fiat lux

Since father’s passed away we have been shedding things in the house. The guest room that never was is finally cleared up. We decided to give away the Mac Plus and will throw away the “made in Taiwan” Apple II and an early 1980s Vector CP/M computer shortly. They have been stored in some paper cartons for the past 10-15 years and have never been powered up again. I don’t even want to take pictures of them before they are out.

My parents, like many of their generation, used to frown at throwing away things. Father was particularly like that. Being a proud Hakka, he valued thrift much. And having served in the water processing and environmental engineering sector (he had overseen construction projects like water supply for chipmakers, incinerator for medical wastes, and so on), he always told us to “think of the impact to the environment” whenever we were going to throw away something. And he was an avid recycler–we’ve got a few appliances around that was rescued by him from the streetcorner. He repaired them and made them back to life.

In recent years, however, that has acutally become a problem. The house we have been living for almost a decade is certain bigger than the last one, which was too small for a house of five, but that doesn’t mean the capacity is unlimited. And again, like many of their generation, he sometimes stocked things out of impulse. When affluent baby-boomers now live in the age of hypermalls and cheap groceries (their prices being the cheapest in real terms in the entire human history), that impulse can bring funny consequences to a house. Many of my friends also shared the complaint that their parents buy too much, throw away too little, and their houses are full of clutters.

And we the Taiwanese, unlike our Japanese neighbors, are really, really bad at organizaing and utilizing space.

So for the past few months, since my family reached an agreement on what to keep (mostly photos and a limited number of personal belongings), we have been throwing away things. It was lot of work, and it is amazing that we are still throwing away things today.

For me, the past few months have been difficult. Emotionally we have to come to terms with the loss. But finding time to de-clutter the house, in addition to my already very hectic work schedule–it’s always hectic when you now have your own business, teaming up with partners, and playing multiple roles at the same time–is also such an ordeal. I have to devote a day or two every week. Lots of decisions and re-thinkings are involved in the process.

Still, we must do it and have to think what we really need in the next 2-3 years. There will be lot of things happening around. Like little brother is going to college in ’08, and I’ll certainly travel more. If we don’t de-clutter and don’t reconfigure the space, we’ll be literally stuck in a spatial impassé. Not that we lose our mobility literally, but that’s a very subtle psychological thing, and the fact that the space you live in reflects your mental state. Life must carry on with some reconfiguration.

My father’s recycling virtue has its sad side. His refurbished appliances have brought us some problems, and now we have lost a mechanical genius that could take care of them. I might be the one that have some of his skills in repairing things, but fixing software bugs already takes away most of my energy, and I don’t really want to spend yet another minute when I’m at home to rewire the speakers that stop working, or re-install Windows XP on those old PC boxes (horror!) that are noisy and in effect not really energy-efficient.

We have thought about selling them on auction sites. But taking photos of them is another time-consuming work. Many of them just don’t have brands. The “made in Taiwan” Apple II wasn’t of really much value. And giving them away to people? There are way too many things to give away, and it’s not easy to find the right people–or just finding people who are willing to take them is hard enough. We do have donated a used Acer desktop PC set to a middle school, which in turn gives it to a student who needs a PC at home.

In the end we have no choice but to throw many things away. Gladly we live near a household that does recylcing for Tzu Chi Foundation, one of the largest charity organizations in Taiwan. They categorize and arrange things and re-distribute them to people in need.

The one thing that my sister and I had been telling father is: we actually have more than enough in the house. The same can be said of many of my generation’s house. Overstocking things create clutter, and clutter ends up in waste. The sad thing is that not all waste have high residue market value, and clearing them out is another time-consuming, economically inefficient thing. So refurbishing or repackaging those stuff is just out of the question (they’re not economically rewarding at all–and I doubt the probability of changing hands successfully), throwing them away seems to be the only viable solution if we are to de-clutter.

