My current state is like waterfall, where water from gentle push, accelerated forward towards the abyss, reaches the point of no return, forms it’s turbulent flow speeding up with gravity only to crash on the rocks below. Where it’s cohesive form tears apart, forming chaotic spray of bits and pieces of the greater self, the flow, scrambling, unable to recombine to it’s previous form. I am someone who controls the self and rechecks it way too many times, questioning actions and thoughts, analysing, reanalysing, recombining, trying different approaches, imagining the other possible outcomes either past or future.

Someone I don’t know well recently enlightened me. I’m just trying to be polite almost all the time. And it is why I stay out of the way. I don’t call, I don’t try to get one’s attention, I’m simply trying to remove myself from the existence of other people’s lives so they wouldn’t have to cope with me. Because I feel like I’m an obstacle, someone who is not needed by others and simply unwanted in their social landscape. I have learned to stay out of the way, being a stranger, an outsider, forcing myself into rejection and I have learned to manage the pain that comes with consciously staying outside of others lives.

I’m polite except maybe for those times I’m trying to be mean on purpose. However this hurts my feelings, even if I know this is right thing to do. From the psychological standpoint it might suggest I’m submissive. Taking a deeper look inside this actually might be true most of the time. I have a problem with relations with other people because of a friendship-ego paradox as I like to call it.
All of my observations about myself indicate I might actually be a highly disfunctional person. Leading to conclusions I am a narcissist, because I am obsessed with myself, with the image of the person I am, how I feel inside and am perceived, with the ethics of my actions and feelings that I have towards others and how I fit into sociological spectrum of my past, current and future situation. Being an introvert I perceive the world as a multidimensional medium which is a theater of interconnected, complex interactions, systems, actions and reactions, cause and effects, where logical and orderly world mixes with emotional and chaotic dynamic of the fabric, the lifescape that my brain perceives or even is somehow generated by it. And I am driven by fantasies and imagination to the point I prefer to live inside and the outside world is just a stimulus to emotional vibrations inside of me.

I feel so lonely recently. There is really no one in this Universe with whom I could share my thoughts and my feelings, even the slightest parts of myself. I feel like my inner world is a gift and a curse. There are so many subtleties, so many sensory excitations I could never let out of me, because there is no medium I could connect with and share myself. I know what this medium is called – it’s empathy – something I am aware of, I know how it works, but I’m unable to obtain and use. It simply feels like I am closed in this inner world of myself. This might be because my ego is over the top. I don’t question it. Psychopaths are known to be so focused on themselves they don’t see other people, they use them as tools. I’m not really sure if I am one, however I might be trying to excuse myself.

This note is about me, about what I really feel and how I’m trying to understand myself – simply to become a better, maybe even decent person. My excuse is that no one really gave me attention I needed, so I have adjusted my outside image to appear stone cold, distanced and boring. However I do understand that my needs here could easily lead me to feel like the center of Universe. I am trying hard not to let myself being egocentric prick I can be. Feeling like a center of Universe is a paradox, because when you finally reach this state, you feel tired and simply don’t want it, no matter how much it feeds your monster ego. That’s why I am trying hard not to cross the line and deliberately forcing myself to destroy my need for attention.

So I have fought with this need, because even if I’m disfunctional, I’m still trying hard to be human as much as I can resemble one. I know how it sounds. I have a problem with low self-esteem. Maybe it looks to others like this and perhaps is partially right. However I’m really self aware. I am aware of qualities and deficiencies that build the core of myself. I can relate and imagine an image of how others perceive me. With high probability I can only say that if they are persistent enought, they scratched the surface of who I am really. My appearance and behaviour when interacting with others is that of a boor, boring, distant and cold person. I suppose most people are holding back to themselves  also, because many of them are introverts, posing as socialised, friendly and outgoing. But they live in their inner world, caught inside a beautiful trap – some perhaps like me, because it is too dangerous to be themselves completely or even partially in front of others.

Maybe I could explain things much clearer and serve everything on artfully designed plate. But I will leave my thoughts and feelings, explanations and expansions between the lines. I am not aware about how much you can understand from this, but I appeal to your intelligence and emotions if you really want to know me. There are many splits and discontinued thoughts here, left out, hidden inside. Only a person with exceptional receptiveness, emotional intelligence and sensitivity can understand me. I’m not making it easy, because I believe in beautifully pure art that is available only to few chosen ones, to those who have additional sense. This rant is like a scream, a calling, so loud, yet falling on universal deafness.

