Open Buddha

Should Mozilla use Freenode for IRC communication?

By and large, the Mozilla community uses an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server operated by MoCo at irc.mozilla.org (IMO). For day to day operations, IMO is used by a variety of groups and projects for communication. For the people that I work most closely with, we use the server for release management of security releases and for overall quality assurance efforts. The development team uses it quite heavily for intercommunication in the #developers channel.

Much of the open source community uses Freenode for IRC communication. The entire Ubuntu project uses it. I know that the Python community uses it quite heavily. The local hackerspace, Noisebridge, even has a channel (#noisebridge). In fact, every project that I know of that has a public face on IRC uses Freenode except Mozilla projects.

Given the cross-group nature of open source, where people often participate in many projects depending on their interests, I really think that Mozilla should move to Freenode. The current situation with irc.mozilla.org feels like a semi-private walled garden. It is a public server, yes, but it is cut off from many of our natural allies. Let’s face it, people are fundamentally lazy in many ways and the extra work that it takes to join another IRC server when someone is already active on Freenode means that many people probably don’t bother to come to the Mozilla IRC server.

A while back, as part of my work in the Mozilla QA organization, I set up #mozilla-quality on Freenode and submitted the paperwork to reqister Mozilla QA as the owner of that channel. We don’t have a lot of people drop into the channel but we get a few irregularly, often looking for help. I have personally seen that when, in response to questions that they want to direct at developers, they are directed to irc.mozilla.org, most of them do not go to the directed channels on the server.

It would be quite easy to register ownership of “mozilla-” on Freenode and to move the bulk of IRC conversations to that network. I think it would be a win-win situation for working with community there and would make Mozilla a lot more accessible to others.

This is something that will probably need to be debated and discussed in newsgroups but I wanted to post something here before beginning that discussion in order to see what the readers of planet.mozilla.org felt about the matter. If you have thoughts on this, please comment.

Mazzariello Labyrinth

This last weekend, R and I were looking for something to do together. I recalled that there is a labyrinth locally in a state park and suggested that we hike out to it. One thing that isn’t readily apparent when you live in the Bay Area is how close some fairly large parks are to the urban areas. R has been making a point of hiking these during the last couple of years but I haven’t seen most of them.

The labyrinth is in the Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve, a large park in the hills behind Oakland about fifteen minutes away from my house. It spans the tops of the hills that separate the coast from the more arid inland areas. The labyrinth is in an old quarry (looking like a small canyon) about twenty or so minutes hike in if you know where you are going. If you don’t know where you are going, as was the case with us, it can take you about an hour to find. You can see the labyrinth clearly on Google Maps if you zoom in on the park and know where to look.

The Labyrinth from the Overlook

The Labyrinth was created by by Helena Mazzariello during the spring equinox of 1990. It is a classical (or 7-circuit), left-handed, earthen labyrinth with the lines set out in pieces of local rock. The term, “labyrinth,” dates from Greek legends of Crete and the labyrinth there with its minotaur at the center. As has been pointed out by some, a labyrinth is not a maze (even though the one in the legend is…) in that there is a single, clearly defined path within a labyrinth that leads in winding fashion from the center of the labyrinth to the center. They are seen by many to be sacral constructions that one walks as a form of meditation or pilgrimage. I’ve known many people that made a practice of labyrinth walking, at least on occasion. They have been used by both non-Christian traditions in Europe and the Middle East (and, separately, in pre-contact North America). Grace Cathedral in San Francisco has a well-known labyrinth that I’ve still never visited:

Given my pagan and esoteric background, I’m quite at home with the idea of labyrinth walking.

When we arrived, the location was overcast, with fog nearby. R and I were alone in the space so, after a few photos, we took the opportunity to walk the labyrinth (and its tiny neighbor) while listening to the frogs. It was a bit water logged in places but it is clear that we were far from the only recent visitors, given the objects left in shrine-like fashion at the center of the main labyrinth.

I’ve put a very small photo set online. There is a page devoted to the “Friends of the Labyrinth” as well, who attempt to keep it maintained and protected.

Kindle, E-books, and Hacking

I’m a great lover of books. I spent much of my childhood with a room of the house dedicated to books (aka the “library room”). By the time I moved out after I college, I already owned hundreds of books and I continued to amass them over the years. Being a former occultist, I had acquired the required collection of hard to find texts. At least one friend of mine complained, after a house move more than ten years ago, of having dreams the next night of seeing unending boxes labeled, “Al’s Books.” Needless to say, the number of books has gotten to be a problem and, at this point, I have a couple of thousand living in boxes in a garage because I don’t have room for them in my house and really don’t always need them at hand. I’ve gotten to the point where I will read a book, decide that I’m not going to read it again (nor keep it on hand for others) and I’m not sure what to really do with it. There aren’t a lot of good options for what to do with used books unless you don’t mind getting completely ripped off selling them to a used bookstore or the like. In an ideal world, I would be able to store the book (so I could have it at hand if I did want it) but not have it take up a lot of space.

