I felt like writing a poem today

I felt like writing a poem today
I haven’t written one in many years
once I published a book of them
once I told the world my hopes and fears.

I felt like writing a poem today
but maybe I’m not as convinced of my own importance anymore
because I am writing it in a blog post, to be read and discarded and forgotten
As pretty and fleeting and impermanent as a castle on the sandy shore.

I felt like writing a poem today
something in me was inspired
I haven’t written one since I fell in love a long time ago
In a way it’s a eulogy to love expired

I felt like writing a poem today
And wrote a poem about wanting to write one
Self-referential, existential, quasi-intellectual… bullshit
And I can’t find a line because I want to write more and the only rhyme I can find is “done”.

I felt like writing a poem today
forgive me, I’m seriously out of practice
I’m no longer so used to letting the world comment on my soul
and that makes me rather nervous

I felt like writing a poem today
something nostalgic and sweet and happy and funny and sad
and all the mixed up emotions of my inner turmoil
Something that makes the reader smile even as it makes him feel bad.

I felt like writing a poem today
for all the things I’ll never be, the astronaut and the rockstar
and for how embarrassing it is to admit those two
and how I just don’t care because you can’t draw blood from a scar

I felt like writing a poem today
with too many versus and not enough rhythm and too much honesty
about love and loss and crushes and sexual frustrations
And then stick it in a blog post to live… ever so fleetingly.

I felt like writing a poem today
Help me because I don’t want to reach the end
I’ve tripped into eloquence and I can’t get up.
There is a hole in me I’m trying to mend.

I felt like writing a poem today
to tell the world everything and nothing and make you blush
and laugh and cry and weep and sigh
I felt like writing a poem today, and I did… what a rush.

I felt like writing a poem today
and if I don’t stop soon I’m gonna end up like Milton… interest lost.
except I’m not trying to preach or teach
I’m just communing with the shell and the ghost.

I felt like writing a poem today
So I wrote a poem, and stuck it in a blogpost with no regrets about it.
And now I’m going to hit publish
and then I’m going to forget about it.

March 31, 2009 | silentcoder | Tags: , | 4 Comments »

Kongoni Weekly Updates: 2009-03-27

Well, here we are for another Friday’s worth of weekly updates. The list is a bit shorter this week, largely because my efforts were slowed down by a hard-drive failure. The drive is still readable but not writeable and it’s my main data drive. I’m getting a new one today and I’m investing in a 1tb hard drive so there will be plenty of space to play around with :)

Our first piece of news is from upstream, I contacted Bluewhite64 about the state of their ia32-emulation packages in the current tree. They assured me that these will be updated over this weekend – that means that we will be able to get a chromium test-case runnable on a kongoni system sync’d to current on 64-bit in future. All this is of course still very experimental stuff – but it’s a glimpse of our medium-term future.

A big impact on the work now, is the upcoming feature freeze for Sophocles. This means that from now until April 6th, I’ll be pushing in as many features as I can – ready for testing and fixing after the freeze.

I released P.I.G 0.0.3 this week and the port should be on most mirrors by now, this is a major release and marks the last feature-release prior to sophocles. From here on in any releases until Sophocles is out will be bugfixes only (there isn’t time before freeze to work on any of the major parts of the TODO list here). The new version does however have some pretty awesome stuff in it. The first is that autoporK is now fully integrated into it, the second is that port-sharing support has been added to the interface though it is disabled for now (it will be finished after harbourmaster is running). I fixed a few bugs from 0.0.2 and there is a lot of cleanups in some of the processes. This release has the longest changelog yet for the project in fact.

KISS has now got a skeleton in place as well as it’s first feature: switching off roaming networking (as per wicd) and configuring stationary networking using classic slackware scripts instead. The core design her was meant to be as flexible as possible, so kiss uses .desktop files to tell it what exists, and scripts to actually implement them. This means we can use existing tools with ease, grow the system without code-changes and present it in a whole bunch of cool ways – browse it with dolphin or konqueror or most other file managers, set up an admin menu based on kiss using a lancelot-part (I am tempted to do this on the default taskbar as the default way to use it).
I have quit a bit to do in line of getting a basic set of features into it but the work has begun. A big missing piece is the icon here but that is quick to plug in when one of our artist folks get around to it :)

Another new port this week done specifically with the freeze in mind is ksplasherX a nice gui tool to help artists design splash screens for Kongoni. Would anybody like to volunteer to do one for us ? Anastacia… you look bored ;)

The kongoni facebook group got a growth spurt this week with ten new members joining – I’m kind of to blame, it occurred for the first time to me to invite those among my friends list with an interest into the group – the group has the potential to be a nice marketing avenue for us so if we can hijack and evil website to a good purpose – why not ? Those of you on facebook who aren’t in the group – please do join it – and invite your GNU/Linux using/interested friends as well :)

Daniel has reported that we have a new mirror that came back, from Sweden this time, setups are in progress there so we’ll soon be able to add a European mirror to our list.

