F-spot can export photos directly to Gallery, so I’ve installed Gallery 2 on my site now. I can now click photos in F-spot on any of my desktops, and then directly export them to the website with a couple of clicks. How cool is that?

Check out the new photo gallery.

Something in one of the feeds to ISKCON News.net corrupted the disk cache and I had to wipe it out. The page will straighten itself out over the next few hours.

Unfortunately blogspot doesn’t allow the photos that are published on blogs on their site to be displayed from within webpages on other sites, so Ride Within and Madhava Ghosh’s photos don’t display on ISKCON News.net. If anyone has an idea of a way around this, I’m all ears.

ISKCON News.net now has archives. You can view the output for any day now using a URL of the format:

http://www.iskconnews.net/daily/yy/mm/dd

Where yy/mm/dd are the two digit year, month, and day that you want to look at. I’ll be making some sort of calendar thing so that you can click through the archives.

I’m working on a formal statement of the editorial policy.

ISKCON News.Net is starting to fill up with content. I’ve recently added Krishna Kirti’s Hare Krishna Cultural Journal to the feed.

My editorial policy on that site up to this point has been to only add in feeds of people who talk about what they do as well as what they think, in order to have some accountability of authors. I’ve added Krishna Kirti even though he doesn’t do that. Why? Because it’s time to take the site to the next level.

Now that the rate of addition of new content is getting so high, it’s time to start creating different sections. I wanted to have people who posted about what they do in addition to what they think in order to give context to their writing. Now we are going to create context through the creation of sections. If anyone would like to be involved in the graphical design or editing of ISKCON News.Net, then please drop me a line or leave a comment.

As we heard at the end of October, the venerable VCal program that has served ISKCON so well is being retired. The Next Generation Vaisnava Calendar is now under development, and devotees with skills in IT, especially in programming, are invited to participate in the development.

On the one hand: Worldwide, Information Technology is increasingly prevalent and, like the rest of the population, many devotees today work with computers, and have skills and talents in this area.

On the other hand: Information Technology is the latest development of the Western drive for efficiency that Srila Prabhupada so admired (the lame man and the blind man). A recent study revealed that 2 year olds in the US spend as much time looking at a screen than they do playing outside, and more time than reading. People in the developed countries are increasingly eschewing print media for online media. The US Congress is getting set to pass legislation to get broadband Internet into the 66% of US households that still don’t have it. A project to provide an initial 15 million $100 laptops with networking capability to under-developed nations will start rolling out in Q4 of 2006.

Regardless of our understanding of the superiority and desirability of a simple, subsistence lifestyle, we can’t have our heads buried in the sand. The printing press will never disappear, but the Internet is increasingly becoming the brhad-mrdanga of the 21st century.

Putting these two things together, we need to offer engagement to devotees where they can use the skills they are having to learn in order to get jobs to support themselves and their families, or are increasingly arriving already in possession of. Programmers, graphic designers, infrastructure and project managers, can all utilize their skills and abilities in the service of the sankirtan mission. We need to adopt modern technologies and place them in the service of Sri Krishna Sankirtan - let us leave nothing un-utilized.

A worldwide organization such as ISKCON needs a significant IT capability in order to leverage the efficiency-increasing power of IT in communications, data storage and retrieval, calendar calculation, content delivery, and other areas. At the same time, something like a centralized corporate IT department is an impractical model.

The open source development model utilized by the GNU/Linux community more closely maps to the principles and values that ISKCON operates under, and looks like a more realistic guide for a practical implementation.

Whether you are familiar with this model or not, if you are a devotee who has abilities in information technology and would like to get involved in leveraging these to add value to the sankirtan mission, then get in touch. If you know someone who has these talents, drop them a line and point them here. Washing pots, sweeping floors and cutting vegetables are all great services and clean the heart. At the same time, in addition to this type of service at your local temple or preaching center, you can also engage your professional abilities in service, making a significant contribution to the mission, and purifying that aspect of your life. The Next Generation Vaisnava Calendar is being developed using the open source development model. The GBC Calendar Committee has sponsored the creation of a coordination mailing list for this project. Send a blank email to vcal-devel-subscribe@worldsankirtan.net to join it.