I am really sorry if this sounds like I believe I am someone special, but this is simply not the case. I simply can’t relate to others, because I have almost no empathy, I only know how my mind works, how my feelings change perception of the world. I have never seen the world through someone elses eyes. I am unable to gain insight how others might perceive what I have written here. This is not because I feel superior. This simply comes out of my experiences. Either people are so closed within themselves they can’t perceive others, just like me, or they are unable to do so, because of their lack of adequate sensitivity. I really need someone to show me, to teach me how to become open again. But this is no easy task – I was trying to open myself for people so many times, leaving myself fragile, naked and without any defenses. All I got was getting hurt, abused and left with the feelings of being used. Not to mention the pain I had to cope with after putting my trust on someone, believing that this person would not take advantage of me and simply appreciate who I am really.

I don’t trust people. I think I can never open myself again. People with whom I shared myself were simply oiks. People around me mostly are oiks. And I have become one, because of peer-pressure. Inside however I’m still a person of high standards, respecting differences, variable approaches, ingenius ideas, subtleties, simple joys of life and overwhelming beauty of it. I would lie if I didn’t enjoy peoples behaviours and sometimes I like to go with the flow of the crowds, being part of it. But for most of the time I prefer to be silent and embarassed with this behaviour. Why, oh why? People think it’s fun, it’s how the world goes, everybody is doing something so why not me? But I ask you: where the hell is responsibility? Where the hell are virtues? Life is not about constant hedonistic indulgence. So I remain silent. In the recent few years everything flipped on it’s head. The lowest and most plebeian actions are glorified, where those which really matter are being ridiculed of and sometimes even assaulted or openly fought with. What the hell is wrong with the state of our civilisation?

Maybe someone would just say: “chill out man”. Well. I can’t god dammit! I understand much. I am somehow smart. I have eyes wide open. I read much. I think way too much. But I also understand balance. The need to position yourself on neutral grounds. But I have to be serious sometimes. I have to be simply because someone has to be. And I’m no freaking fanatic, because I’m always trying to understand both sides rationalisations and their needs. Really. I’m tolerant. But I can’t allow myself to become corrupted with laziness of thought. I can’t allow to choose the paths of least energy possible, because they lead to destruction of the soul, individual, the people, this civilisation and are simply not worthy a human being. Progress currently is perceived as unstopabble freight train of irresponsibility that is heading straight for the wall.

But I have lost most of my hopes. I can’t fight anymore. I don’t want to. I’m trying to bring back those bits and pieces of myself that the world and previous experiences smashed and spread around telling me they are bad, inadequate or unfit. Yet I know they were good, however people took them and simply destroyed what I believed – telling me their lies, forcing me to become one of them. Yes. I distance myself here from others. And this is only because I believe that what I have learned along the way was good – yet I was stupid to allow myself to be corrupted with crowd psychology. I am trying hard to be noble man. Yet I feel that most of those qualities that were once in high regard, are now unpopular among fellow members of this society. And this also forces me to drift away from people.

World is a shallow place now. People are shallow. I have built a hard shell inside that possibly I won’t open ever again. I will sadly digest my feelings alone. With this painful feeling of loneliness – despite so many people around me. They are not, never were and quite possibly will be true. I’m sorry for the people, but I’m also sorry for myself. My current belief is that the pain of loneliness however is very small price to pay, but it has an advantage of leaving all the hurt and abuse of my inner world outside.

I believed and yet still believe I might find someone who will understand me and connect with my inside universe on a deeper level. I can’t allow myself to open in front of a person who I can’t trust, without deep mutual understanding and emotional connection. And I have to get to know this person well, before I can even try to open. It’s a matter of my previous experiences. I might appear as boring, careless, stupid and simply uninteresting person. Sure. But this is my first line of defence against dishonest, uncaring people. Yet I do have a good heart and good soul. I can be caring. My emotions can be as wild, almost uncontrolled firestorm. They can be soft as a touch of a feather. I am extremely sensitive person and trust me – I can show how deep the emotions can go. I can be so warm and subtle, that it could feel like dreamy drifting among the clouds. And my touch can cause you to explode with overwhelming feelings. Yet. No one really allowed me to show my qualities. Everything is hidden inside, dormant and waiting for someone special. But… Even I still have hope, I don’t believe it anymore.

No one really gave me enough time, patience and good will to let me show what is inside me. And if only someone could prove to me that he can be trusted I will give everything I am. But I would have to know this person well, spend time with and especially engage in communication. When there’s no free exchange of thoughts, no one can really learn about another. And I really love conversations – yet I don’t get many. From some people I get none.

The Brotherhood, The Cell And The Network. The Book that is going to be written. We can fuck up or build everything according to our wishes.No restraints can be put on us. We are the power sublime. Come on, nobody is really so weak as they tell us. You are not weak, you just don’t feel the powerful weight you have in your hands. Some of us are stronger than rock. We use brutal force for assaulting more and more of their fortresses. Those will be crushed. We use our soft skills on those we like, we drag them into our orbit, they become one with us. I’m not saying we are against independence of the one, I’m saying about collectiveness of ideas and convergence of power in our hands. We can do much more together than anyone can think about.

