Recently it hit me that I knew of no generalized protocol for sharing the state of an abstract space among a group of computers. I did a quick google search to see if I could find anything, and after coming up dry (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist) I decided to slap one together to test out the many uses for this that were readily apparent to me (i.e. any application where multiple users must be able to collaboratively make changes, and become aware of changes made to that space in real time: chat, bulletin boards, network games, etc.)
Of course there is similar stuff like Croquet that certainly does an even more complicated generalized version of this, and lots of single purpose applications, like Subethaedit which must also do thisbut I haven’t found other efforts that are quite as simplistic and generalized.
So, I slapped together the beginings of a protocol as well as a ruby based server, and a RealBasic based clients for OS X and Win to test out the ideas, all of which are released under the GPL license.
[tags]collaboration,FLOSS,sharing[/tags]
open source spirituality
The open source movement is, I think, the tip of the iceberg of a fundamental sea change in human thought that is swirling all around us. I had been emailing with a friend about how Quakerism seemed to me to embody in a religion,the principles of open source software because (I wrote) “it handles the balance of the community and the individual in a precise way: 1) the individual is highly autonomous and assumed to have unique and direct access to the devine. I.e. everybody can write code. 2) because this is true of everyone, individual revelation must be checked with the group for further descernment, i.e. your code has to be checked in to the repository and actually work with the whole system! Thus there is no preacher/parishoner or consumer/producer relationship, we all minister to eachother (we are all prosumers).”
My friend pointed me to various links on open source spirituality that are worth looking at. I was especially intruiged by yoism which at first seems like yet-another-newagey spirituality thingy, but on closer inspection is quite a bit more than that.
[tags]spirit,FLOSS,yoism[/tags]
Gnucash & Tiger
Another installment in the collective tech-support arena:
Gnucash wasn’t working under OS X Tiger (10.4.5); whenever I tried to run a report I kept getting the following cryptic error message in my terminal:
dyld: Symbol not found: _program_invocation_short_name
Referenced from: /sw/lib/libgnome.32.dylib
Expected in: flat namespace
A google search didn’t reveal anything with those error messages as keywords, so it was up to me to find the answer. Fourtunately my first stab in the dark worked! I did a fink selfupdate and then fink update-all (I’m using FinkCommander so I did those fink commands from the Source menu). I’m guessing that when I reinstalled gnucash after updating to Tiger, there were still some bugs in several of the libraries that were fixed by the fink update.
Be forewarned that this take a loooong time to complete (overnight for me on my G4 powerbook).
[tags]gnucash,fink,FinkCommander[/tags]
blogging and tech support
I’ve found that numerous times when I type into google a technical question, be it an error message that I’m seeing when installing some software package or some feature about a programming language, that where I often end up is in some person’s blog where they describe how they coped with exactly the same problem. This phenomenon seems to me a generalized solution to tech support, and also a wonderfully comunal and gift economy approach to problem solving. So I’ve decided to play the game too by creating a category for this blog called solutions, and, as often as I can, post my minor little breakthroughs in hopes that they will be helpful to someone else. And here’s my first:
I’ve been learning Smalltalk using squeak and I assumed that, like other object-oriented languages, there would be a constructor method that could take many parameters which would be used by the constructor to load up the values of instance variables. For example in perl a simplified constructure would look like:
sub new {
my $class = shift;
my $self = {};
bless $self, $class;
$self->{'FOO'} = shift; # save the constructor parameters into our data structure
$self->{'BAR'} = shift;
return $self;
}
which would be instantiated like this:
theObjectClassName->new('fish','dog');
In Smalltalk, it appears, you don’t do that. Instead you just create settors for your parameters and chain them to the new call. So you would have two methods:
setFoo: fooVal
foo := fooVal
setBar: barVal
bar := barVal
and your call to instantiate an object is then just:
theObjectClassName new setFoo:'fish' setBar:'dog'
because the first two words create the object and the the second two are just messages that get to the object after it is created, one at a time.
I love the beautiful parsimony of notions in Smalltalk.
The City of Ember, by Jeanne Duprau (2003)
The City of Ember is a young adult novel that is a fantastic allegory for spiritual awakening, though I have no idea if it was intended as such. The story is of a girl who lives in an underground and completely self-contained city created by the “Builders.” The population of the city knows of nothing outside the city, in fact, though they speak English many of the words in it like “sky” are not understood in any terms but metaphorically. The problem is that the city is falling apart, the lights are going out, the vast stores of supplies of light bulbs, canned food, and vitamins are running out. The reader is in on a worse calamity, namely, that a secret message in a timed lock box that was left by the Builders, which was meant to be handed down from mayor to mayor and that would open just in time to explain to the city dwellers how to get out of the city, was lost many generations back. Well, being a young adult novel it’s pretty predictable in that the box is in our hero’s closet, but a nice turn of events it is found by our hero’s baby sister who chews on it for a while before our hero gets her hands on it leaving the message is only partially legible. So the bulk of the story is the deciphering of the message, followed by the experience of trying to communicate its contents to the adults, who of course don’t accept the message (where else is there but here?) which is the equivalent of all prophets experiences of rejection by the status-quo. And finally, there is the adventure of eventual escape.