Manasa deho geho yo kichu mor - apilu tuya pade nanda kishore

With whatever you have - mind, body, wealth, family, worship the lotus feet of the son of Nanda Maharaja (Bhaktivinode Thakura)

yat karosi yad asnasi yaj juhosi dadasi yat yat tapasyasi kaunteya tat kurusva mad arpanam

Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer or give away, whatever austerity you perform - do that, O son of Kunti, as an offering to Me. (Bhagavad-gita 9.26)

Here is an interesting article on the use of technology by American “Megachurches”. Props to Candidasa for the heads-up. Here’s another related article from the Sitapati.info archives.

If you read the section “Towards Network Centric Preaching: Vision 2011″ from the “Operations Manual for World Domination” that I published in December last year, you’d have read my analysis of how information technology enables massive increases in scalability and speed - exactly what Srila Prabhupada had in mind when he talked of the “lame man and the blind man”.

(btw - I submitted that article as part of my CV for my current job)

One example that is given in the Megachurch article is that of using management software to deal with a huge number of people.

While I was in South America I was involved in the Bhakti-vrksa program there, and I noticed something. Part of the Bhakti-vrksa program is reporting. Every week each group leader needs to make a report about his group and its members. These reports then go up the network to the area commanders, whatever they’re called in the Bhakti-vrksa model (sorry, I’m a little out of touch with the terminology - and yes, I know he’s an area servant, but this is Lord Caitanya’s Sankirtan Army on a mission of digvijay - world conquering, so please let me indulge in some bombastic rhetoric), who can then make informed decisions about what’s going on.

Theoretically, and this was my point the other day, these reports could go higher and higher, until the heads at namahatta.org could produce classified reports detailing the exact situation worldwide, which could then be summarized, sanitized (to protect preaching in countries where it’s banned), and published periodically.

Now in practice what happens is that coordinating the movement of paper is practically impossible, even at the local level. For the group leaders to fill out a report is sometimes too much to ask. Getting it from them takes more time. By the time you get everyone’s reports, it’s already the next week, and you spent so much time and energy just getting them that you don’t have time to do anything with the data.

Unless you have a secretary you now have to sit down and enter all that data into a spreadsheet to get it in a useable form. God help you if your Bhakti-vrksa is actually successful, because you’ll be swamped under the paperwork.

What happens in practice, in my experience, is that reporting is simply discarded as too much trouble. The lack of reports coming out of the ministry tend to support my supposition that this is a widespread phenomenon.

I don’t have to keep harping on the point, but I am. A lot of the systems involved in Bhakti-vrksa currently just can’t scale to support the kind of growth that it is potentially capable of. It’s a system that is currently destined to fail because success will kill it. It is self-limiting.

Here’s an idea for a solution:

First the caveat: this will only work initially in developed countries, but if you build it, they will come…

There is an online system where the group leader, after the meeting, the next day, whatever, logs in and fills out the report online.

Bada bing.

Now the area commander does not have to deal with massive amounts of paperwork, and neither does the group leader. The area commander doesn’t have to chase all the group leaders, and they don’t have to add finding the area commander to hand in their paper work to their duties of maintaining contact with their group members.

The area commander doesn’t have to convert the data from paper to electronic form, and as you get more groups and group leaders, the work automatically redistributes. Ladies and Gentlemen, can you say “Scalability”.

Now here’s the kicker. You use one central database, and the namahatta.org heads can run global reports on it.

That’s what I thought when I saw what happens when the theory of the BV Manual (on reporting) meets the real world.

Now we just need to build an IT capability to build and maintain such a solution, and we’ll be there. More on that in the next post.

I’ve been corresponding with Caitanya Candra prabhu about the Vaisnava Calendar Project. Man, I thought it was pretty cut and dried, but apparently there is a whole lot of confusion and controversy over the calendar generating algorithms and which ones should be used.

Before the technical issues are tackled the socio-political situation will have to be sorted out. Anyway, we’re looking at the technical angle simultaneously. We want it to be cross-platform, which means portable languages - either binary portable like java or .Net / Mono, or else source portable like Python, QT, etc. There’s also talk of implementing it as a web service, which means php or similar.

The technical platforms we eventually settle on will depend to a large degree on who’s involved. If you have some programming experience / skills and would like to get involved in making the next-generation cross-platform open-source fully buzzword-compliant Vaisnava Calendar Generating Program, and become a superstar of devotional open source programming while performing service to the community of devotees, then please drop me a line at sitapati worldsankirtan net. You know where to put the punctuation.