Voy perdiendo. Or do I?

Simply speaking I lost… Yeah… I lost something that was a handicap for me. Finally shaken it off. Learned to respect people. Learned to worship them. And learned to follow the long forgotten Goddess. And she recognized me as I recognized her. And she gave me the most beautiful gift one could ever receive – perfect love. And this time it’s simply breathtaking. And it’s awesome. Hail the Goddess!

And it’s full of bliss. What has to happen has to happen. If you’re open enough you can deal with it, and tonight it’s not my part. We think alike, we like what each other does, we are tolerant, we are full of magic even if we don’t realise it fully. And I can’t retract it any more… I’m so fascinated with you, I feel so dragged to you, like I was caught in a magnetic field that is stronger than ever. I really can help myself. I hear that you are so fine, so moderate. I can help myself. I just wanna be with you.

And I like that you’re direct. So much I could even imagine there are people like you who would treat it as intrusion, not as simple as a statement of will. And I bow to it. I like it. A lot… The sublime softness. Matching of characteristics. Well. Maybe that’s just my imagination. If it is, then I’m really prepared to go to hell, at least I could catch some breath knowing where I stand.

I’m not afraid. I find it so adrenaline pushing to find out the truths, even if it takes a life out of me. I’m not afraid. I’m curious. It’s like oxygen to breathe.

It’s all about the pressure. The more you push, the more kickback you will encounter. It’s like trying to squish one’s soul into solidified shape. There will always be an eruption on the path of the lowest resistance. And the ejected material would be carrying so much force it could overwhelm you. After thirty years it would be heavyweight. Like a solid punch. And I like it this way. Almost exploding with the power of a megaton nuclear device. If you think you can take it, go ahead and try me. If not, simply say so.

And don’t try to play with me, I’m too experienced for games. I like it straight. Or sublime. But I’m sure the level needed for the second option takes so much effort it’s better to say it once. I will hear it. And I won’t think you’re idiot or somehow not adjusted. I just have to analyze it. It takes time.

If you’re real, and you’re fine, I can accept your deficiences, because I also have many. And in fact. So far. I don’t care about yours. I don’t care about what people are saying about you. They know nothing. I’m afraid that mine are too much to cope with, for anyone else but me. And really. If we can raise each other to the next level, I’m all yours.

And if it turns out we are incompatible, well, I’ll pack my sack, say a nice goodbye and set my sail towards my destiny.

So I have more than I wanted. And I feel like life is just starting to feed me the hose. I should be worried, yet I don’t think I’d drown from overfeeding. In fact I like it when things are entering through my doors like an angry mob. Yet I am so calm. Exceptionally steady. And yet so elastic.

Do you really believe that you can achieve something exceptional if you don’t sacrifice everything and push the limits? The more I feel I can’t, the more I push myself harder. And what I see is that living my life exactly the way I did, I can surpass my own deficiences. It shows. I’m doing something that matters.

Some of my best friends say – yes, but you are alone. They are right. However when you set your mind to follow this vibe, you know that self-sacrifice is really satisfying and fulfilling. There are more important things than one’s happiness. And it’s only one side of the story, because INTP’s are happy with it. I am INTP. I am an architect. Exceptional performance of the self is not enough for me. You think you’re on the limit – fuck that and cross the line. That’s how I do. That’s how I learn. Everything, and I mean really, must be analysed. Like a building blocks of the overarching complexity – everything put in place within the cathedral of belief and logic.

So. That’s just a pun towards those who once said I might not be the smartest, but certainly something deep comes from my rants. Well. Fuck you and good luck. You never understood the depth of the abyss. I could say something about this world. I could say something about both of you. I could say something about the future. I won’t. Perhaps knowledge should be shared as some say. However I’ve realised that speaking about some things too early would put the etiquette of craziness on you. So I don’t. Only now people are beginning to grasp a little about how the world goes, yet when I spoke about those things ten years ago, everybody was saying I’m nuts. Now they slowly agree on that what I’ve been saying then was true. However they don’t remember ten years ago I was warning them about it. Now I don’t give a shit.

I’ve always questioned myself. Subconsciously preparing for the great showdown. But I don’t speak about this anymore. You’ll soon see what I meant.

There’s only me and my music. My emotions and my drift. I’m echoing deep within because you might see I was someone really special – misunderstood, but very special. Now I know everything is lost for everybody and I am not going to raise my finger about it, when you finally realize that I was right. Not only this. I am going to divert my energies towards helping them achieving their goals. I know they know it. I am just too tired and my stance was always neutral. Never for myself. Just because I know people are too biased, too indifferent.