All of this makes me a good candidate to go all digital, along with being a complete computer geek. I spend most of my time reading words on a screen for my day job. When the Kindle DX came out, I bought one because the high DPI screens are much nicer than reading an LCD (you do really have to see one to appreciate it) and because the DX had native PDF support. For my school program and scholastic interests, I wound up with a lot of PDF files of articles to read and this way I didn’t have to print them out. I’ve bought a lot of books for the Kindle since I got mine and I really have enjoyed using the device. One of the big problems of the Kindle and similar devices is the non-transferability of the books. I’d rather have books in an open format like EPUB or even PDF than the DRM-laden Kindle format. As has been pointed out, when you buy a Kindle book, you are really long-term leasing the book, not owning it. I’ve worked around this to some degree by seeking (and often finding) pirated versions of the same books that I own in more open formats. I don’t even feel vaguely bad about this. After all, I have already paid for the book. I’m just getting a more suitable archival copy of it. In fact, I’ve been doing this for paper books that I own as well. This gives me more room to clear out my shelf space from many pounds of dead tree.

I have been expecting for a while that the Kindle format would be cracked. Given the cracking of DVDs and even Blu-Ray, I knew it was only a matter of time. No DRM scheme will survive the interest of enough talented individuals. Only one person has to be smarter than the creators, as Cory Doctorow has pointed out, and then everyone else can learn from that person. Well, that day has come, at least partially. It has been reported recently that the Kindle DRM has been hacked. As it turns out, this is not entirely true. Kindle books, while externally looking the same, come in more than one format. The Kindle supports (and Amazon sells) books using the Mobipocket format without DRM (.mobi), Amazon’s topaz format books (.tpz), and Amazon’s DRM-restricted Mobipocket format (AZW). The Amazon topaz format has not been hacked yet. What has been hacked is the Kindle form of the mobipocket format that added DRM. This format is a format based on the Open eBook standard. Most Kindle books are actually the same .mobi books that you can possibly by from other retailers but tweaked for Amazon DRM. (Well, actually, Amazon has a LOT more than any other retailer but they are still mobiformat books for the most part…) Some publishers use the topaz format but it seems to entirely be up to the publisher to choose what they want to create based on the instructions for creating a Kindle book that I’ve read. There are a lot of tools for working with mobipocket format, which is basically just HTML with some special additions and tweaks.

The hack uses a combination of the Amazon for PC application for Windows and two python scripts. One script extracts the books from the Amazon for the PC application when it creates a session for reading the book and the other script strips off the mobipocket DRM, leaving an unprotected mobipocket format book. I tested this out by firing up a Windows XP virtual machines (since I run OS X), installing python and the Amazon for PC, and downloading the two scripts. You fire up the main script (called “unswindle“), which then starts the Amazon for PC application. You then open the book that you want to extract and close the application, unswindle grabs the book and fires up the mobidedrm script to strip off the DRM. I looked at my bought content, as an experiment, and it turned out that out of more than 50 books that I owned, only five or so were in topaz format. The rest were mobipocket books with DRM. I was able to extract a book that I had bought and then fire up Calibre, an open source ebook reader and reformatting tool, and view the book completely outside of any Amazon application.

It will be interesting to see what Amazon will (or can) do to stop this. They’ve updated their PC application once but the author of the script simply made an update and it worked again. While the Amazon application updates by default, users can turn this off. At that point, Amazon will have to make a choice between cutting off users who haven’t updated the application or letting the hack continue to work (since they can’t change the way they do DRM without cutting off users unless they update the application).

It is an interesting problem. As a number of people have pointed out, having no ebooks doesn’t really get rid of piracy either. There have been text file or PDF versions of popular books floating around the net for more than ten years. You can’t really stop a dedicated person from either typing a book in or scanning a book and running OCR on it. For a lot of people, a scanned OCR’d book is “good enough” for them. There is no DRM in the world that can stop that from happening, which makes books an entirely different problem than say music or movies. The printed book is not an analog hole that can be plugged. I’ve ripped the spines off of paperbacks and scanned them before, not for distribution but simply because I was tired of having the paper copy of a reference book on my shelf taking up space. I never bothered to OCR mine, just leaving them as high dpi image-based PDFs. Most books are still under 10 megabytes in size and this isn’t much in an age when people have giant music collections where a single song is easily three to to eight megabytes in size. Print is cheap. I found the process to be tedious but pretty easy if you own a scanner.

Like I said, it was only a matter of time until the DRM was hacked and this is probably the first salvo in what will be another ongoing DRM war between publishers of media and their own customers.