The Hare Krishna sacred calendar, full of festivals and holy days, is a lunar calendar, based on phases of the moon. In practice this means that the holy days, such as Krishna’s birthday, fall on a different Western solar calendar day each year.

VCal, the Vaisnava Calendar generating program that the Hare Krishna movement uses to calculate their sacred calendar, is going to be replaced.

I was approached by an intermediary to get involved in working on this program in 1997, so it has been some time coming. The old program, if I remember correctly, is written in some version of BASIC. It runs under MS-DOS.

According to the official website the redevelopment is because the underlying platform, MS-DOS, has become obsolete.

This program is a prime example of an opportunity for ISKCON to engage the open source development model.

There are many IT graduates in India and elsewhere in the world who have energy and talent that could be applied to this task, and other tasks besides.

By developing it using an open source model, a community of developers can be created around the program, and the knowledge of how it works can be documented and shared. This will enable future generations to implement it if the original development is ever stopped, for whatever reason.

By using a portable language that can be compiled or interpreted on multiple platforms the problem of platform obsolescence can be avoided for the future. A compiled language like C could be used, or an interpreted language like Java or Python.

This is also a fairly straightforward project that would make an ideal candidate for the initial foray into open source community building and facilitation.

Anyway, I’ve written to the relevant contact address with an offer of my services in this respect, and we’ll see what happens.

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.

I have set up email updates for both ISKCONNews.net and Sita-pati’s Virtual Pen. Check into them by entering your email address in the provided box (on the right hand side on ISKCONNews.net and on the left hand side on the Virtual Pen).

You get an email update once a day with all the new articles nicely formatted.

They are handled by Feedblitz, and they look very nice.

Check it out - on the left (at the top) you can now subscribe to receive email updates from Sita-pati’s Virtual Pen.

I’ve got a new site design, which comes courtesy of Justin Baeder of Radical Congruency.

My previous template rocked because it was very simple and direct. Easy to read. This new design is a little more complicated, a little more busy, but it has a few things that I really wanted:

1. Wordpress 1.5 - better spam protection, so I stop getting hundreds of bogus messages a day.
2. Amazon plugins that work, so I can easily link to books that I am reviewing
3. Bust out the comments on the front page so that you don’t have to go searching through the articles to find them

Let me know what you think of the new design. You have to read it, so your opinion is important to me.

ISKCON News.Net is running in third place behind ISKCON.com on Google at the moment.

Here’s a great article that talks about the difference between a web site and a web ministry.

Foreshadowing my review of Good to Great, this distinction is between thinking that technology is some kind of end in itself, and realizing that technology can only be an accelerator.

In order to actually be effective, technology has to be integrated with the core business activity of the enterprise. Technology, when properly applied, can enhance, magnify, accelerate, whatever, that core business activity.

If your core business model is broken, undefined, or not integrated with the technology, you’re just playing around with shiny toys.

Check it out:12 Steps Apart - SILAS partners

Kurma das, described by some with the rather weighty epithet of “Australia’s vegetarian guru”, is now publishing information about his activities, and the feed is being carried on ISKCON News.Net.

I found the problem with the DNS. I missed two things. One, I did not update the serial number in the zone file, which is not a critical error, but it lead me to discover something when I did update it and the slave DNS didn’t update. The BIND server in RHEL 4 is chrooted by default, whereas it wasn’t in Fedora Core 2. So I was editing zone files in the wrong place. Fixed. On with the show.

I’ve been a little slow on my World Sankirtan.Net initiatives lately due to issues migrating the operation to a new server. Since I shifted things over DNS has not been working properly. I wanted to do a seamless shift, so I left one server running and then started the other, then changed the DNS at the registry. At the moment some networks connect to the old server and some to the new, and I can’t make head or tail out of it.

DNS propagation takes up to 48 hours, so every time I make a change I end up waiting for two days to see what happens….

Anyway, slowly but surely wins the race.

Phase one of the World Sankirtan.Net Hardware build out has taken place. The existing server has just been upgraded from a PII-266 to a PII-400, with about 64MB more of RAM in it, so service should be a little more snappy.

Phase two, coming up, involves the additional installation of a PIII-650 rack server in a hosted data center, which will give more bandwidth and more server grunt. This should also increase availability (i.e.: less frequent outages)

Phase Three: (to be announced).

Phase Four: Total World Domination.

Here is a kick-a new logo for Goloka Link, prepared by Tri Yuga das: