Fedora

In the mornings I am often visited by subtle entities. Sometimes they are malignant, taunting me or tempting me, sometimes benign, asking questions or offering advice. This morning I had an interesting conversation with an pious, inquisitive visitor.

This Morning's Visitor (arguing with friend and asking me for my opinion): Did God create man in a void, or was there something here already?

Me: The Bible at least tells us that there was something here, the Bhagavatam also. These things tell us something about the time of the creation of man. We may or may not believe these accounts. However, and more importantly, the creation of man definitely tells us something about the nature of the creator.

Gilbert Bilezikian, Wheaton Theological Seminary scholar and teacher of Bill Hybels, the founding pastor of American Protestant mega-church Willow creek, writes in his book "Beyond Sex Roles: What the Bible Says About a Woman's Place in Church and Family":

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them."

- Genesis 1.27

Lesson: From intention (v. 26) God moves to action, as the moment for the creation of
humans arrives. The design calls for "man" (singular) made in His image (note the double parallelistic emphasis on the "image"). Then the divine decree crystallizes into action and (surprise!) the result is not one person, but two. The original order called only for the creation of "man"; but because the product had to conform to the specifications of the divine image, "man" inevitably came as male and female.

In other words, the male/female sexual differentiation reflects realities contained within the very being of God and derived from His image. Femaleness pertains to the image of God as fully as maleness. God is neither male nor female. He transcends both genders since they are both comprehended within His being.

According to the logic of Vedanta, nyaya, this is the "logic of cause and effect" - an effect must be pre-present in its cause. Since God is the cause of this world, and we see that a male and female dipolarity pervades it, this dual nature must be present in the Supreme.

Therefore the Hare Krishna maha-mantra is the best prayer, because it addresses both the masculine and feminine aspects of the Supreme. Hare refers to the feminine aspect, and Krishna and Rama to the masculine aspect. The two are both present and balanced in perfect harmony in this prayer:

The other day Krishna-kirti posed a polemic: "So, I think that women should be given the same opportunity as men to realize their full, human potential."

This is not simply the opinion of a limited, imperfect human being, it is an order of the Supreme Lord through scripture. Vedanta-sutra (1.1.1) states:

athatho brahma jijñasa

"Having obtained this human form of life, now inquire into the nature of the Absolute."

No distinction is made between persons of different genders here - all are commanded to do this. The full human potential means to reawaken our forgotten relationship with the Supreme Couple, Radha and Krishna.

OK, now off to Mangals and some hot yoga!

Jack, it definitely sounds like you've been "floxed". Here are the resources for fluoroquinones:

• http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/quinolones/
• http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/fq_research/
• http://www.fqresearch.org
• http://home.triad.rr.com/rrippy/storiesindex.html
• http://fqvictims.org/fqvictims/index.htm
• http://www.fluoroquinolones.org/
• http://www.drugvictims.org/advice.html

I also recommend these two sites, for a more general insight into the "sickness industry" and a guide to constructing a counter strategy:

• www.newstarget.com
• http://www.healthranger.org/

Basically you cannot "fight fire with fire" and take another drug to reverse the effects. The best course of action will be to change your dietary and chemical usage patterns to empower your body's physiological response. The body can do all these things automatically, but a lot of our lifestyle today degrades its ability to do it. If anyone can help you more specifically with this, I'd say Mike Adams can.

best wishes and good luck

I've been trying to get the Planet aggregator to display embedded video on the page in its output. Youtube videos from a Wordpress feed look ok, but <object> tags from my Drupal feed get mangled for some reason.

Here's what I've discovered so far:

First of all, to allow embedded objects to be displayed you need to edit both planet/sanitize.py and planet/feedparser.py, and add 'object', 'media', 'embed' to the acceptable_elements array. That does the trick for youtube videos coming in a Wordpress rss feed (wp-rss2.php), where the content is passed as CDATA inside a <content:encoded> tag.

From Drupal the content is passed in a <description> tag, and at line 905 of Planet's __init__.py is identified as String content and passed to sanitize.HTML. This function then does some funky stuff popping elements onto and off a stack, and messes everything up, moving the object's closing tag up before the <param> tags. With the Wordpress feed the <object> code is inside some kind of array around line 905, so it doesn't get passed through the sanitizor. I've tried commenting line 905 out, to stop it from sanitizing the code. It means that the page just potentially became a crack smoker, but that's life.

I'm currently working out of the Sydney office and staying at the local Hare Krishna temple, which is handily ten minutes down the road from the office.

Yesterday was the Community Open Day at Linux Conf.AU. It rocked. I talked to a bunch of people and gave out some Fedora DVDs. Props to Danielle Harrison for doing everything down in Sydney to make the Fedora stand possible, and big ups to jdub and Pia for an awesome event.

And in other news, I just had to share this article with you all. I've had it for a while, but I can't hold on to it any longer:

"BON APPETIT," said Chilean artist Marco Evaristti as he presented his friends with his newest creation: meatballs cooked with fat from his own body, extracted by liposuction.