Talking of mirrors, our current loadbalancer is really rather basic, the php is simple but it could be a much nicer tool. For starters it should count requests for ISO’s (it already treats those special so just adding the code is easy – I can pull the initial value from the logs to start it off on) so we can have a truly accurate count of downloads – at least those downloads that didn’t go straight to a mirror. But a much nicer feature would be to split the mirror lists by country somehow instead of just by content like they are now, and make an effort to direct the user to one nearby him. So a request for a ports mirror from South Africa should automatically go to mirror.ac.za (which is in the ports mirrors list) but an ISO download from the user should randomly choose between mirror.ac.za and IS.
The current script is about 100 lines of php – would anybody like to volunteer to expand and maintain this ? It could be a fun little project that doesn’t require genius-level php skills but would be one less thing your brave and fearless dealer needs to find time for :)

That’s about it for this week.
Ciao

March 27, 2009 | silentcoder | Tags: , | Comments Closed

The earth-hour stupidity

Saw yet another blog post about Earth Hour just now, and once more was struck by just how stupid the idea is.
Earth Hour is not a good thing for the environment, I won’t say it’s not great as an awareness raising method – but frankly it’s downright stupid. In fact, this kind of unscientific approach to climate change is a large part of why we still have trouble getting governments and corps to take it seriously enough to make real efforts to fix it through things like Kyoto.

You see, the impact of switching your lights on or off is relatively minor on the climate scale, cars and factories make up a good 70% of the air pollution that we need to fix, Electrical generation stations make up about 20% more with the rest divided among various things (these statistics are probably not 100% accurate as climatologist aren’t in full agreement on the matter and besides that it’s very hard to get truly accurate values). Switching off lights en-mass will cut down that 20% figure – but the thing is, it’s going to push up the 10% figure – by much larger amount !

Right in that same post lies the reason: people are saying things like “read a book by candlelight instead”.
Candlelight ? A candle burning for an hour causes about 500% more pollution than an electric lamp. Firstly they are both made in factories – but candles usually take more energy to make (particularly lot more heat energy to shape the wax), once burning – a lightbulb does not cause any direct emissions, it draws some power from the power station which causes some but even old fashioned lightbulbs only draw a fraction of what geysers and stoves draw. Modern energy-saving bulbs use an order of magnitude less, and if you have LED lights – it’s another order of magnitude reduction (granted those are still very rare and expensive). Candles may not draw power from the station – but they burn with flame, it’s a direct non-renewable burning of a fossil fuel that is producing emissions the entire time.

Oil lamps and other flame-based lights are even worse than candles ! Gas lamps are probably worst of all (unless you can manage to get methane lamps as methane burns with extremely low emission rates).

Basically… earth hour is the environmental fashion movement trying to make a statement.. and not thinking about the actual science and doing a lot more harm than good. It’s a great thing that climate change has become a matter of fashion – few people can ever be persuaded to care about about real issues especially if there is any personal sacrifice or change involved, but most of those people care about fashion more than anything else.
The problem is – the environmental fashion group has made no effort to understand the real science behind climate change, the real problems faced – and the real solutions.

In a future post, I will talk about what some of those solutions really are. Suffice to say for now – very little of the “Green” movement’s fashionable activities and products are actually good – in fact, very often they (like earth hour) will actually make the problem worse.

And let’s get one thing very clear: saving the planet is the dumbest crusade you can go on. We don’t need to save the planet, the planet will save itself, life will survive – this planet has survived far worse than humans a million times over – life has survived tragedies that make global warming look like an old lady who slipped on a banana peel.
The real scientists – and those who listen to them – we’re not fighting climate change to save the planet, the planet will be fine – we’re fighting for something far more important: to save ourselves.
Life, and this planet will survive global warming, homo sapience probably won’t.

March 26, 2009 | silentcoder | Tags: | 2 Comments »
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