Raam Dev’s Weblog

I just finished the longest fast I have ever completed. It’s not really fair to call it a “fast”, since I did eat brown rice twice during the 48 hours, but it was a detox fast. The experience was more eye-opening than I had imagined and although I felt a bit “out of it” for most of the weekend, I did end up with a much higher appreciation for food.

I’m considering starting a monthly weekend-detox to regularly clean my system. Since I’m vegan, you may wonder what toxins I could be cleaning out. Well, there are a lot more toxins in our bodies than you might imagine — even toxins unrelated to food! An article titled “How Toxins Affect Your Energy Health” has a nice explanation:

It is nearly impossible to free your body of toxins because they are everywhere. Toxins can be found in the air you breathe, the food you eat, and your body can even create toxins from too much stress. Even if you can not get rid of all the toxins in your body, it is still important to reduce the level of toxins so your health and energy will not suffer. Your body is designed to handle small level of toxins on a regular basis; when there are too much toxins in your body at once, your body will start to breakdown and you may suffer from health problems, such as headaches, fatigue, nausea, sickness and chronic diseases.

Fasting is one of the many ways we can clean toxins out of our body. A detoxification fast usually consists of eating a single simple food that is easy to digest, such as brown or white basmati rice, and nothing else for several days at a time (of course you must drink water to stay hydrated!).

Calorie restriction has been shown to improve overall health and slow the aging process. The low-calorie Okinawa diet, for example, is thought to be a direct reason why a high proportion of Okinawans live to over 110 years of age.

I’ve been hearing a lot about IntenseDebate recently, in various blog posts and news sites (they were acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress, back in September). IntenseDebate is basically a set of tools that allows for enhanced commenting on your blog or website. Two features that caught my attention were Comment Threading and Reply-by-email.

Comment Threading was of particular interest to me because I find that being able to respond directly to a specific comment keeps the comments organized and relevant. Normally the way you respond directly to a comment without threading support is to prefix your reply with the persons name (e.g., “@raamdev That’s a great idea!”), but constantly searching the list of comments for the comment being replied to gets tiresome.

I don’t really have enough comment traffic on this blog to deal with the aforementioned problem on a regular basis, but I decided to install the IntenseDebate WordPress plugin to see how easily I could integrate it. I was impressed with how smoothly the process went. All my old comments (1,300+) were synced to IntenseDebate and there was nothing I needed to change on my theme templates — the entire commenting system was replaced with IntenseDebate’s commenting system, with threading support, a comment reputation point system, and all those other fancy features.

In the end, however, I decided to deactivate the plugin. I didn’t like that my comments were being loaded from an outside source, which both increased the average load time for each page and added yet another dependency on an external service. (In contrast, my Twitter sidebar uses Twitter Tools, which actually syncs tweets to the same database as WordPress and loads them from there. Dependency problems solved! To be fair though, the IntenseDebate plugin maintains a copy of all the comments in the WordPress database, just in case you decide to stop using it.) Customizing the look and feel of the comments also meant modifying CSS through my IntenseDebate account and right from the start I felt the need to customize and make the comment system less “busy” and self-advertising. There were no themes to choose from either. Ugh.

While doing all this thinking about the disadvantages of outsourcing my comments, I came across a post on Robert Nystorm’s blog where he decides to literally outsource all of his comments. Instead of having any form of commenting system, he simply provides a link to reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon where he encourages people post their comments on his post. His rationale behind this is that people already use these other sites for commenting and those commenting systems are specifically tuned to handle comments. If you can’t beat’em, join’em.

But that’s extreme. Although I can sympathize with some of Robert’s frustration, I think a commenting system, even if only a simple one, is important. While some people may be familiar with reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon, not everyone will use those sites regularly or, for that matter, want to go through the trouble of creating an account just to post a comment.

Back in September, I wrote about how excited I was to hear that Comment Threading was coming in WordPress 2.7. I hope the features and functionality of IntenseDebate are somehow integrated into WordPress down the road, instead of indefinitely relying on an external service to provide the same functionality.

Most of what I’ve read about good blogging practices relates to staying on topic and keeping content relevant to a particular theme. To grow reader subscriptions and increase repeat traffic, these “good blogging practices” say that to help readers feel the blog is an interesting resource, the blog should have new content that stays “on topic”. If readers feel the blog is an interesting resource, they are more inclined to return or to subscribe to the blog. A good portion of my posts (maybe 70%) are technology related and for someone interested in only my technology related content, I imagine the personal or “off-topic” posts must be quite a nuisance.

When I started this blog, I did it because I needed a place to write. I had lots of stuff I wanted to document; lots of solutions to problems that I wanted to share and make available to whomever may be searching (even if that person was myself, as has been the case many times). While I feel I write a lot of reference-worthy material, this is also my personal blog. It’s the place I write about activities, travels, thoughts, experiences, and ideas. As I begin think more carefully about what I’m writing, I feel myself being torn between mixing personal and not-so-personal content.

