del.icio.us, which also means you can read them on different machines that have Flock on them), and I’d imagine more under the hood that I am yet to discover. Zero day warez. You heard it here first.

And on the “you heard it here first” thread, I can see the Krishna Linux distro that I blogged about a year ago becoming a reality too - things are definitely moving in that direction - slowly but surely. It won’t be 2006, but it will happen.

Kirtan on the radio within 5 years as well, remember.

I am also trying to enable Google Ads on the blog - so that I can start collecting revenue from click throughs and then retire to spend all my time blogging and watching the bucks roll in - not! =)

Actually I’m interested to get a feel for what Google considers to be relevant ads for my blog, both in the sense of understanding where Google is at, and where it thinks I’m at. So I will run it for a while to see what it does, and then probably turn it off (unless I find that people are interested enough to click through).

I’ve added a link to Blog Flux Mapstats on the left hand side. You may have noticed the Clustermaps world map on the Virtual Pen and ISKCON News.net. This BF Mapstat takes it a step further with integration with Google Maps.

Now I can drill down to your street and see a satellite photo of you in your house looking at the website - just kidding! BF Mapstats with Google Maps enables you to see where people are reading your blog from, down to the city level. You can get information about the hits, from the referrer URL to the browser.

Don’t worry, you are still anonymous when you read the Virtual Pen. Your IP may be logged, but you’re using a dynamic address anyway.

Param is resting up. I’ve been off work for the last three days, two days at the hospital, and today to help with Prahlad and to make sure that Param doesn’t need to go back to the hospital in a rush. Things seem to have stabilized.

Last night we had the inaugural meeting of LUG Vegas, a new Linux user group that a few of us have started here in Brisbane. Check out the website at www.lugvegas.org. I went along to give a 10 minute opening talk and to introduce the speaker, the Senior Director of Red Hat’s Global Support Services, Iain Gray.

Marty, my boss, told me not to go, but Param wanted me to, so I went. It went well. I didn’t get to record it, and I forgot to take along the free tshirts that I have in the office for community events such as this. Had a lot on my mind, you know.

I spoke about Elvis, LUG Vegas, and getting involved and making a contribution to open source. It went well, although my sermon preparation was disrupted by the events of the past few days, so it didn’t go as well as I would have liked… still, the peeps were happy, and that’s the main thing.

OK, so the wp-hashcash thing didn’t seem to work so well. I’ve changed the commenting system so that you have to create an account and login to comment. Sorry for the additional steps, and hopefully no-one will let it dissuade them. I’m just sick of wading through literally hundreds of emails each day of comment spam…

I just installed the wp-hashcash spam filter plugin. It’s a transparent challenge / response thing that uses javascript. The reason I installed it is because although you hardly ever see spam comments on the blog, I get hundreds of moderation messages each day in my email. I’d like that to stop, and wp-hashcash reckons it has a 100% efficiency, because bots don’t have javascript (yet).

Let’s see how long it remains effective. My recent test of it posted a comment, but left me at a blank page after I posted, so be warned.

Here’s how to get a Panasonic NV-DS60 video camera capturing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4).

1. Download a firewire enabled (unsupported) kernel from Centos.org. I got this 2.6.9-11 smp one for i686. Big ups guys and keep up the good work!
2. This didn’t work for me until I issued this command (big ups to google, every tech’s best friend): mknod -m 666 /dev/raw1394 c 171 0 [original thread]
3. Get dvgrab. I got it from Dag’s APT Repo. Props Dag!
4. Rock over to this site and pick up Cinelerra. You don’t need it for capturing, but that’s how you do your non-linear editing and rendering to a distribution format. Think Adobe Premiere.
5. Reboot to your CentOS kernel
6. Plug the camera into the Firewire port on your computer (you do have one right? If not, you just wasted any time you spent on the previous points)
7. Switch the camera on to VCR mode
8. Issue the command dvgrab –raw capturefile. This will start the camera and capture the video to the file capturefile.avi in the current directory. On my machine it would start a new, sequentially numbered file every 999MB which was slightly less than five minutes
9. Enjoy your 37173ness.

I had an article published in the latest Red Hat Magazine:

How do I enable a script to start and stop a service at different runlevels using chkconfig?

Scroll down the page, it’s the last one. That’s real exciting stuff for ya!

At the moment at work we are really busy. Two of our team are away on PTO - Cathy has gone back to the Phillipines to get married, and Athene has time off to spend with visiting friends from back home in Philly.

