FocusWriter is a fullscreen, distraction-free word processor designed to immerse you as much as possible in your work. The program autosaves your progress, and reloads the last files you had open to make it easy to jump back in during your next writing session, and has many other features that make it such that only one thing matters: your writing.
A few days ago Diaspora, the venture by four programmers to build an opensource, federated social network that would compete with Facebook, released its code to developers, having reached a phase where minimal implementation was already possible. The group promised, from the beginning, to set up a site that would be similar to WordPress.com or identi.ca for non-technical people. Even more technical people will not at this stage be able to implement Diaspora on shared hosting, simply because the database chosen is not compatible with most web hosts.
Most tech writers on Diaspora fail to mention, or do not know, that long before Diaspora there was already an opensource, federated social network in the works – not identi.ca – which resembles Twitter – but Appleseed – which, like Diaspora, is of the Facebook mould. Its code is already more advanced than Diaspora, though it hasn’t been as well funded, and it uses a standard LAMP setup. But, as with Diaspora, it doesn’t make too much sense to set up one’s personal social network, or even a “node” of a larger network, unless there are lots of friends.
So while we wait for alternatives to Facebook, we are stuck with it for the time being. There are other networks, but only on Facebook are we likely to find many of our real world friends. But as Facebook grows, so does the discontent of its user base, who come to regard the network as a necessary evil. Many treat it with extreme caution. They are dead right.
Today brought the news that the developers of the Haystack project – which sought to enable Iranian citizens to use the web anonymously, have had to halt the project due to a security review. It appears from news reports that the project was never safe in the first place and may have placed Iranians more at risk for using it than if they had not used it at all.
In Britain, a 17 year old who launched an abusive email to President Obama after a night of drinking, was tracked down by police, photographed and informed by the US government that he is barred from setting foot on US soil for life.
Without noticing, we have moved from a period in which we regarded the internet as the ultimate tool of democracy, allowing anyone anywhere to read and make the news, to a period in which the internet seems like the ultimate tool of totalitarianism.It keeps an indelible and unforgiving record of what we are doing and thinking. This record is available to just about anyone, while governments and security forces are able also to trace us through IP addresses and scrutinize internet traffic. Some countries demand complete access to all information, including cellular telephone records, as came out in the recent fracas between RIM (makers of the Blackberry) and the Indian government.
We have come accustomed to surrendering information that is used by companies in order to make us more suitable targets for their marketing. We provide the tools for social network analysts to measure our level of influence based on the number of followers and friends. New location technologies and simple social network updates announcing our whereabouts add another level to the way our privacy is compromised.
The end result is that while the internet indeed allows us to read and express almost anything, the consequences are dire, and not only in countries with repressive regimes. We expose ourselves not just to the whims of government officials but to potential employers, insurers, lenders, landlords – anyone with an interest in learning all about us. Every petition we sign, every blog post we write, every link we share, every forum discussion we take part in, every political or religious opinion we express, every status update we unthinkingly splurt out, every compromising or unflattering photo in which we are tagged, shows up in search engines and remains there for years. The end result is that if we value our personal freedom, the internet has become a dangerous place to hang out. And this only stands to get worse.
Whatever it was, Auroville was interesting. Three weeks in a place which presents itself as an alternative to so many of the negative currents in our world throws up a personal challenge. Now I wonder to what extent it is possible or desirable to make it a part of my consciousness and my life. I’ve a lazy attitude to big ideas, and inbuilt dampers on enthusiasm towards them. Lazy in adoption, but then fairly faithful and tenacious . So I will probably continue to mull the ideas that I received from Auroville, and Auroville itself, and see if electricity is generated.
If I were age 20 again, I’d already be making plans to move to Auroville permanently, as the best and most sane alternative to the material mainstream culture that is destroying our spirits and the planet. Now, at 54, there are family, work ties and the engagement in another radical community experiment with value in its own right.
If the proverbial Jesus, Moses or the Dalai Lama encounter us on the street, gaze into our eyes and say “follow me!”, what do you say? At age 20 you pick up and go. At 35 you ask for a few weeks to settle your affairs. At 50, you say wait, that isn’t practical at all. But then again, according to the sanatana dharma, that’s exactly the right time to head for the jungle.
Saturday was a quiet day. Windows closed. Quiet hum of the A/C. So many days of our lives pass dimly, without attention having been paid to them. We are busy doing stuff, but if you ask us in what exactly we have been engaged the following day, there’s no telling. And now I was just reading in Tinker Creek,
“What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration. … I’ll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river, up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away. These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.”
The TV is blaring in the background, in the evening’s sticky heat. Multiple distractions, those that are borne in from the environment reverberating with the internal noise. And with all this I am trying to focus on what Annie Dillard has said.
The problem is that she is describing (here) a state of absorption. The only quiet that most of us know is when our consciousness is absorbed in something. Afterwards, we emerge from our absorption as if from a great absence, from a spell of time that has been subtracted from our lives. If the experience was powerful, it may survive in memory as a shadow of what was and we may hanker after it.
But the secret, the real trick, is to be fully present without being either absorbed or distracted. No one needs to haul us away. The noise of the TV does not prevent us from being silent.
Along the river bank in Rishikesh, on the Swargashram side, are saddhus’ cottages. Plying the path that passes by them are cows, tourists, pilgrims and young guys on motorbikes – who violently honk their horns at all the rest.
Noise is ever present. We can shut it out by self-absorption or we can give up on meditation and stay with the noise. Neither is a good option, because being truly alive means to be alert to all levels of being. Such alertness is not subtracted from our lives like half-forgotten dreams.