What am I talking about? Well. Perhaps about the greater or the grandest plans of them all. Perhaps about the war that consumes all without their knowledge. Perhaps about the philosophy of life. And maybe I was always so dark, so cold and so distant because I knew about things that are about to happen. And I knew that it’s all a lost cause. Yet I know that when what has to happen, will, I would be blamed about not saying so. Remember what I have to say: fuck you and eat your shit.

I am neutral. I know I will pay my price. However all that I need is a sacred peace. That’s all.

Perhaps I could elaborate more about psychology of the crowds. Perhaps I could say something about geopolitics and geostrategy. Perhaps I could say about the big money. About enterpreneurship, manipulation, politics, sociology, technology, order and discord, rites and spontaneous actions. Perhaps I could show you how the world behaves, how it runs, how groups achieve their goals, and perhaps I could say about self-fulfilling prophecies. I won’t. And don’t ask me. I had too much time on my hands for the last few years. I’m still struggling to understand few nuances, but I already grasped the big picture.

If you don’t know the power of pain, don’t try to understand this world. Knowledge is burden. I am somehow in a position of authority, however nowhere to be recognized. My sword is scientific method, analysis, observation and logic. I assure you – what it will give you is only a heart cold as stone. Why? Because if you don’t build a wall against this knowledge it will make you crazy. You have to build immunity to emotions if you want to know.

I am an accidental illuminati. Been at right places at right time. Studied what no one sane would. I understand what’s happening, but I don’t assess. I am neutral. I see good and bad sides of the force. I understand where we, as a civilisation, are going. And the keyword is Kardashev Scale. And the second keyword is Peak Oil. And the third is Malthusian Catastrophe. And the fourth is Eugenics.

We won’t escape from fate. We won’t escape from progress. We won’t escape from dystopian future that somehow hangs above us all like a sword. It’s a break or make point. Hopeless and tragic either way. But who cares? To understand what I mean would take another illuminate by accident or not. Wars? Sometimes they are justified. Slavery? Sometimes. Mind control? Definitely if we are to embark on a greater journey… I am sorry, but all you believe is real isn’t. And I know that no matter what I say here, this would go down the drain in the chaos of idiocy.

So where are the emotions in it? There aren’t any. You’re looking in the bad direction.

Emotions? I personally find them inside myself. When it’s middle of the night. When it’s cold. There’s only me and overwhelming music. Emotions are in dreams. In savage trance. In a spark enlightened by touch and melody. I thought that I am stupid, because nobody related to me. I thought I am strange, because nobody thought the way I do. I thought I was so cold, because nobody grasped my emotions. I know I was wrong. It wasn’t my fault, no matter how I thought it was. Think I am biased? I always question myself. I always take few attack vectors to bite the problem from different angles. I thought I was missing something.

Now I know. It’s not me who is missing something. It’s you, no matter how impossible, even for me. Being an INTP is hard. Yet. I don’t have to explain myself. That’s why those who really know me say that I’m wise. I wouldn’t say so, because I know how much I lack in my conscience. I know so little, yet so much to judge. But I judge only fake people. No matter who you are I can find the true believer in people who are rejected by most of this society. And that gives me a reason to hate those who believe in their arrogance they are somehow better than others. Those who think their beliefs are better than others.

You might think I am exactly the same from what I have said here. I am not. Why? Because what I believe is open to criticism. Because my beliefs follow logic that is based upon hard facts and evidence. Because what I feel is simply succession of building blocks based upon ingenious logic and observation. I am an architect. I have to grasp, analyze and put into order complex systems spanning multitude of disciplines. And my intuition never failed me. You don’t have to believe it.

I had to turn my heart to a stone to achieve what I want. I’m progressing. Evolving. Business is a bitch, but I love it. I really am happy seeing that my work matters. When you see that your profits gain two hundred percent within three months you see that you’re doing something right. However that what I am doing is nowhere near what I want to.

The best thing I learned recently is that I’m not afraid to speak loudly and object what is ultimately wrong for me. I am not afraid to put the pressure on local and global politics. I have means to do that, because I already know that one person is able to change everything – persistence, carefully crafted words and unshaken logic is better than the sharpest sword.

Words are the most powerful weapon.

But I don’t like to fight all the time. My life is as stressful as it gets – simply because I am a perfectionist. Everything I do and others do for me must achieve perfection. And I expect no less. However I do understand that it takes time to achieve this level of sophistication. I know that I spent many years to achieve this and that’s why I don’t demand this exceptional performance from those who learn. In fact, I believe in failures and have faith, because I know everyone needs to learn on their mistakes – if only he or she is willing to progress, to achieve perfection, to show that it matters.