Meanwhile NA (North America) seems to be taking a hammering. I took two days off PTO for Janmastami, and I’ve been struggling to catch up ever since.

Theories as to the high workload include the high gas prices inducing people to stay at home / work and call us up, or blood pressures rising due to the gas prices and devastation in New Orleans and being taken out on vendors…

Anyway, that’s me at the moment. Snowed under at work.

I wrote an article for the Red Hat internal magazine that was published this month. Re-reading it now, it’s a little abstract. Anyway, there is one line in it that I am rethinking now, as the result of the last couple of days. Yesterday I spent most of my working day on conference calls with up to nine people from three different companies.

In the article I said:

We have to aggressively tackle customer issues, and build up the internal technical resources to successfully resolve them. “We will 0wn your problem” - courageous and accountable.

My realization now is that building up our own internal technical resources is not sufficient. In the market place we have to create a value cluster around a solution that will be delivered to the ultimate end-customer, and this means building strategic relationships with other providers of components of the solution. End users do not care about whose responsibility a particular component is. They want a solution that just works.

Enterprise computing platforms are extremely complex systems, composed of various high performance components from various providers. Customers do not buy components, they buy solutions. If it doesn’t solve their problem, they are not interested, no matter how great individual components may be.

If companies that provide the individual components do not cooperate and form a value cluster around an end product - sometimes referred to as virtual integration - each contributing their strength, each will be the loser. Winning companies will be those that learn to integrate with others to form an ecosystem of support for the end-customer.

Again, it’s the same essential principle that underlies varnasrama-dharma - everyone has a particular talent and function and needs to cooperate harmoniously with others, who have different talents and strengths, to be successful through service to a party that transcends the participants. In this case we are referring to companies, or aggregates of individuals, rather than individuals themselves. The principle holds true at all levels.

Economic Networking.

Why would you want to do this?

1. Because your machine is just sitting there wasting processor cycles that could be used for something useful, like recompiling the kernel.
2. Because pre-emptive scheduling gives you realtime scheduling for foreground tasks like mouse and keyboard input, and since you are the master of the machine it should obey your commands, rather than tending to other, unimportant, tasks which are running in the background - and should stay there.
3. Because you want to use your machine as a Digital Audio Workstation using something like Ardour to create your podcast.

Props to mutk at Red Hat for walking me through this one. I thought I’d blog it for future reference and for the good of humanity.

Download the kernel source package using:

up2date –get-source kernel

Download and install the fedora-rpmdevtools package

Run fedora-buildrpmtree as a non-root user

This will create an rpmbuild directory in your home directory

Now go to /var/spool/up2date and install the kernel source package that was downloaded. Because you installed the fedora package first, the kernel source will be installed to the rpmbuild directory in your home directory.

Go into the /~/rpmbuild/SOURCES directory and edit the config for the type of kernel that you want to build. The config files are at the top of the directory listing.

In there find the line:

#CONFIG_PREEMPT is not set

Add a line beneath it:

CONFIG_PREEMPT=y

Save that and then go into the SPEC directory.

Set the

%define buildup 0
%define buildsmp 1

if you are building for a hyperthreaded or multiprocessor machine. Set them the reverse if you are building for a uniprocessor machine.

Add something to the end of the line:

%define release %(R=”$Revision: 6.37 $”; RR=”${R##: }”; echo ${RR%%?}).EL%{rhbsys}.premptive_or_whatever

so that you can identify the kernel once it is built.

Now save that and run:

rpmbuild -bp kernel-2.6.spec –target=i686

This will build a source tree and check that everything is A OK.

Once that finishes, run:

rpmbuild -ba kernel-2.6.spec –target=i686

Watch the code scrolling across the screen for the next 30 minutes or so, depending on your machine, and bask in the combined glow of your CRT or LCD monitor, and the l33tness of running free software and having the freedom to modify it to suit your situation.

OK, we’re gearing up for the inaugural podcast from Sita-pati Studios next week, featuring DJ Vrajadhama.

What is Podcasting? It’s kind of like radio broadcasting, but it’s done over the Internet. Basically you use a program that synchronizes your iPod or other mp3 player with the podcast, and it downloads the program onto your mp3 player so that you can listen to it on the bus, at the gym, doing the dishes, whatever.

One program that does this synchronization is iPodder.

Here’s a head’s up on getting iPodder running on your stock RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 4 installation.