This book reworks the universal theme of Plato’s cave, and of all mysticism. What we think of as the whole universe is but shadow, and further, that to enter that “kingdom of heaven” you must be like a child. The insight that this version of that universal story led me to is part of the answer to why childishness is a necessary component of the transformation. Children haven’t yet become someone. Which means who they are is not yet at stake. For some reason our culture has this question “what are you going to be when you grow up?” Think about the hidden structures and assumptions in that question. Who are you? Have you figured it out yet? Is what you do, who you are? Is what you believe who you are? Is who you associate with who you are? I write these questions myself in shadow not in the condition of childishness, and with all of this, as Quaker’s say, “a notion,” i.e. not something that I have experienced, but rather something I think. But this thing that is mostly a notion for me, that the distinction between notional and experiential living is key to awakening, I am begining in small ways to actually experience.
[tags]awakening,experience,cave,Plato,mystics[/tags]
the role of conventional money
Since mutual credit money is truly valueless, it cannot BE a unit of measure. It must USE a unit of measure. This means that there must be something with which to set the price of things. You could use chickens or bales of tobbacco or kilowats, or hours as your unit of measure in which the mutual credit money is denomitated, but you can’t really do this because the “value” of any of those things varys across and within communities. Instead, the proper unit of measure is a conventional money, which is determined by an arbitrage market. So in fact, I think what I’m claiming is that the true role of conventional money is to determine aggregate value of things, skills and time, to be a unit of measure. Once we have that (which we allready do), then we can do the bulk of our exchanging using mutual credit money.
[tags]money,mutual credit,LETS,price,value[/tags]
money & spirit
For that last 2 years I’ve begun a process of examining perhaps one of the most fundamental ways that I “participate in the consumer economy” and that is simply my use of money, specifically US dollars. Before this period money seemed primarily mundane. Money was just a practical thing about living life. It’s there, and I didn’t question it very much. In my mind, the connection between money and spiritual matters was mostly from biblical quotes, for example “the love of money is the root of all evil,” “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” “seek ye first the kingdom of the lord and his righteousness,” the kicking out of the money-changers from the temple, and perhaps the most influential for me is where Jesus says “look at how beautifully God as clothed the lilies of the field, not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed such as they, how much more will he care for you?” All of these quotes set up the primacy of ones spiritual life and faith in the divine provider over what ever promise of security we might find in money. In a sense, these are all more about the disconnection between money and those higher spiritual aims.
These last two years, however is bringing me to a new place. I’m now seeing that at least some of the power of money to distract us from the divine, is not inherent in money itself, but rather in the form of our current monetary system, and further that news types of money can be re-invented such that much of that power is removed from it, even more so, such that money itself will become yet another part of living a God centered life. If so, that would be a real step toward achieving that third QIVP purpose. An economy more aligned with our Quaker testimonies.
At the most fundamental level, money is the information that encodes who has how much of a claim on things of value in a community. Historically this information was encoded very simply in the the ownership of scarce metals. Later we used paper that was legally equated to that same scarce metal. Our current monetary system no longer equates the medium of exchange with gold, but it it still relies on treating that information, be it paper or numbers in a bank account, as valuable in and of itself by maintaining its scarcity. How is it possible to make information scarce? It’s difficult, but that’s exactly what our monetary system is, a large body of regulations that use the coercive force of law to create a very precise scarcity of the medium of exchange (information) so that it will “maintain its value.” That’s exactly what’s going on when the Fed changes interest rates.
The assumption behind this is that people won’t use a medium of exchange to trade if the medium itself is not valuable. In other words, the medium of exchange will only work if you can trust it, and the way to make it trustworthy is to make it valuable. Well, there’s one case where this equation doesn’t apply. Namely when you are trading with people whom you trust. If you trust the people with whom you trade, then you don’t need to trust in the medium of exchange itself. The medium of exchange can just devolve into its purest form, i.e. simply the record of who has a claim on the economy.
Here’s how it works: when you trade with another individual, money (information) is created on the spot. How? With a ledger book. If I buy something, I subtract from the balance in my ledger the price of the item, and seller adds the price to balance in her ledger book. Remember that money is just the information on who has a claim on the economy. So now, the seller has a positive value in her ledger book. That positive value represents the claim she has on the community. The negative value in my ledger represents the obligation I have to give to the economy. In this system money is created on the spot by the purchaser and given to the seller who then has a claim on the economy (as represented by the positive value in the ledger book), a claim which will be redeemed when seller in turn goes to purchase something from someone else, just as the obligation of the purchaser will be fulfilled later when he or she sells something.
So if the medium of exchange isn’t valuable in and of itself a whole world of things change: the task becomes how to enlarge the circle of people I trust so I can trade in using this incredibly available money; I don’t have to earn it, I can create it on the spot, as long as it’s being used in a circle of trust people will know that I won’t create more than I can redeem; relationships become primary.
To me this is the fundamental spiritual issue of money: Do I trust my neighbor? Do I trust that of God in my neighbor enough to transact with him or her and not have the coercive force of law in place to back up the claim I might have in my ledger book? Our US dollars say “in God we trust” but we don’t, we trust in the coercive force of law that backs the dollar.
[tags]money,spirit,trust[/tags]