• Much improved ability to concentrate
• The mind feels ‘lucid’ and calm rather than ‘murky’ and agitated
• Improved memory (things become easier to recall)
• Improved creativity
• A general feeling of being one step ahead of things (chores and such) instead of one step behind

Meditation is tightly linked with several far-eastern religions and philosophies such as Buddhism. As can be expected, these belief systems attribute many mystical properties to meditation. Nonetheless, meditation can be successfully detached from these beliefs and used as a tool to sharpen the mind. It is just an example of a practical discovery made by religiously-minded people, and I will stick to its practical aspects.

There are many forms of meditation. The most commonly practiced form, which is the one I practice, involves concentrating on one’s breathing. It is called Anapanasati. The technique is very simple: Sit on a chair, feet straight on the floor, back straight, hands resting on lap. Set a timer to ring in say fifteen minutes. Close your eyes and mouth, and breath normally through your nose. Concentrate on the air coming in and out of your nostrils, counting each breath as you exhale. Count the breaths silently: One, two, three, four; one, two, three, four; and so on. Continue until the timer goes off.

Meditating is difficult because as you try to concentrate on your breaths, your mind wanders and you start thinking about other things. When this happens, you should gently yet firmly divert your attention back to the breathing, back to the air flowing in and out of your nostrils. At first this will happen a lot. After several meditations the intruding thoughts will appear less often, and there will be stretches of pure concentration without disturbances.

After some practice, you will come to a stage where a thought occasionally creeps into your consciousness, you note it and let it fade back to where it came from. If you think of your mind as a bucket filled with water and sand, the everyday mind is constantly stirred so the sand muddies the water. Meditation pauses the stirring, letting the sand sink down, making the water lucid.

Once your mind is calm enough so that you can count your breaths for fifteen or twenty minutes without losing count, you can go on to the next level and concentrate more deeply on your breathing and on other areas of your body. For example, you can gradually let your awareness cover greater areas surrounding your nose: First your nose and your mouth, then your whole face, then on to your entire body. You should do this slowly, all the while keeping your concentration and not letting your mind wander. When you reach this level you should seek further instruction, for instance by reading a book or taking a course on the subject.

Some general guidelines:

• If at any point you feel meditation is somehow bad or wrong for you — stop doing it. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea.
• Try not to move while meditating. Don’t open your eyes or mouth. After several minutes your hands or legs may feel numb — this is normal. On the other hand, if you feel pain you should stop and change your position.
• Meditation should be practiced at least once a day, otherwise it is not effective. At first, sit down for ten minutes at a time. When this becomes easy, go up to fifteen minutes. Then to twenty or more.
• Do not meditate when you are tired, for example before going to sleep. You will quickly lose concentration and fall asleep. By the way, if you are having trouble sleeping, meditation can sometimes solve the problem.

Here are some tips I picked up along the way:

• When the mind wanders, you may feel bad about failing to keep your concentration. The fact is that you should actually feel pleased, because diverting your thought back to the breathing is exactly what improves your concentration in your everyday life. It took me a long time to appreciate this.
• Itches make for excellent practice. An itch is something concrete that tries to grab your attention. Try to resist for as long as you can and keep thinking about your breathing. Often, the itching sensation goes away after a while.
• Pain makes for terrible practice. As explained above, if you feel pain you should act to stop it.
• In time, this form of meditation may become boring, and you may be tempted to switch to another form or try variations of breath-counting. There’s no problem with trying out other forms in addition to the one you’re practicing, but it’s a huge mistake to just switch because of boredom. For a beginner, the value of meditation lies in the fact that it is hard and boring. Concentrating on something boring is exactly how you improve your concentration. So shuffling things around when you’re bored defeats the whole purpose of what you’re doing.

If you want to read further, there’s a wealth of information available on the web and in books. Amazon doesn’t carry the books I learned from, but it looks like there are many other good ones.

...
# Banned sites
127.0.0.1       reddit.com
127.0.0.1       digg.com
127.0.0.1       slashdot.org
...

going to one of these sites returns this:

I did that a week ago, and so far it works. I did not check any of these sites since, and instead I’m actually doing productive things. Turns out that this is just the right amount of barrier that works for me. Next step: Convince SO to get rid of equally sinful TV.

So what’s the big deal about a todo app? For starters, It has a simple and effective workflow concept behind it: New todos usually go into the Inbox. Adding a todo is quick and painless. It can be done using the app, or you can send in the item by email. So for example if you’re somewhere listening to the radio, and you hear a song you’d like to download later, you can use your phone to send in an item that says ‘download that song’ — and it’ll show up in you Inbox. Neat, huh?

