May 23, 2004
Cogito Ergo Something
There can be no other truth to take off from than this: I think, therefore, I exist. There we have the absolute truth of consciousness becoming aware of itself.
Jean-Paul Sartre
--Existentialism and Human Emotions
May 19, 2004
Symbolism in politics
For India, his swearing-in will be historic, and not just because of the extraordinary political drama of the last week. A Sikh, Mr. Singh will be India's first non-Hindu prime minister. In a milestone that says much about this vast nation's diversity and capacity for co-existence, Mrs. Gandhi, an Italian-born woman raised a Roman Catholic, is making way for a Sikh prime minister who will be sworn in by a Muslim president, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.
Remote JMX
The Java Management Extension (JMX) API is defined and under maintenance release of the Java Specification Request (JSR) number 3.
JMX defines the API for management of Java applications, and those API are local to the application: remote clients that would like to connect to a JMX-enabled remote application and manage or monitor it using JMX could not do it in a standard way.
The MX4J project, the JMX reference implementation itself, and other JMX implementations provide custom connectors, mostly RMI-based and HTTP-based, but those are not interoperable.
JSR 160 thus provides a standard way to connect to remote JMX-enabled applications using RMI; it is possible to use MX4J JSR 160 implementation on client side, and have a JMX Remote Reference Implementation on server side, or viceversa. This allows the creation of Management Consoles based on Swing, for example, that will be able to interoperate no matter which JMX implementation is used.
May 17, 2004
Weekend Reading
This weekend I read some very simple books:
Lord of the Flies - William Golding. 
Man's search for meaning - Victor Frankl
May 13, 2004
May 10, 2004
May 04, 2004
Taming an elephant
Ancient Pali texts liken meditation to the process of taming a wild elephant. The procedure in those days was to tie a newly captured animal to a post with a good strong rope. When you do this the elephant is not happy. He screams and tramples, and pulls against the rope for days. Finally it sinks through his skull that he can't get away, and he settles down. At this point you can begin to feed him and to handle him with some measure of safety. Eventually you can dispense with the rope and post altogether, and train your elephant for various tasks. Now you've got a tamed elephant that can be put to useful work. In this analogy the wild elephant is your wildly active mind, the rope is mindfulness, and the post is our object of meditation-- breathing. The tamed elephant who emerges from this process is a well trained, concentrated mind that can then be used for the exceedingly tough job of piercing the layers of illusion that obscure reality. Meditation tames the mind.
May 03, 2004
Telephone exchange lookup
North American Telephone NPA NXX Area Code and Prefix Location Databases
May 02, 2004
Religious Tolerance
Religious tolerance has developed more as a consequence of the impotence of religions to impose their dogmas on each other than as a consequence of spiritual humility in the quest for understanding first and last things.
Sidney Hook
--Religious Liberty From the Viewpoint of a Secular Humanist