I feel that splitting my blog into two separate blogs (this one remaining my personal blog and the second being only for my techy reference-material-like posts) would allow me to be more creative and expressive on both topics. I won’t feel as though my techy posts are too long and technical (for a personal blog) and at the same time I’ll feel free to post as often as I like about more personal topics.

What do you think? Does segmenting my blog into to separate blogs make sense?

Sites and services like Facebook and Twitter ask you questions. In fact they can even be configured to pester (i.e., “nudge”) you if for some reason you feel a moral, religious, or social obligation to keep the vast world of unknown people updated with your every mood, feeling, thought, current activity, or location.

I sat down in front of my computer with a splitting migraine, a migraine that had been piercing through my head the entire day, like an alien parasite whose only job was to disrupt, distract, and otherwise make my day as mentally challenging as possible. As I turned on the monitor, I saw that I had left the Twitter website open. “What are you doing?” the screen pestered, as if instantly joining forces with the alien parasite to make my brain work harder. But it had been 22 hours since I last wrote something on Twitter! Oh no! The world is going to end! I must update everyone immediately!

I suddenly realized that as I begin to use more social-networking sites and write more things on my blog, I am increasingly being pestered with questions and buttons that contain definitions of what I should be writing:

Write a New Page
Write a New Post
Write something…
Write another comment…
What are you doing right now?
Write something about yourself.
What are you doing?

How annoying! I mean really, it’s annoying. No, that’s not the alien parasite talking. This stuff is right in line with Google’s growing visual clutter, only worse. It’s bad enough that I come up with an interesting thing to search the Internet for only to have Google’s suggestions magically chase the original query away, but when everywhere I look for an outlet to express myself I find a question or a definition of what I should be writing, we’re bordering on mental invasion and theft!

These subtle things are killing the creative thought process and subtly removing truly free expression. I feel as though I’m fighting to keep my thoughts to myself just long enough to express them genuinely to whomever might be listening (even if that person is only a future version of myself).

Google’s latest “feature” is nothing short of annoying. I fell in love with Google Search for the clean, textual layout of the search results. The colored text I can deal with, but not visual buttons next to every single result! To make matters worse, Google doesn’t provide a way to disable this feature either, so your only two options are logging out of your Google account or installing a Greasemonkey extension.

Oh, and my rant doesn’t end there. Another feature that was recently added, Google Suggest, has been more trouble than it has help. I can’t even count how many times I’ve went to Google something only to have a big list of suggestions instantly erase the original search query from my head. There are hacky ways to disable that too, but come on Google! There should be options to disable this stuff!

I have long accepted my limited social abilities and, for lack of any good reason other than convenience, avoided any situations that may expose me to new social interactions. Limited social interaction alone would not normally be such a bad thing, but when it leads to neglecting interpersonal communication, especially with those you love, the end result can be disastrous and detrimental to life itself.

The Kalabarian analysis of my name says the following about my weaknesses:

Often I am so fired up about my own projects or goals that I inadvertently run over or ignore other people’s feelings and interests. Being receptive and appreciative of others’ contributions, ideas, and feelings would go a long way in improving my relationships.

Weaknesses should not be something to accept and ignore, but rather a guide for what needs the most attention! From this day onward, I will make a conscious effort to improve my interactions with others and learn to value any opportunities to improve my interpersonal communication skills.

To evolve or die means to learn to meet new challenges as they arise and overcome them or to remain stubborn and inflexible. We need to apply this lesson to our own self-imposed limitations in life. If we accept those limitations and let them define us, we exponentially decrease our potential for growth. We should not learn to accept who we are, but rather learn to accept that we are limitless beings.

Edit: I should mention that in this context to evolve means to continuously adapt and face challenges in life. To die means to live in a box and accept your perceived limitations.

I just received this email for an auction I listed almost 24 hours ago:

The listing was removed because it violated the eBay Search and Browse Manipulation policy. The violation occurred when you included the following information in your listing:

Title…- LIKE NEW

Sellers are not permitted to include unrelated keywords in their listings in a manner that unfairly diverts attention to them. Using ‘new’ in a title to describe a pre-owned or used item is misleading information that confuses buyers when they are searcing for items that are actually new.

You’d think that eBay would be smart enough to make those checks BEFORE I publish my listing! I had over a dozen people already watching the item with several bids already in place and then eBay just spontaneously removes my listing. This is unacceptable!

I was a bit surprised to learn that my Mac didn’t have the md5sum and sha1sum tools installed by default. A quick search and I found a site that provides the source. The sources compiled successfully on my Mac (OS X 10.5.5, xCode tools installed).

The only quirk appears in the last step:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
cp md5sum sha1sum ripemd160sum /usr/local/bin
chown bin:bin /usr/local/bin/md5sum /usr/local/bin/sha1sum \
/usr/local/bin/ripemd160sum
chown: bin: Invalid argument
make: *** [install] Error 1


The make install command tries to change the ownership of the files to the bin user. Since that user doesn’t exist on my system, the command fails. This isn’t a problem though, as both binaries work perfectly. By default, they are installed to /usr/local/bin/.