So today I came to this “advice to parents” on my Twitter: if you really value the virtue of thrift, don’t be a pack rat.

lukhnos :: Aug.05.2007 :: bon-vivant :: Comments Off

Have been experiencing some ennui, fatigue, languor that I haven’t experienced for a long while. Perhaps the more energetic and productive the previous stage was, the stronger and the lower the other phase of the wave becomes.

Lately the fetish has been Twitter.

Gradually understood the notion of “being lost”. You don’t have to be disoriented to be lost. One can still be lost when he or she is there. It’s a inner-state, inter-state, and intra-state thing.

My room is a mess and so is the surrounding. Lately I often think about what Moby comments on his Hotel. Namely, hotel is a metaphor to the world we live in. We come and go, but the hotel room will be made again and still anew, as if no one has come before.

Responsibility has its weight and is never weightless even if you’re roaming (mentally) in a lethargic space.

“There is no way out for the time being.” I thought to myself. But hey. Should it be rather: “There is no way out for the time being being”, “There is no way out for the time being being“, “There is no way out for the time being been”, or “There is no way out for the time being been“.

Honestly, I don’t know.

lukhnos :: Jul.27.2007 :: essayer :: 1 Comment »

What follows is an excerpt of this blog entry written in Chinese. Ken made a translation so as to encourage more people to see this film, Helvetica the Film.

Finally, er, I went to see this movie.

Many segments were comical (the audience in the theater actually burst out in laughter). When it came to the birth of Swiss style, the editing was seamless and graceful to the extreme.

When Michael Bierut‘s side cheerfully suggested that this typeface resembles the end of history and a typographical “finality”, I realized suddenly that this movie may be the most profound I have seen in years. Behind its starting point of visual design lurks that which is modernity. The closing remarks depict in some sense how these designers view future generations’ living in a world where “all is said and done” possibly (because it is a typeface almost thought unsurpassable), even slightly triggering a certain lacrimal corner in my eyes. This took me by complete surprise, just as nobody could predict that the typeface originally known as Neue Haas Grotesk would be a sign of our times.

The director Gary Hustwit said that DVDs will go on sale on October 9, clocking in at two hours long (the theater cut is 80 minutes). The original soundtrack will be distributed as an iTunes playlist.

Because this blog entry is about WWDC, let me mention two facts about the movie and the Mac:

1. One motivation for making the film was that the director wondered about the fonts that came with his first Mac in 1987.
2. Characters in the film as senior as Massimo Vignelli, as young as the Experimental Jetset group, and as iconoclastic as Paula Scher are all Mac users.

I’m saying both too much and too little. This is a documentary I truly cannot summarize yet want to see several times more. (It cannot even be said to praise or criticize the typeface.)

Just go see it.

lukhnos :: Jun.16.2007 :: tekhnologia :: 1 Comment »

I haven’t got time to check out what other blogs are saying about this year’s WWDC, but many complained that the keynote speech was a bit dull and flat, not too much excitement.

The afternoon sessions were much better from my perspective, but they are much more in-depth and more technical than last year’s state of the unions. I’m glad that Apple is addressing the trend of applications moving to the web. But whether the iPhone factor would actually become a Cocoa killer. That is, now that iPhone only has JavaScript/HTML/CSS, and people are moving to the web anyway, why should we bother with Cocoa?

lukhnos :: Jun.12.2007 :: tekhnologia :: Comments Off

My kudos to the organizers of sf/Mac indie soirée. That was really the meet-up that I was looking for at last year’s WWDC!

lukhnos :: Jun.11.2007 :: tekhnologia :: Comments Off

I’ll be attending WWDC 2007 from 6/11 to 6/15. Things to watch closely: CoreText, CoreAnimation, PDFKit, WebKit-Cocoa integration (and all those RIA–Rich Internet Application–talk), and Ruby-Cocoa bridge, and how to put everything above together to cook an evil app. Some possibilities for iPhone dev are also very welcome.