Download and install iPodder from here: http://ipodder.sourceforge.net/index.php

and then download and install the wxPython widgets from here: http://www.wxpython.org/download.php#binaries. I installed the Fedora Core 2 unicode versions.

Booyakasha!

“It is not simply a matter of meditation, which is just an activity of the mind, but of performing practical work for Krishna. In such work, we should leave no resource unused. Whatever is there, whatever we have, should be used for Krishna. We can use everything-typewriters, automobiles, airplanes, missiles.” - Srila A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Introduction to Sri Caitanya-caritamrita

From Robert Scoble’s blog:

How did Dallas’ Fellowship church become America’s fifth largest church in less than 15 years?

CTO Terry Storch has the answer: information technology investments designed to attract a new kind of churchgoer that other churches were ignoring.

Who said IT doesn’t matter? Certainly not the people running this church.

Every weekend 18,000 to 19,000 people walk through the doors. Thousands more watch on the church’s TV or radio shows.

Brian Bailey, Internet technology manager, heard I was in town and invited me over to see the secrets behind this church’s massive success. Hey, I’m a technology evangelist and I wanted to see how the professionals do it

Even before I got in, I could see this church was something different. The only thing visible on the side of one of their two huge buildings, from the freeway, is the church’s URL. Even in Silicon Valley I haven’t seen that approach taken on a church sign. Lesson one: make it easy for everyone to learn about you — on their terms.

Coming in the doors I noticed something else: plasma screens everywhere. I felt like I was in a rock concert, or a sports event.

That’s on purpose, Bailey told me. The church knows it’s competing against video games, rock concerts, mass media like ESPN, and sporting events, he said.

When the church started, they decided to appeal to a new generation of chuch goers who feel uncomfortable in the traditional churches most of us attend. So, they invested in video, audio, computers, multimedia, and making the end-to-end church experience better than their competitors. “Our services are a lot like attending a concert,” Bailey told me — he handed me some DVDs so I could check it out for myself. Lesson two: make it easy to experience your product’s special attributes.

You’ll see this investment in all areas, from the time you walk into the church and are registered by one of the volunteers manning 50 computer stations. Plus, massive investments in audio, lighting, video technology — this church has an all-digital sound system that is better than many rock shows have. Lesson three: to get word-of-mouth advertising you need to be remarkable.

If you are bringing kids, the volunteer will guide you to the right room (and, will print out a name tag and a receipt that guarantees that only you will be able to take a child out of the classroom).

They custom designed the system (yes, it’s a multi-tier .NET app written in C# and backed by SQL Server) to be extremely efficient, even in a noisy attrium with thousands of people talking “we only need the last four digits of your phone number,” Storch said. Why a phone number? They found that was easier to understand than asking someone to spell their name. The screens are touch-screen and a volunteer can be taught the basics in minutes. Funny enough, though it sounds like it treats visitors like a number, the end result is that each person gets paid attention to and has individual attention that they couldn’t get in such a large church without IT investments. Lesson four: use IT to efficiently get close to your customers and take care of their needs.

The atrium, by the way, doesn’t look like your traditional church. A baseball or football fan would feel right at home here. In the middle is circular information desk surrounded by eight plasma screens. “The minute the service starts we switch four of them to the service,” Storch said. The rest of the time there’s a set of information screens that play (different ones on each screen). All high-definition. Lesson five: if you want to be better, make sure you’re better from the first minutes of someone’s experience.

Speaking of HD, this church was the first in the world to film all of its services in high-definition TV format. They worked with Sony on their HDTV system and, Storch says they learned so much that now the church is consulted on HDTV projects around the world. Lesson six: if you want to be seen as bleeding edge, invest to be bleeding edge and do so throughout your company.

The church’s store also uses plasma screens throughout the store to display information and to set the mood. Of course there’s WiFi available in the attrium and other parts of the church (not in the main worship hall, though. “We haven’t yet pushed the edge there,” Storch admits, but says they are looking into it). He said they invested in WiFi because they wanted to give church members a way to hang out at the church during the week and be able to stay in touch with work and family. Lesson seven: extend the usefulness of your plant.

Other IT investments they’ve made? A sizeable fiber-optic network that was designed to take the HDTV video load, not to mention the church’s Web traffic, and other needs (there’s computers in nearly every room I toured, including the children’s play areas). Plus, they designed the network for future growth — the church is now working on building satellite campuses that will share video feeds. To do that, they needed to make sure their network would never go down and have a good backbone to allow for future growth. Every system has redundancy, too (there are two digital sound boards, for instance, in case one goes down). Imagine what would happen if the computer system went down on a Sunday with 5,000 people arriving for the next service and trying to get their kids into the right classroom. Lesson eight: design your systems so they never go down and can expand for future growth.