However when someone repeatedly abuses my good will, I am turning to a ruthless avenger. Simply – don’t fuck with me – especially when it comes to my emotions. There were so many people that robbed me of myself and my fiery emotional responses, that I am not willing to sacrifice anymore of them. Just saying.

What I am into is mystical, perhaps beyond this world and even understanding that can be achieved now – in our lifetime – during our lives. I strive for understanding, the greater knowledge. I believe that universe is symphony that awaits to be heard in it’s all enveloping glory – a symphony of billions. Symphony of emotions and quintessence of lives. As a universal soul that sings.

So how am I doing? Fine. Just fine. I don’t need anything really. Perhaps my worldly needs sometimes manifest themselves, but in fact I am happy with all I’ve got and all I am. Things above this are simply presents from the Universe.

Somehow it likes me I suppose.

mkdir /etc/profile.d
cat > /etc/profile.d/mc-chdir.sh << EOF
#!/bin/sh
if [ /usr/libexec/mc/mc.sh ]; then
    . /usr/libexec/mc/mc.sh
fi
EOF
chmod 775 /etc/profile.d/mc-chdir.sh

Being lucky to own a new machine capable of running multiple virtual systems, I have decided to try few of them I wasn’t able to easily install and use before. Being a hardcore Linux user, but not inclined to bash Microsoft or any other operating system vendor right out of the box (hey, Windows 7 is not that bad after all), I have tried few Linux distros I wasn’t very familiar with and also this new Windows 8 Developer Preview.

Since I am a familiar with and really like Mandriva I’ve decided to give this new Mandriva 2011 a spin. I’ve downloaded new Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Mageia and some other distros also just to try and see if any of them really are being that much different from the others. I wanted to see the progress in Linux and other operating systems as I haven’t got touch with other systems than XP, Mandriva and Gentoo recently.

I won’t go into details of each and every OS I have tested, but I want to share with you some thoughts about the direction and general progress in evolution of operating systems in general. My feelings are not very positive I might say.

I’m currently using Mandriva 2010.2 mostly. My server is running multiple Gentoo installations over a VMWare hypervisor. Those two distros are two different worlds and both have their pros and cons, but so far they did the job for me. Mandriva 2010.2 is really good desktop and laptop distro.

Gentoo makes pretty good server system – however I have some objections. Those objections are that you have to put significant amount of time to maintain your system. Time that is precious for me and I just want things to work and update as they should. Without spending hours for simple system upkeep. I’m a business person and I’m calculating my time economically. Gentoo is really cool system and I find it very satisfying and pleasant to use – when you have time. I don’t, but unfortunatelly I must somehow stick to it for the time being – lacking any real alternative that would offer that much stability and speed. Gentoo, if maintained properly, is fast. It’s customizable to the point no other distro can be. However when you’re a business conscious person I would not recommend to use it on daily basis. Too much knowledge and time must be put into simple upkeep and maintenance.

Mandriva is really great distribution for daily use, but I would think twice about using it on the server. Why? Because there were some outstanding critical security bugs that lead to compromise of my server machines not once, but few times. I wouldn’t have anything against it if patches were provided in a reasonable time, but honestly. Waiting half a year for fixing critical security bug in ProFTPD was way too much. Mandriva is also a distro which longevity (i.e. support time) is way too short for a real production server.

Of course. It has many security features out-of-the-box. I like msec and the way it’s configured from the start. I like it’s so uninstrusive for a power user and doesn’t get in the way when you want to accomplish some more advanced things without all those druid crap getting in the way. It just plays nicely and I’m really, really amazed by how Mandriva found balance between ease of use and needs of power users. They had their ups and downs, but this distro was really solid for most of the time. I have used many different distributions, but I always was amazed that in Mandriva most of the time everything worked. I liked it’s logical layout of configuration files and interoperation between editing configs by hand and by druids. Something Debianbased distros (including Ubuntu) could only dream of. Despite the fact that the OS was never pretty and I must admit it lacked taste when it came down to fancy user experience, it was still very rock solid. There were some great tools that Mandriva offered like msec, mcc and relevant drak*/*drake utilities and URPMi which I still find superior to any other package manager, maybe except for Gentoo’s emerge.