Preparations for summer vacation
Our summer vacation is coming up quickly, and on Saturday I spent a bit of time making bookings. Things are looking good. We’ll be flying from Amman to Mumbai, then from Mumbai to Chennai. Thereafter we’ll be in Tiruvannamalai and Auroville. The second part of the trip, from Auroville to Mysore and perhaps the Nilgiri hills, we are leaving open for now. Our hardcopy information consists of an old Lonely Planet – inherited from Yonatan, a good map, and the Insight Guide to southern India, ordered from TheBookDepository. I like the Insight series.
Linuxmint
The latest install of Linuxmint (Isadora) has lingering problems, due to a minor mistake I made at some point in making the upgrade. About the time of the upgrade I was suffering from a strange bug, the nature of which I’ve managed to forget in the meantime, but which resulted in me using the Terminal for some basic commands. I think I did a backup and restore using Sudo, and that assigned Root permissions to a number of directories. Maybe I also did the install using sudo – I don’t remember. Anyway, now I have problems with some of the software. Chrome and Chromium will only work with sudo, and there seems to be a difficulty with importing photos through Shotwell. So I’ve been using Opera and Epiphany for my home web browsers.
Today I was excited to notice that quite unannounced, the latest version of Ubuntu, and hence Linuxmint, have the ability to work with Ipod Touch. That’s an important feature for me, and I’m quite thrilled about that. (I don’t want to get too thrilled, lest it stops working again.)
Social Networking
Partly because of my browser setup, I’ve felt much less of an urge to follow tech developments (it’s harder without Feedly). And I’ve made a parallel disengagement from social networking services. Maybe the latter urge has been diminishing anyway. I think this blog, which sends links through Twitterfeed.com, will fill the bill. On Twitter, I’ve jettisoned most of my followers, and follow mainly news sources, companies and organizations that I want to keep up with. On Facebook, I got rid of most old stories. On MyOpera.com I’ve kept only what I wrote that pertains to Opera. I’ve got rid of a few other accounts that I hardly use these days.
This year we decided not to invest very much time in the film festival, since we will already be taking too much time off this summer. Dorit chose 3 films that we could watch over the weekend. The first was an American indy film called Tiny Furniture by Lena Dunham, who also appeared in the film and was there at the screening to respond to questions. If Dunham could make such a good film at the age of 23, it seems that we will be hearing more from her.
We saw the second film this morning. It was White Material, by Claire Denis. It would have been good, except that the projectionist may have had too much beer. First we saw about 40 minutes from the middle of the movie. Then we saw the beginning. Then we saw the end. After the titles, they announced that we should remain seated, since apparently they had found a bit more. But by that time nobody cared and the audience was heading for the exits.
Leaving the film early meant that we had a little more time to kill before the next one. Since most of the Moshava was closed for the shabbat, we headed over to the cinematheque for lunch. Then back to Smadar theater to see Please Give by Nicole Holofcener. This had some similarities to Tiny Furniture as both films were character films set in New York. Dorit liked it, I liked it less.
And that’s probably about it for the film festival this year. I might have liked to see Budrus today – unfortunately it was full. I noticed that Yossi Sarid and David Shulman were there by the doors.
(straight) -> Morning Star Online
(supportive) -> The Guardian, & The Guardian & The Guardian again
(super-supportive) -> The Electronic Intifada & ISM
(ecstatic) -> Smash EDO
(appalled) -> The Jerusalem Post, The Jerusalem Post, The Jewish Chronicle
Britain is one of the few countries where, despite heavy police surveillance, it is possible to break into a factory, cause £180,000 of damage, claim moral justification, gain support from politicians, a random jury and a judge, and win acquittal from all charges.
(Stating the obvious), Israel has totally lost the p.r. war in Britain. But Israelis regard this as hatred towards them, rather than a sign that they should change something.
Bibi + Obama: I switched channels at the point when they began to talk one more time about America’s special relationship with Israel. I don’t know exactly whether it was irritation or nausea.
———————
In some recent correspondence I quoted a figure for the number of Palestinians in Israeli jails. The most recent reporting had been on Iran’s PressTV, which I wouldn’t consider a very reliable source. So I tried to get to the bottom of where the figures were from. It looks like the source was a March 8 article by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. They have a page with figures from March 8.
The Israeli human rights org Btselem, also keeps statistics. They have a page with tables of historical data up to the end of May 2010.
The PCBS gives a figure of 7,300 prisoners is from the PCBS. Btselem’s current figure is 6,338. I don’t know why these figures are different, but the good news is that the number has been going down since 2006.
PCBS, by the way have a link to Btselem; except that the link goes to Betselem.org and not, as should be, Btselem.org. The former link goes to one of those holding domains that seem intended to embarrass organizations into buying the domain. I’ve come to recognize them since they have a standard layout. But this time I was fooled for a few seconds.
The Data Portability Project have come up with the idea of a data portability policy, using the metaphor of the privacy policy which most companies now use.
The idea is not to dictate a given policy, but simply to be open about it. It’s a nice idea: many web sites and companies are not up-front about what data (if any) can be exported from their site and let the users attempt to discover this by themselves. Even companies that in other ways win respect are often guilty of this – for example Opera’s myopera.com social network does not have a mechanism to either export or backup data that is placed there. Does our webmail system allow the download and backup your messages? Does our browser permit us to export bookmarks? How many of us check these things in advance, before beginning to use a product or service?