Overall, as this is a good year for Apple, hype and optimism should abound. The delayed shipment of Leopard is but a factor to be considered. Because none of the “cool and edgy” application tech will exist on Tiger (CoreText, CoreAnimation, Objective-C 2.0). Apple may also need to answer the challenge from Adobe (Apollo) and Microsoft (SilverLight) in an age where platform is at the same time irrelevant (the only platform that matters is the web browser) and still makes differences (in terms of productivity, availability of tools, etc.).

This WWDC will be important to me as I’ll decide my own “tech roadmap” from what I’ve learned and heard there. One crucial piece among them will be how Apple respond the RIA challenge. I’m also eager to learn how indie software developers response to the web app challenge and the trend to open source. Let the show begin.

lukhnos :: Jun.10.2007 :: tekhnologia :: Comments Off

Mom asked sister to read Amitabha Sutra (阿彌陀經) for dad. We had done this a few times since dad passed away. I roughly understood what the sutra was about at the first few readings, so when sister asked what this sutra is talking about, I did a rough explanation.

Some terms, such as arahato samasam buddhasa (阿耨多羅三藐三菩提, in Chinese it means 無上正等正覺, or satori in Japanese), do require some look up. This is when Wikipedia comes in handy. The problem with Buddhism-related entries on the Chinese version of Wikipedia, though, is that not all of them have cross-lingual links to other Wikipedias. Interestingly, this is where a little knowledge of Japanese comes to the rescue. Japan happens to be the farthest place to which Buddhism has spread in Asia, but it is Japanese that acts as the intermediary between the different language traditions.

Amitabha Sutra demonstrates many features found in oral literature: repetition, citation of names, and use of short, rhythmic constructs. The common cited Chinese version is the work of Kumarajiva (鳩摩羅什, 344 CE-413 CE), one of the greatest translators in the history of Chinese literature. Still, according to Yang Mu (楊牧), a Taiwanese poet, Kumarajiva’s translation is a mixture of transliterated Sanskrit and some “not entirely gramatically correct written Chinese”, and this contributes to “the exoticism found in the Chinese translation of Buddhist sutras”. Nonetheless, this “exoticism” has contributed a lot to the Chinese language. Many everyday phrase, notably incredible (不可思議, originally a measure of time) and ksana (剎那), comes from this translation practice. One common misconception, though, is the reading of kalpa (劫); the original Chinese meaning for this character means disaster and trial, but in Sanskrit it actually means a very, very, very long time.

What Amitabha Sutra teaches is simple. Told by Buddha himself, the sutra is about the paradise in which Amitabha resides and achieves his work. It is beautiful and has singing birds. A theological question concerning whether those birds shouldn’t belong to the paradise “because they are animals” (and animals belong to the Realm of Animal) is answered by Buddha. In order to enter this paradise, Buddha says, one needs to heed his teaching, and cite Amitabha’s name. But there’s no need to worry, because this teaching is good for anyone who “has expressed such willingness, is having such willingness, or will express such willingness” to be born in the paradise of Amitabha, and such teaching also works for anyone who “had lived, is living, or will be born to live”. And the teaching has lasted long enough (over five kalpa, which is longer than what human can imagine) and is also taught by gods of different worlds. Anyone who follows Buddha’s teaching in this sutra will be able to achieve arahato samasam buddhasa.

The reading of Amitabha Sutra and the citation of Amitabha’s name makes the fundamental of the Pure Land School (淨土宗). I have some problem with this practice. But the understanding of the sutra helped me understand why this sutra is read and cited in the ritual for the dead in Taiwan. It also helped me understand why mom would read the sutra for dad. For Buddhists, reading the sutra is among the help one could do for the dead.

There are two interesting things about Amitabha Sutra. Although not manifested, the sutra talks about the effectiveness of Buddha’s teaching, and how the faith in it can help the work of gods permeate both time and space, so much so that it works for anyone, including those who were no more (“who had lived”) and those who are to come (“who will be born to live”). This, in turn, demonstrates what books like Sophie’s World say about the Indo-European religions (and cultures, languages, and as a consequence, mentalities): the sensitivity and sensibility of time, the distinction and division between the past, the present and the future (and the further distinction between imperfect and prefect, and so on), the circularity of space and time, and the hope for salvation.