Update: Updated to clarify that there are two book formats, not three. I was confusing Amazons mobiformat with DRM with unprotected mobiformat. The only currently uncracked format is topaz.

Sensory Deprivation and Fun

Your Technological Womb?

Last night, R and I went to Float: The Flotation Center and Art Gallery nearby in Oakland. Float is, as the name implies, a place to float. In this instance, it is floating in a flotation tank aka a sensory deprivation or isolation tank. (Apparently, the older names are now no longer commonly used with their odd associations.)

This is something that I’ve wanted to do for more than 20 years, ever since I read the slightly whacked-out writings of John Lilly when I was a teen. John Lilly (not the same John Lilly as my employer, Mozilla) invented the tank in 1954 and proceeded to use it while whacked out on drugs like Ketamine. (Remember kids, a horse tranquilizer is not for fun!). In spite of these odder connotations, it struck me that the odd isolation would be an interesting thing to be experienced and something that is a bit hard to replicate in one’s day to day life. As it turns out, while flotation tanks are fairly uncommon in the United States, they are quite common in Europe, being associated with spas and relaxation. The co-owner of the facility from last night stated that there are more tanks in London, alone, than all of the United States.

The procedure for the tanks involves, like a Japanese bath, a complete scrub down before getting into the tank. The tank has roughly 10 inches of water with 1,000 pounds of medical grade epsom salts in it. This provides a very odd, oily, consistency to the water but causes it to be slightly denser than a person, making one float on it kind of like an skater bug. The water is heated to around 93 degrees and the air in the tank is pretty warm and humid (I think R called it “fetid”) as well. As experienced by me, you climb into the tank (mine pictured above), turn around to face the outside, sit down and, when ready, swing the door shut. You then gently ease back and find yourself floating pretty naturally. I’m slightly claustrophobic (let me tell you about my attempt to go into the burial chamber under the main pyramid at Giza sometime) and the air is pretty warm and muggy. I had been assured that it wouldn’t set off my claustrophobia, which wasn’t entirely correct. You don’t feel boxed in since the tanks that we were in are eight and a half feet long but the close and warm air in the darkness caused me twinges for a few minutes. I put on my zen game face and just “sat” with it and it went away as I relaxed.

Initially, we were encouraged to play around a bit when in the space, to get a feel for it and because it is the closest to a weightless environment that most of us are likely to get. It also takes a little unlearning to let one’s neck fully relax in the water and not to try to hold the head out, as we have all been trained for pools and the like. As the minutes went by, I gradually lost the sensation of my arms and legs, except when I moved them. The only things I felt were the sensations of water around my face (as the rest of my head was submerged) and my heartbeat pulsing through my chest and limbs. R reported feeling her heartbeat in her neck and the same sensations around the face as well. As an aside, ever since my illness, I have had a fairly strong sensation of my heart beating and my skin or muscles moving in time with it at most times (no one knows why) so I was pretty prepared to feel that. I relaxed, gently feeling like I was kind of spinning or floating in space. Occasionally, a hand or a foot would bump the wall as I kind of drifted about. My mind drifted and I relaxed. Lacking anything in particular to “do” in the tank, I did my shamatha meditation thing and watched my mind and letting my physical body relax since it had no need of support and almost no sensation.

Toward the later part of the float, I had a myoclonic jerk (a sleep start such as when your leg kicks) and then, later, a couple of more. Now, I have these whenever I transition from waking to sleeping since my illness. We had been told that we might fall asleep in the tank and I was skeptical since these jerks have kept me from daytime sleeping for a year. As it turns out, R had them as well and the co-owner mentioned that she has them in the tank. Apparently, they are pretty common as people transition into deeper brain states in the tank. I did find myself in a very relaxed state without much of a sense of time or place with some dreamlike mental churning at that point (I’ve been watching too much Venture Brothers so I saw dreamlike imagery inspired by it). I did not see much in the way of visual effects from my bored optic centers, just some mild colored traceries, such as you see when you rub your eyes lightly when closed. (Note to self: when you see odd things, if they don’t change or go away when you open or close your eyes, they aren’t really “there.”) I had no great bouts of creativity or problem solving occurred (though I did have the epiphany of going to In and Out Burger for burgers after the session while floating, which we did).

After an hour, the co-owner gently rapped on the tank three times (which is the least jarring way of letting people know that they need to get out) and I exited. Following a float, one has to shower as you exit covered in a pretty large amount of powdery salt particles. I rounded out the experience with an hour massage, making it an all-relaxation Christmas Eve.

I would definitely say it was an interesting experience, hype and history aside, and I want to do it again at some point now that I know what to expect. I found it pretty relaxing, though hardly life changing. Apparently, there are some people that arrange to do six hour overnight floats where they sleep in the tank, as well as longer, two hour or more, floats.