I’m still using MDV 2010.2 and honestly I’m a little bit disappointed that I’d have to stick to it for the nearest future. I simply find that this system is the most rock solid distro ever. For now. I did some certifications from Novell, so I also know SLES and SLED. Those are not bad distros indeed and when you take into account some of the tools Novell built, you have to say that they are really good choice for an enterprise network. Somehow I’ve always found SuSE really messy distro. They have their own ways of doing things which I personally don’t like.SuSE without Novell stuff is just too chaotic and inconsistent. Nevertheless Novell OES2 is a great business system which is stable and reliable. However I don’t find SuSE based management tools too attractive or even useful sometimes. Zypper is nowhere near URPMi. I know it’s a little bit more focused on tech-heads, but I always found it distracting that Novell tools are made by engineers for engineers and not for your ordinary next-door admin. I being a highly technical person, find it somehow too overwhelming and not pleasant to work with. Sure. I’m amazed by technical superiority of SLES over other distros, but honestly – technical superiority doesn’t mean it has to be technically impossible to manage without engineer level of knowledge. Sure. I can manage it, but people who are not into IT for twenty years, but have some good knowledge should be able to manage it too. Simply. Using and managing Novell systems is not fun at all. And your daily work should not only be pleasant, but also productive. Novell tools are technically superior to other solutions, but are just too hard to use for an ordinary person. And technical person also has to invest significant time into getting the idea of how things tick. That shouldn’t be this way.

I’m a person who likes doing things my way, but I don’t want to invest much time for getting knowledge of all the tips and tricks to make things work my way. Configuring your system should be pretty straightforward and when you want to tackle with parts of the system on a more advanced level, system shouldn’t get into your way, allow you to configure and manage things the way you want, but without any overhead of unncecessary technical details and stealing your time for learning really unnecessary things. After all computer is just a tool for getting things done and if you are like me, not a technical marvel to praise and invest all of your time for exploring it’s nuances, quirks and technicalities when it’s really unnecessary.

Since a computer and in fact the underlaying operating system is the key to your experience we are slowly getting to the point of this elaborate. For me productivity is the most valuable thing. I’m running a small company and I don’t want to invest time in managing my systems. I work with many clients who treat computer as a tool and not their toy. Time is what counts. I don’t want to be managing all the technical stuff and since I’m working with many clients I have some experience that they do not care about their updates, anti-virus scanning, backups, system configuration or management. They only care about how they can do their work with their computer and their operating system. Most of my clients treat IT as necessary evil, but still evil. Most of my clients can’t afford a dedicated network administrator or full-blown IT department. And I share their beliefs. Ordinary operating system user should get to the computer, do his work and leave. Not caring about all the technical details or computer/OS management stuff. For many years I have seen that most of open source community (and IT in general) is simply forgetting this. Client treats computer/OS as a tool, not as a thing of admiration. No matter how much we love all the intricate details of how those binary logic things tick, ordinary user doesn’t share it. And we shouldn’t rebel. We have to accept it, that not everyone can find the beauty in IT, nor does he want to know anything about the technical details of his own operating system. Nevermind it’s so beautiful, simple and logical for us. It’s a little bit arrogant of us, IT guys, to force our knowledge and admiration on those poor souls who doesn’t understand the art of IT. And it’s us to shame, not them. Because we thought our way is the only way that should be taught to others. It’s not. And it’s a tragedy of IT and open source community as a whole that most of us don’t understand this.

I will stress this once again. Ordinary user wants to do his work on his operating system. Computer is just a tool. And honestly as a technical person with a background of network administrator and software developer, not to mention an owner of the company – I want to do my work with my computer and do it as productively as I can. That’s why I care about offloading tedious and really mostly uninteresting work from my shoulders. I want my operating system to be able to do most of the ordinary management automatically. I don’t want to care about backups, synchronization, antivirus sweeps, updates and such things when I really have to do my work. And do it quickly.

So there was an idea. Big companies and the industry thought. Hey! Why don’t we do this by pushing more and more to the cloud? We can keep our users updated, synchronized whereever they want to be, on whatever device they like. We can scan their files to see if they are not infected, ensure their data is always available and they will enjoy the benefits of (marketing bullshit) cloud. And we will slowly force everybody towards Software-as-a-Service upon which we can monetize (not to mention we will get knowledge of everything about them – who will guarantee we won’t). Right?

Wrong. In my opinion IT industry got it wrong. There are many objections to the cloud which we all know. Privacy and data security being one of the most significant concerns. Let me express my opinion it this way. Industry got the right problem, but they provide the wrong solution. Of course many will praise that it’s the way, but I won’t discuss their motives. I have just recently installed Ubuntu and Windows 8. What I’m seeing? Two most significant operating systems (except MacOS, but I’m not familiar with it) are subtly forcing it’s users to use their clouds. We all know about those privacy invasions done by mobile phone operating systems – guess what they will do with all your private or company data offloaded to the cloud. Who will guarantee that your data is properly stored, inaccessible to others, etc.? Knowledge is power. You’d better not hand your data right away to the corporation you have no control over. After all corporations are known to be handing over data about you to security agencies or using it against people who can endanger them. Corporations are entities making profit of their shareholders. Who can guarantee that your innovative technological company won’t interfere with their plans to dominate some part of the market you are competing with them? Cloud is dangerous.

