In Nomine - The Lotus Land

The website should now look a bit better again, especially on the reading side.

For those of you using Thunderbird and want a calendaring option inside of Thunderbird to communicate properly with people using Outlook or Lotus Notes that send you invitations for meetings and the like: Mozilla’s Lightning is now at version 0.8. Lightning is an add-on for Thunderbird based on Sunbird.

If you then also use the Provider for Google Calendar you can synchronise your Google Calendar with your Lightning setup.

I published my vim colorscheme on the vim site today. It is called Shōbōgenzō (正法眼蔵) after the famous collection of Zen Buddhist fascicles (a discrete section of a book).

I am aware the current CSS for the website is not yet taking advantage of the width of the monitor. I am adjusting the most recent version of this template along with Wordpress 2.5. Hopefully during the week.

I spent the past three days doing a lot of coding for my Dutch-Japanese dictionary site Rangaku (or better known as Kouyou). I am happy to see that things are finally starting to pull together now. I had intended to publish things much sooner, but I had a lot of catching up to do on the Python front. Partially thanks to my new job and my own endeavours in my spare time I am mastering Python at least on a level I feel I am reasonably comfortable with it. Of course, the release of various tools like Werkzeug, Genshi or SQLAlchemy helped me a lot as well.

I think Robin Hobb said it quite eloquently in her article on weblogs.

Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient means–themselves of the nature of the world of names and form, though eloquent of, and ultimately conducive to, the ineffable. They are mere symbols to move and awaken the mind, and to call it past themselves. This recognition of the secondary nature of the personality of whatever deity is worshiped is characteristic of most of the traditions of the world. In Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Judaism, however, the personality of the divinity is taught to be final–which makes it comparatively difficult for the members of these communions to understand how one may go beyond the limitations of their own anthropomorphic divinity. The result has been, on the one hand, a general obfuscation of the symbols, and on the other, a god-ridden bigotry such as is unmatched elsewhere in the history of religion. For a discussion of the possible origin of this aberration, see Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (translated by James Strachey; Standard Edn. XXIII, 1964).

Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Fontana Press, 1993; pg. 258

As Yoda says in Episode III - Revenge of the Sith:

The fear of loss is a path to the dark side. Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not. Attachment leads to jealously. The shadow of greed that is. Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.

I tried to find Him on the Christian cross, but He was not there; I went to the Temple of the Hindus and to the old pagodas, but I could not find a trace of Him anywhere.

I searched on the mountains and in the valleys but neither in the heights nor in the depths was I able to find Him. I went to the Caaba in Mecca, but He was not there either.

I questioned the scholars and philosophers but He was beyond their understanding.

I then looked into my heart and it was there where He dwelled that I saw Him; He was nowhere else to be found.

Often misattributed to Mawlānā Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī.

The standards body we thought would help us get the Internet better in shape is actually dying at the hands of elitist members.

The Internet started with open standards and code that formed the IP stack with the BSD Unix software. Later Tim Berners Lee and other people ensured we were able to work with HTML and all these specifications were open and people actively worked to get innovation and fixes in.

Now, since a number of years the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has become the domain where the ones who can pay the membership fees ($50.000 seems normal) get a voice and individuals without such backing are left in the cold.

For some examples, read:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qa-dev/2006Jul/0011
http://www.zeldman.com/2006/07/17/an-angry-fix/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tohellwithwcag2/
http://www.dzr-web.com/people/darren/blog/2006/07/12/is-the-w3c-failing-us/