"Ladies and gentleman, bon appetit and may god bless," said Evaristti, a glass in his hand, to his dining companions seated Thursday night around a table in Santiago's Animal Gallery.

On the plates in front of them was a serving of agnolotti pasta and in the middle a meatball made with oil Evaristti removed from his body in a liposuction procedure last year.

"The question of whether or not to eat human flesh is more important than the result," he said, explaining the point of his creation.

"You are not a cannibal if you eat art," he added.

Evaristti produced 48 meatballs with his own fat, some of which would be canned and sold for $US4000 dollars for 10.

A veteran at shock-art, in an earlier work Evaristti invited people to kill fish by pressing the button on a blender the fish were held in.

In April 2004 he dyed an enormous iceberg in Greenland with red paint.

If anyone is looking for a blog provider, there is a new player on the scene with an attractive service. Terapad.com offer 2GB of storage, 10GB traffic per month, integrated image gallery and Paypal-enabled store, for free.

If I were going to start a blog somewhere, that would be one of my first choices.

Word up the Internet massive! Fedora Core 6 has been delayed, but fear not, because we've an extended mix of Fedora Reloaded for you this time.

After listening to all those experimental jam electro-noise free jazz rock albums on Jamendo we've put together a stream of Fedora consciousness podcast recorded live in wmealing's garage (well, more accurately his lounge).

We weren't able to connect Chris Blizzard this time round to talk about the One Laptop project, so that will be in the next edition.

Enjoy!

Download:
Fedora Reloaded 6 (ogg version)
Fedora Reloaded 6 (evil mp3 version)

Here are some links from the podcast:

Jamendo : www.jamendo.com
Libmtp project: http://libmtp.sourceforge.net/
Django: http://www.djangoproject.com/
DJ Vraj: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/dj.vraj/

Head down tail up at the moment. We're racing to get changes in for a milestone in the development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. I'm working on the installation documentation for x86, IBM POWER, and IBM S/390.

At the moment I'm using two laptops and an LCD flatscreen to give myself a three monitor desktop using Synergy.

Synergy is a program that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, that allows you to use one keyboard and mouse across two machines, as well as providing a shared clip board. By mounting my home directory on my second laptop using NFS I can work on the same files in multiple windows.

Two of the screens are running on one CPU, the other laptop screen is running on it's own CPU, but the mouse goes between all three, and the keyboard goes to whichever one has the mouse focus. I can cut and paste between all three.

It was simple to download ("yum install synergy" for Fedora users), and set up.

Here's my synergy.conf file. The IP addresses for ibook.G4 and thinkpad.T43 are in my /etc/hosts file.

  GNU nano 1.3.12                       File: /home/jwulf/synergy.conf                                                     

 section: screens
       ibook.G4:
       thinkpad.T43:
    end
    section: links
       ibook.G4:
           right = thinkpad.T43
       thinkpad.T43:
           left = ibook.G4
    end

Aside from that, this morning I went to Kate Pell's lead practice at West End Yoga. Good to be back, and there was a lot of Simon Borg-Olivier influence in the practice today. More about that when I have some time to write about it.

It's also Kartik month, which means Damodara dipa-dana, or offering lamps to Damodara each morning and evening, and Kartik-vrata or special austerities. It's a nectar time. Prahlad and I are having a great time. Prahlad blows the conch each morning while the members of our household are offering the lamps and we sing the Damodarastaka. I guess it must be for him like Christmas season was for me when I was a child, except that it lasts one month.

I wrote previously about getting the Democracy Player working on my Fedora Core 6 rawhide system.

I use it to watch the "Yoga Today" show, which broadcasts a one hour class every day via the Internet (it's a 300MB+ download each day, so be careful with your bandwidth!).

Well, the player stopped working after I tried to work around a recent bug in yelp. Democracy Player relies on the Mozilla browser, which has been removed from Fedora Core in favor of the more recent Seamonkey, as Mozilla is no longer being maintained. That removal caused some problems in yelp, which I then tried to fix, and b0rked the bailing twine and duct tape that was holding my Democracy Player together.

Anyway, to get Democracy Player to work again, I downloaded a Fedora Core 5 mozilla package and installed it, and Democracy Player worked again.

So follow the instructions on my earlier post, plus installing this mozilla package to get it working now.

I wrote to my friend Sukanthi the other day to ask her how it's going with the Fedora operating system on her laptop (We loaded it on a few weeks before she left Australia), and to point her to the BBC documentary on Free Open Source Software, The Codebreakers [1] [2]. She had wanted to know more about the philosophical reasons for using FOSS. She is currently in Hungary and wrote me today:

There is a new Hare Krishna centre in London called Matchless gifts, they have free internet access for the under priviledged and they use Fedora. They also do yoga classes and kirtana nights and classes with prasad.

I took my mum there, it was cool, she was playing the drum and chanting Hare Krishna.

Someone blogged about it here

Update: I gave Matchless Gifts a call, and it turns out that they're using Ubuntu (which is what I thought they would / should be using). "Fedora" obviously represents GNU/Linux in my friend's mind.