But I’m not going to elaborate more on this issue. I’m sure if you’re interested in the topic you already know those problems with the cloud. Cloud is a centralisation of power and knowledge about it’s users in one invisible hand. Why open source community should be on high alert when hearing “cloud”? Because it’s against one of the most significant principles of the community itself. Open source was and I hope still is about freedom. Freedom of communication, freedom to share, freedom to express, freedom to innovate, freedom to creatively express oneself. It’s not about the software. It’s about art. It’s about the humanistic ecosystem that was built around the software. It’s about exchange of thoughts and ideas, improvement and striving for excellence. Even if it manifests itself only in software development.

Cloud is against the open source’s inherited ideal of decentralisation, of Bazaar. Cloud is the next level of Cathedral. You may own the free bazaar software, but you will be forced to use cathedral cloud – one or another, but still in the hands of one or another entity. I’m really surprised that the community doesn’t raise objections to this matter. Take it this way. It’s an issue like Napster or Kazaa vs Bittorrent. Cloud is a centralised entity. No matter there are many clouds. They all have one weakness – a controlling entitiy. Just like Napster or Kazaa was one day. Bittorent on the other hand is decentralised. And that is what we need. We don’t need clouds. We need SWARMS.

What is a SWARM? It’s a decentralised cloud. No single entity controls it. It’s a community thing. A SWARM is voluntary cloud. It’s a concept of encrypted, decentralised storage allowing synchronisation of your data in a secure manner. Much like Bittorent is a peer to peer network of data exchange, so is SWARM to synchronization. Of course SWARM poses significant technical difficulties to develop. But I’m sure there are many brilliant minds that can and ultimately will overcome problems with this concept.

How I would see the SWARM implementation? It may be global distributed filesystem. It may be a distributed database. Data synchronised with the SWARM may be distributed to active SWARM nodes and replicated on purpose. I imagine a daemon that would be running on each and every SWARM participating node that would give up some resources for the whole SWARM. Think of it as a server running on each SWARM node providing for example 100MB of storage space to the SWARM. The amount of data you can store in the SWARM would be determined by your participation of resources for the SWARM. Security of your data would be guaranteed by strong cryptography and chunking of your data. Like in Freenet, nobody will know what his SWARM node is storing and to whom this data belongs.

Unfortunately there are some problems with this, Freenet storage is based on popularity of the requested content. There are more problems. Which nodes should receive your chunk of data? How the data should be distributed and replicated? How many nodes should receive a copy of your chunk synchronised with the SWARM? How the SWARM should cope with data loss or significant loss of storage providing SWARM nodes? Should your node track copies of your data and if it looses some of the nodes synchronised to your data, how should it decide to distribute replication of your data? How to ensure you can always reach your data if we must assume tha SWARM nodes are unreliable? How to deal with contraction of node count hosting copies of your data? How much data can you store in the SWARM at any given time?

If the SWARM is going to be a real project those and other questions must be answered first. Due to it’s chaotic and unreliable nature it would be hard or even impossible to devise algorithms that will guarantee the availability of your data all the time. It may be necessary to loosen some of the restrictions on SWARM concept. However the idea might find it’s way to some private environments where SWARM might be an attractive alternative for non-controllable cloud.

If you want to talk about the SWARM concept with me feel free to do so in the comments section.

What I needed was to be able to log what function or class method issued the log.debug() and in what line. This was needed by me for asynchronous and multithreaded networking library project I’m working on.

The solution was to write my own custom logging.Logger class implementation that overrides it’s debug method with some fancy inspect module tricks. Works like charm! Try it by yourself.

import logging
import inspect

logging.basicConfig(level = logging.DEBUG)

class MyLogger(logging.Logger):

    def debug(self, msg, *args, **kwargs):
        method = inspect.stack()[1][3]
        frm = inspect.stack()[1][0]
        if 'self' in frm.f_locals:
            clsname = frm.f_locals['self'].__class__.__name__
            method = clsname + '.' + method
        if not method.startswith('<'):
            method += '()'
        msg = ':'.join((method, str(frm.f_lineno), msg))
        self.__class__.__bases__[0].debug(self, msg, *args, **kwargs)

logging.setLoggerClass(MyLogger)
getLogger = logging.getLogger

Voila! Now, after instancing this new MyLogger class, you can use it just like normal Logger class, except for the bonus of having module name, function or method names and line number in your log.