The next step is to catalog the items in the Inbox. Here you have several options:

• Contexts: Catalog items by the context they should be performed in. For example, create a @Phone context that includes all items that require making a phone call. Then, when you’re at a phone, you can quickly look these up.
• Projects: Just a simple grouping of items into projects. Contexts and Projects are orthogonal: Any item can belong to both a project and a context.
• Waiting: Items that you delegate to someone else go into the ‘Waiting’ state until that person gets back to you.
• Someday: Stuff you want to do someday but not right now. Vitalist will remind you every once in a while about these.
• Reference: Little bits of information you want to store somewhere. For example, when I order heating gas for my apartment they give me a confirmation number for the order. I never know where to put it. Now I can just tap the number into my phone and email it to my Inbox. The next time I’m at a computer, I’ll move the item into the Reference list for keeps.

After GMail, this is definitely my ‘best web app around’.

I can say now that all that studying paid off, as I was able to swing back at almost all the topological curvballs prof. Lapid threw at us. There was one question that stumped me though. Here it is. If you can solve it, more power to ya (and please let me know the answer!)

Let be a continuous, injective function from the sphere (that’s the unit sphere in ) to some metrizable space Y. Is the image necessarily homeomorphic to ?

Anyway, while studying I stumbled on a fun little something involving polarizing sunglasses. More on that in a future post.

I tried contacting the seller but he hasn’t responded. So I used PayPal to open a dispute. As I learned, disputes are handled in the following steps:

• You first open a dispute, describing your complaint.
• The seller and you have 20 days to work out your differences.
• If you can’t resolve the problem yourselves, you can escalate the dispute. PayPal then assigns their own fraud investigator who decides whether to refund the payment.

Filing the dispute finally got the seller to contact me. After a brief exchange, he refunded my payment in full.

In the past, PayPal’s handling of disputes received a lot of bad press. I don’t know if this is the result of a fundamental change for the better, but this incident has boosted my confidence in eBay shopping.

The Bad

My first installation attempt was a disaster. First thing I did was create restoration CDs for my ThinkPad, allowing me to completely restore my machine to its factory configuration. Annoyingly, Lenovo don’t supply these CDs with the machine, and you have to burn them from a BIOS utility. All nine of them. The data itself is present in a separate partition on the hard drive, but that of course won’t help you if your hard drive dies.

Next, I downloaded the Ubuntu live installation CD and started installing. I was presented with an option to resize the existing NTFS partition — the first time I’ve seen such an option in a Linux installation. I was a bit suspicious, but I went ahead and used it to shrink the parition and make room for Ubuntu. After that, the machine failed to boot. Ubuntu had destroyed the machine’s partition table.

Looking up this problem on the Ubuntu forums, I found out that the Live CD had a buggy old version of the partitioner which caused this problem. I also learned that the Live CD install was new and not very stable. That’s not an excuse for destroying my hard drive, but whatever. Folks on the forums recommended using the Alternate Installation CD instead of the LiveCD.

Grudgingly, I restored my machine to its original state using the CDs I burned earlier, and started from scratch. This was a very major fuck up that caused me to rethink the whole Ubuntu thing. Eventually I decided to go ahead with it anyway, and luckily from this point on everything went smoothly.

The Good

I used my trusty PartitionMagic to shrink the NTFS partition and make room for Linux. I then installed Ubuntu using the Alternate Installer — that’s the previous, text-based, stable version of their installation CD.

The installation went off without a hitch. As is common with Linux installations, all the choices you need to make are concentrated at the beginning of the installation. So once you hit ‘Install’ you can go away and come back to a fully installed and configured machine. Also, the entire installation required only one or too reboots. What is special about Ubuntu is that it doesn’t ask you what to install. It installs reasonable default packages, and you can install everything else later using Synaptic or apt-get. I like this approach.

Having done a couple of Linux laptop installations in the past, I was expecting a week or so of post-installation tweaking to get everything working. When the machine first booted, I was pleasently surprised to find almost everything working out of the box. This included wireless networking, sleep, hibernation, battery monitor, SpeedStep, subpixel rendering, and the mouse’s scroll wheel, not to mention graphics and USB support.

I almost fell off my chair when I found that all the ThinkPad-specific keys were also working: Volume control, brightness control, wireless on/off, hibernate button, and sleep button. Even the key that controls the keyboard light at the top of the monitor worked! To me, everything-just-works is the most important feature a distribution can have. Ubuntu has mastered this, and it positions Ubuntu as the most user-friendly distrib around.