Where I am at with blogging or near year end post

The Three Stooges?

My mother, dear sweet mum, has pointed out that I don’t blog anywhere as often as I once did. Yes, this is one of those perennial “I haven’t been blogging much posts.”

As long time followers know, I had a serious illness about a year ago. I picked up a virus (they guess) in Egypt or England during our trip in the fall of 2008. When I came back, I was sick for three months, barely able to work, with hypertension and tachycardia (along with fever) during the illness. I didn’t really begin to recover until sometime in January and it is clear, in retrospect, that I wasn’t very well recovered until the summer. In the course of the illness, I developed a sleep apnea-like problem in which my breathing doesn’t stop during sleep but slows down, causing my body to freak out and try to arouse me. This is probably a latent issue that I had for years but which the illness brought to the forefront. As a result of this, ever since the illness, I’ve been unable to fall asleep very easily and wake, often, ten or fifteen times a night, resulting in fatigue and headaches daily. This has gradually gotten somewhat better to the extent that it isn’t completely destroying me anymore but it is still quite bad. They had me start sleeping with a CPAP machine in the last couple of weeks to see if that will help things since medication and a mouthpiece (to help my breathing be smoother) has not.

Needless to say, no one wants to read about this all of the time so I haven’t said as much about it since spring. The problem is, as my mom pointed out, that I used to do much of my blog posting late at night, when I am no longer up. I’ve switched my schedule around because sleep issues require you to give yourself a predictable and solid sleep schedule. Between that and often feeling just worn out due to lack of sleep and headaches, I just haven’t felt as compelled to write much this last year or had the energy to do so when I have felt the urge.

I am hoping that this will change now in the next couple of months since things seem a bit better but we shall see.

I was also ordained as a priest in my Zen lineage earlier this year during the spring retreat. I haven’t quite figured out what, if anything, this pulls me towards doing beyond a dedication to the study and practice of Buddhism in my own life. I continue to participate in the Five Mountain Buddhist Seminary. I have been and am teaching a few of the classes there and am taking courses this next term, including one on how to write and give Dharma talks. It should continue to be interesting and I’m looking forward to continuing to contribute to the seminary. Over time, the seminary continues to improve and evolve as we learn more about what we are doing there.

Also, on the spiritual front, I joined the Grand Tsubaki Shrine when visiting it earlier this year. Beyond joining and receiving the newsletter, I have not really participated in it, not being local, but I continue to find Shinto fascinating though odd given my general stance of non-theism or friendly agnosticism on spiritual matters these days.

On other fronts, I started and abandoned a doctoral program this fall as well. I decided that the return on the massive amounts of time and money involved were not really worth it. Getting a doctorate in the humanities just wasn’t worth it compared to continuing my Silicon Valley technology career at Mozilla (or otherwise). Frankly, putting myself in debt and working my butt off for six or so years in order to get a job paying half as much (if I’m lucky) in the middle of nowhere (if I’m really lucky and actually can find a job) just isn’t worth it to me. I’m refocusing on my career but I need to make some changes there. Much of my current work, while interesting enough, is a bit of a dead end. I’ve been doing much of the same work in QA for the past few years. Briefly, at Microsoft, I’d managed to transition out of QA for a new career path but I had to return to QA when we moved to California. I need to either improve my coding skills, to open up more options in QA, or do something else within technology or I feel that I am just going to stagnate. (If anyone has any feelings on the Python 2.6 versus 3.0 debate, let me know!)

I am also working on improving some of my real world skills related to technology of the non-computer sort. I took a class in basic welding this last year. I have signed up for a multi-month class on metal milling and lathing at The Crucible and I plan on taking some of the computer-controlled milling classes at the TechShop. I want to be able to work with and fabricate metal components or otherwise create physical objects. I should also have a MakerBot within the next few weeks, which is a 3D printer for making parts out of plastic. My goal is to eventually have a CNC mill as well so I will be able to fabricate metal and plastic components for things as needed. The area of 3D printing has a lot of promise but we are at the very beginning of the mass adoption of the technology. It’s only gotten “cheap” recently (as opposed to being tens of thousands of dollars). I’ve attached a recent video below about the MakerBot:

Beyond all of this, at the union of the technological and the spiritual, I still want to develop more Buddhist resources online. The Zen Community aggregation blog is still going strong, though it takes little work. The One Sangha group blog was effectively stillborn. My attempts to get four to ten bloggers who want to write, at minimum, a single post a week has gotten nowhere. I’d still like to do the group blog but cannot really do it alone. On the “Open Source Buddhism” front, I’d really like to get more resources for sutras, liturgy and other material online but it feels likely to be an uphill struggle on my own. Anyone interested in such projects should e-mail me as “albill” at this domain.

This is my year end update.