Here's a simple debug output from this class:


DEBUG:network.connpool:Connection.analyze():187:Found packet: [0, 1, 0, 42, 0]
DEBUG:network.connpool:Connection.analyze():187:Found packet: [0, 1, 1, 69, 0]
DEBUG:network.server:PacketHandler.handle_close():102:Closing connection id: 139697871065392
DEBUG:core.event:emit():153:Emitted net.conn "CONN_DROP"
DEBUG:core.event:EventManager.process():194:Sending event net.conn (CONN_DROP) to ConnectionPool
DEBUG:core.event:ConnectionPool.notify():86:ConnectionPool got event of type "net.conn"
DEBUG:network.connpool:ConnectionPool.remove():294:Closing connection id: 139697871065392
DEBUG:network.connpool:ConnectionPool.parse_packets():332:Removing connection id: 139697871065392


PyGame checks for environment variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER that specifies which video driver PyGame should utilize for initializing display. This can come handy if you are running pure PyGame based application and want to use it if you don’t have or want X.org. Unfortunately this also means that you have to manually export SDL_VIDEODRIVER variable before running your application. There’s a little trick you can do for automatically determining whether you want to run your app in frame buffer.

When application is run within X.org context, the DISPLAY environment variable is passed to your application (in fact it’s set in the system context for the app, but that doesn’t matter). You can test if app was run from X Window system like this:

import os
disp_no = os.getenv('DISPLAY')
if disp_no:
    print "I'm running under X display = {0}".format(disp_no)

When we know if we have X Window running or not we can act accordingly. What we want to do in our app is to check for the X display first, the check if SDL_VIDEODRIVER is set and if not we want to set it automatically. This is how we do it:

driver = 'directfb'
if not os.getenv('SDL_VIDEODRIVER'):
    os.putenv('SDL_VIDEODRIVER', driver)

As PyGame documentation states there are different video drivers available under Linux: x11, dga, fbcon, directfb, ggi, vgl, svgalib, aalib. Obviously we are interested only in three: directfb, fbcon and svgalib. Those are the drivers for console frame buffers. Which should you choose depends on the Linux distribution you have. Ideally you want directfb, because it’s probably the most advanced and modern type of frame buffer library. You can either let your users choose the appropriate driver before you launch your primary app or you can test which is the most suitable. This is really simple:

drivers = ['directfb', 'fbcon', 'svgalib']

found = False
for driver in drivers:
    if not os.getenv('SDL_VIDEODRIVER'):
        os.putenv('SDL_VIDEODRIVER', driver)
    try:
        pygame.display.init()
    except pygame.error:
        print 'Driver: {0} failed.'.format(driver)
        continue
    found = True
    break

if not found:
   raise Exception('No suitable video driver found!')

This will automatically try all drivers in the list and stay with the first one that works. If none is found an Exception will be raised.

When we found appropriate driver we now have to initialize our screen and display mode. With frame buffer we have to determine it’s resolution before we can appropriately set mode. We can do this like this:

size = (pygame.display.Info().current_w, pygame.display.Info().current_h)
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(size, pygame.FULLSCREEN)

pygame.display.Info() is a special object that carries information about current display. We use current_w and current_h variables to set new size for PyGame display. If we didn’t do it, we would not be using the whole frame buffer resolution which would look awkward. I’m not sure if it’s possible to switch between frame buffer modes after fb console terminals were initialized.

After we’ve called pygame.display.set_mode() we can proceed with our application development as usually.

  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/paste/httpserver.py", line 437, in handle_one_request
    self.wsgi_execute()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/paste/httpserver.py", line 290, in wsgi_execute
    self.wsgi_write_chunk(chunk)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/paste/httpserver.py", line 150, in wsgi_write_chunk
    self.wfile.write(chunk)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/socket.py", line 292, in write
    data = str(data) # XXX Should really reject non-string non-buffers
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xf3' in position 1280: ordinal not in range(128)

You can easily fix those encoding bugs typing into config/environment.py (if you are using Pylons):

# Workaround stupid Paster encoding bugs
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

just before def load_environment() function. Module reload is needed, because sys.setdefaultencoding() is sometimes not accessible from command-line. This will make your encoding problems within Paster go away.

However the most irritating problem was with attributes of template context, mainly because of their absence in the templates. Template context in previous versions of Pylons worked in a manner that whenever there was no attribute in the template context object “c” it would be created on the fly being an empty string. Pylons 1.0 changed this behavior so you had to explicitly create the attribute. Given the scale of the project I’m not willing to go through each template out of more than hundred and then check whether or not I forgot some attribute.

Googling a little bit gave answer that you had to insert this line into config/environment.py:

    config['pylons.strict_c'] = False

just before your template customization, but it didn’t work!

I’ve been looking for an answer to this problem for quite some time and found that if you change the above line from pylons.strict_c to:

    config['pylons.strict_tmpl_context'] = False
 

it will happily work. So there you are.

def whoami():
    """Returns name of the method."""
    import sys
    return sys._getframe(1).f_code.co_name

def callersname():
    """Returns name of the caller."""
    import sys
    return sys._getframe(2).f_code.co_name

Or you can simply do:

import inspect
inspect.stack()[0][3]

This will give you method name. Pretty simple?