Several years ago, the church almost went with a database back end from Oracle, but switched to Microsoft several years ago because of Microsoft’s special non-profit pricing, which saved the church tens of thousands of dollars, Storch said. Plus, they liked the quality, performance, and productivity that they got with Visual Studio and .NET. “We’re extremely happy with Microsoft and .NET,” Bailey said. How happy? Well, one of their staff members is 15-year-old James Reggio — he’s been programming for more than five years and is working on multimedia applications for the church’s TV studio. Amazing kid. I asked him “so, are you the next Bill Gates?” Answer: he has bigger goals. He says that .NET lets him get a lot more done for the church than other programming environments.

While most of the computers at this church are running Windows, there are a couple of Macs (their radio show engineer was editing on a Mac when I was given a tour), most of the video is running on a Windows front end, but the back end is an SGI set of computers, along with a stack of computers running Linux that do the hard-core video rendering. “Why did you use Linux for that?” I asked. Storch answered that most the bleeding-edge video rendering apps were designed for Linux. Lesson nine: don’t be religious about technology, choose what gets the job done best for the least amount of money and staff time.

By the way, now the church is selling their software that they wrote to run their church. Named Fellowship One, it looks to become as successful in helping churches run themselves as the church itself is. Lesson 10: when you become successful, bottle up what got you there and sell it to others.

I asked why he went with Windows for their network architecture (Exchange runs their email, Active Directory keeps track of domain, .NET apps do nearly everything from logging their cash, to signing volunteers in. Microsoft Great Plains and SBS keep track of the business). He said they choose Windows because most of their congregants know Windows, and there’s a good pool of Windows developers and IT support people to help out too and because there’s one company to deal with for support needs.

The next time someone tells me that IT doesn’t matter, I’m gonna take them to church. After all, isn’t that what an evangelist should do?

I figured out why the authentication plugin was not working. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 there is a package called php-gd which needs to be installed to provide the GD library (Graphics Drawing) functionality for PHP. In Fedora Core 2 this was in the main php package. Now it’s been separated out into a separate package. That’s why my little captcha (that’s the thing where you have to punch in the code you see in the picture) was not working after the migration.

So now that the php-gd package is installed the captcha is working again, and comment spammers can’t post without going through the authentication mechanism.

Here you can see a gallery of “transparent screens”. Got a digital camera and too much time? Make the wallpaper on your workstation or laptop a photo of the scene behind your machine in your workspace for a transparent monitor effect. I might try it if I get some time and the facility, just to see what the psychological effect is like. I spend a lot of time on my computer at work.

I’ll post a screenshot if I do it.

The best ones in the gallery seem to be laptops. When the lighting effects of the photos and the real world ambient don’t match up the effect is greatly reduced. This one above is one of the best I feel.

I just read this over at Radical Congruency:

“Back in the day, Americans owned IT. It was new, cutting edge, and dreadfully inefficient. As time has passed we’ve become much more efficient at IT. We’ve gotten so good, in fact, that we can break the software engineering life cycle into a thousand tiny bits and send each mindless task to the lowest bidder anywhere in the world. It becomes a virtual assembly line. Component coding in India, business analysis in New Zealand, database administration in from Brazil, and whatever can’t be outsourced stays in the United States.

This leaves two possible paths for American IT firms: efficiency and innovation. Most large IT companies (IBM, EDS, CSC, etc) seem to be going down the efficiency path. They have many resources, a ton of money, and the ability to offer standard-quality, large-scale specialized solutions for relatively low prices. The only problem I see here is for American workers. Even if you do get to keep your job your benefits will probably be mediocre and your work will only be one repetitive step on the assembly line. The good news of this approach is that it allows for the people of other nations to have respectable employment and thus contributes to the world economy.”

What we are seeing here is what Nicolas Carr described in his article IT Doesn’t Matter. The substantial competitive gains to be had from IT have been realized. Having IT now does not give you a relative competitive advantage, because everyone else also has it. It’s now a level playing field. Add to this the glut of persons who have entered the IT industry, and you have a recipe for IT work becoming blue collar.

The flip side of this is that organizations without IT capabilities face increasing competitive disadvantage.