Learning about Buddhism is easier than before. Still, some Japanese or some basic knowledge about Sanskrit (some factual, Linguistics 101 things, such as the language has eight cases, or it has a complex but expressive tense system, or just that it shares many features with other Indo-European languages) will help you (in this case, myself) get a bit further. Actually one of my first paid programming jobs, in 1995, was developing a simple search engine for Chinese Buddhism texts collected by Buddhism Research Center of National Taiwan University. It was one of my first “extreme programming” experience (a friend of mine being the driver, while I observed and helped run the chores). The entire program was written in C, and the search was confined to Chinese texts. How the whole thing has evolved.

So these are the bits and pieces. We spent the evening doing these small researches on the web, learned something. Then some Ketil Bjørnstad over AirTunes.

The sense of loss will not go away. At least it will take another while before we would be able to carry on.

But I’m glad to have come to some more understandings, and equally glad to know that those will not be futile.

lukhnos :: Apr.08.2007 :: essayer :: Comments Off

The older you get, the more boring travelling alone becomes. It’s different when you’re younger — whether you’re along or not, travelling can be a gas. But as you age, the fun factor declines. Only the first couple of days are enjoyable. After that, the scenery becomes annoying, and people’s voices start to grate. There’s no escape, for if you close your eyes to block these out, all kinds of unpleasant memories pop up. It gets to be too much trouble to eat in a restaurant, and you find yourself checking your watch over and over as you wait for buses that never seem to arrive. Trying to make yourself understood in a foreign language becomes a total pain.

H. Murakami, “A Folklore for My Generation”, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, London: Harvill Secker, 2006 (emphasis mine).

lukhnos :: Mar.15.2007 :: essayer :: Comments Off

It turns out that launchd, Apple’s take of rc.d and all those init stuff, doesn’t like daemons. For the traditional services to be launched by launchd as a daemon, you have to first turn off the “daemonize” option, and let launchd takes care of it for you.

So as things migrate from StartupItems to LaunchDaemons, many packages of MacPorts (formerly known as DarwinPorts) have followed suite. The problem is some services only come with daemon mode. So MacPorts comes up with a helper utility called daemondo, which launches the daemon in another process and monitors its starting up, so as to pamper launchd.

mongrel_cluster_ctl, in this case, requires daemondo (mongrel_rails comes with no-daemon mode though), because it spawns a number of mongrel processes in a daemon-like way, which launchd doesn’t like. Copy any script that involves daemondo, and turns every debug message on. Tracing launchd can be a tricky thing, you’ll need every verbosity at hand. And just skip any script that does not mention the keyword daemondo–they are guaranteed not to work.

lukhnos :: Mar.12.2007 :: tekhnologia :: Comments Off

About this I have been thinking lately: we are not human RSS readers. It is true that it’s hard to write and talk about anything these days. Anything would require at least some googling (and that does not even constitute a bit of research), and to hold an opinion risks being ignorant, because there’s always some newer, better development that one simply can’t grasp. We have this much horizon and this much capacity of digesting inflows.

My observation is that some people turn into another extreme, feeding themselves on endless feeds and latest gimmicks or technologies, or anything. In front of them it’s hard to hold an opinion, because there’s always another side that they know while you, without that much digestion, don’t. Well it might not be a bad thing though, as they’ll always remind you how ignorant you are. Your opinions and ideas will run thru their most stringent scrutiny, and then be treated as yet another piece of work in the flow.

On the other hand, that scrutiny might stifle even the least silly effort to make a noise. And one might feel that to beat them (or to join them) one also has to turn himself or herself into one that digests.

Well, I have always been the silly that makes noise that might have been heard and said and spoken over and over. Reinventing the wheel while I could join the system and leverage and leapfrog. But if I make a noise because that’s what I feel like to and feel natural to, I guess I won’t give it up to the endless human RSS feeds.

lukhnos :: Mar.11.2007 :: essayer :: 1 Comment »