The Tweaking

Ah, the tweaking. My favorite part of every Linux installation. First thing I did was to upgrade the kernel to a 686-compiled version (Ubuntu comes with a 386 version by default, which doesn’t use newer processor features). To get wireless to work after that, I also had to install the restricted-modules package, because the driver for my wireless card is closed-source. I’m used to compiling custom kernels for my Linux laptops to get everything to work. With Ubuntu, that wasn’t necessary.

Next, I installed Windows fonts (I love Tahoma) and added hebrew support. I used OpenOffice to edit Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and view PowerPoint presentations. All these documents were in hebrew. Everything worked, except for some minor PowerPoint presentation glitches. I also used OpenOffice to convert an HTML document to PDF, which also worked. OpenOffice has made tremendous progress since the last time I tried it. I think a vast majority of users can already use it as an Office replacement.

I also installed the ProggySquare font which I use for shell and programming. The Gnome terminal had trouble showing the TrueType version, so I switched to Konsole.

When I tried to print something, my printer was recognized correctly but didn’t work. This is a well known problem with Canon printers, which require special drivers to work. I just let it go for now, and printed from Windows.

Next thing I did was switch the graphics driver to the closed-source ATI FireGL driver to get 3D acceleration working. Replacing the driver also greatly improved 2D performance, so it’s highly recommended if you have a recent ATI card.

Finally, I did all the fun desktop tweaks: Keyboard shortcuts, adding panel applets, transparent panels, choosing a theme, and choosing a wallpaper. My desktop now looks like this:

The Conclusion

Since the installation, I’ve only booted back into Windows twice, to use a web site that only works in IE, and to print a document. I think I’ll install VMWare on Linux to get rid of the web dependency, and I’m hopeful I’ll never have to leave Linux again.

I’ve used a variety of Linux distributions over the years, including Red Hat, Fedora, Mandrake, PLD, and a few others. I’m incredibly impressed with Ubuntu. It’s by far the best distribution I’ve ever used. It’s so good, I’d feel comfortable recommending it to a non-Linux-savvy user as a complete desktop environment.

• Calexico
• Voxtrot
• PepLab
• The Decemberists

I’ve been playing the Windows/Linux dual-boot game for years now and I’ve grown rather tired of stuff like booting back into Windows every time I want to access my bank account (yes, they only support IE…). So this time I tried to install Linux in VMWare in Windows. This has many advantages. Obviously the ability to work simultaneously on both machines is great. But it also means dead-simple backup of the Linux machine, and the ability to migrate that same VM to new computers in the future without having to reinstall anything.

I therefore installed Ubuntu 6.06 as a VM in Windows. The installation was a breeze and everything worked out of the box. It was the easiest OS installation I ever performed (including Windows installations). But then I started working with the thing and it became obvious that it wouldn’t last: It just wasn’t fast enough. Everything from switching tabs in Firefox to hitting backspace in a terminal and watching it go felt sluggish. Installing VMWare Tools didn’t help either. So, sadly, I gave up on desktop virtualization for now. I guess it’s back to dual-boot land…

Last Friday I was over at my girlfriend’s parents’ house for dinner. My girlfriend’s sister had been nagging me for a while to install something on her laptop, and this time I finally remembered to bring the installation disc. Now, my girlfriend’s family are religious jews, which means there are a lot of things they are not allowed to do on Friday night. A partial list includes: Picking up a computer, turning a computer on, and installing software on a computer. According to these laws, she’s not even allowed to help me use the computer.

Okay, no problem. I got the laptop from her room and turned it on. The login screen showed up. I clicked her user and was asked for her password. Of course, I didn’t have her password, and she wasn’t allowed to give it to me.. Now we had a problem.

I didn’t want to leave the CD with her because I needed it for other purposes, so I had to get into that machine somehow. After several failed attempts at coercing the girl to give up her password, I realized I would just have to hack into it.

Luckily for me, hacking into a normal user’s Windows machine is usually pretty easy. I rebooted the machine, brought up the boot menu (‘F8′), and chose ‘Start in Safe Mode’. The login screen came up and now there was an additional user on the list: Administrator. As I expected, no one had bothered to set the administrator password, and I managed to login by just clicking on it.

Once in, I reset her user’s password, rebooted into normal mode, and logged in with her user. I went back to the girl and told her what I did, and that if she wanted her old password to work she’d have to tell me what it was.. Finally she caved in and gave me her password, which I restored on her laptop. Isn’t it nice how a little technology can break down religious barriers?