There are people who are good at blogging. I’m not one of them. The time has come to lay this blog to rest.

Many thanks to the readers who cared to put up with my sporadic postings.

I’ll continue my writing at the Vesess blog.

The Promise

When aC first came out there was an overwhelming response, mainly from the design/dev community. People who liked Basecamp but were not willing to use a hosted app, as well as those who couldn’t afford it were probably the early adopters. In fact, Ilija himself said: I wanted Basecamp but didn’t want to pay for it.

Not everyone was interested in the fact that aC was released under GPL, but there were plenty of FOSS fanatics who wouldn’t have used it if it weren’t for the free license. By releasing his wonderful little app under GPL Ilija made an unspoken promise to keep it free as in freedom, along with a specific promise to keep it free as in free beer:

I find it normal to expect something in return for your work. activeCollab will always be free but there will be commercial support as soon as we hit 1.0 for people who need a little more that community support, you can hire me to customize activeCollab to fit your needs or help you integrate it with system you are already running on your server.

It’s natural for plans to change as a project matures, but this sort of major deviation from the original vision is guaranteed to cause frustration and disappointment in the community, especially among the more active contributors.

Sharing the values

There’s no denying that Ilija is a talented developer. He has done a wonderful job with activeCollab, and deserves all success with his proprietary venture too. It’s a shame that he couldn’t come up with a better model that utilized FOSS profitably, and I feel it has a lot to do with his lackadaisical approach to FOSS ideals, as seen in this thread:

I’m not the guy who think that software should be free, community developed and supported and all that open source mambo jumbo. I’m more for controlled development process (you noticed that, right?) and main reason why activeCollab is open source at the first place is because it was the good idea at the time. Nothing more (no ideology or stuff like that - it was just a simple math).

This incident could very well turn out to be a mini version of the Mambo fiasco. If the owners of a project don’t share the values of the community, a split would be inevitable. When the planets align properly, some of those splits kick ass.

If he seriously considers the option, Ilija could still monetize the project retaining the controlled development method while keeping aC free. However, that requires believing in FOSS in the first place. Making the numbers without sharing the values would not be sustainable in the long run.

People who make the numbers and share our values go onward and upward. People who miss the numbers and share our values get a second chance. People with no values and no numbers - easy call. The problem is with those who make the numbers but don’t share the values . . . we agonize over these people.

Jack Welch

On a somewhat unrelated note, the word Serendipity stems from Serendip, the Persian name for Sri Lanka:

The Three Princes of Serendip is an old Persian fairy tale about three men who were on a mission but they always found something that was irrelevant but needed in reality. They discovered things by serendipity and sagacity. Serendip is the Persian name for Sri Lanka. Later, the word serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole.

Wikipedia

No wonder I applied for the Serendipity project.

Ignorance is no bliss

Some time back, I stumbled on a couple of videos claiming Buddhism is “stupid and evil” by a self-proclaimed conservative atheist. I understand that he by no means represents the entire atheist community, and his ways of expressing ideas are rather unique, but the content did reveal a certain lack of awareness of what Buddhism really is, and how it relates to atheism. He was no doubt confused by the conflicting views of different Buddhist schools too. This, and various other misinformed analyses of Buddhism got me interested in this subject. For that, I’m grateful to our conservative atheist.

At a glance

Wikipedia defines atheism as the disbelief in the existence of any deities. It is contrasted with theism, the belief in a God or gods.

This definition of atheism aligns with the Buddhist teaching that there is no theistic God(s). Buddhism does not deal with the beginning or the end of the universe, either in space or time, let alone the creation of it other than saying there’s no creator. Such discussions are part of the fourteen questions which the Buddha refused to answer. Thus, the Gautama Buddha is known by some to be one of the first atheists of modern time.

While denying the existence of an omnipotent Creator God, Buddhism does explain in elaborate detail the different “levels” of beings, of which the manussa loka, the world of humans and human-like beings is but one of many. There are satvas (beings) in “higher” levels than the humans, such as the devas and brahmas. The literal translation for these words would be deities or gods, but such labels should be used without their “supernatural” baggage. They are very much a part of nature, having not transcended the samsara, the endless circle of life, which is at the heart of Buddhist teachings known as the four noble truths.

This leaves us with the interesting question: does believing in the four noble truths conflict with being an atheist? Since karma and rebirth have nothing to do with deities or gods in the common sense of those terms, one could say Buddhists are atheists. What if we extend the definition of atheism to include the rejection of everything supernatural? The four noble truths and the teachings of the Buddha which are based on those four main pillars would indeed look “stupid and evil” to atheists who don’t believe in them. This has led some to call for stricter definitions of the term so that Buddhism could be excluded from Atheism. It is ironical how the same atheists are pleasantly surprised when the very same ideas are presented in a different form.

Buddhist rejection of “extended” atheism

Buddha explained that all beliefs could be divided in to two main categories: Sasvatavada (or Bhava ditthi), view of permanence or eternalism, and Ucchedavada (or Vibhava ditthi), the view of annihilation. To simplify, those who believe in eternal bliss (or demise) after death are the sasvatavadins; those who believe that everything of a “being” ends after death are the ucchedavadins. Both these views are based on the fundamental belief of atta (or atmavada), self-identification, in any of the three forms: this is mine (etam mama); this I am (esoham asmi); and this is my self (eso me atta).

Buddhism rejects these two opposing views and introduces the middle path: paticcasamuppada, the doctrine of dependent origination. Buddhism also rejects self-identification and introduces Panchaskandha, the five aggregates, beyond which there’s no self.

Thus, atheism that rejects a theistic God, rejects only that, and leaves everything else unanswered does not contradict Buddhism because the existence of a person is not discussed. However, “extended” atheism which takes a materialistic view and affirms the existence of a person and the annihilation of him/her at death contradicts Buddhism because it is based on self-identification.

Objective reality

Anatta, the lack of “self”, is best realized by studying the Buddhist teachings of objective reality. As explained in the Abidhamma, it is a deep and complex teaching which leads to, and is only truly understood once one attains, Nibbana. I could only discuss it with my limited understanding. May those who are more knowledgeable correct me if I’m wrong.

One thing that I realize as I’m writing this is how language could fail: in many instances where the Pali has to be translated in to a foreign language, foreign not only in structure and semantics but also in the ways it has evolved and the ideas it has been developed to express, the original meaning could be lost or distorted. My lack of knowledge in the most appropriate English terms to be used for the Pali doesn’t help either. There are plenty of resources assembled by people much better than me for the interested reader to learn more about Theravada Buddhism. I’m emphasizing Theravada because, although assimilation of different cultures and religions is inevitable, a distorted version never really reveals the truth.

As one explores the Dhamma, it is important to keep an open mind when it comes to beliefs, as they are just that: beliefs, not facts. One would do well to keep in mind what Gautama Buddha taught the Kalamas of Kesaputta:

Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another’s seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, ‘The monk is our teacher.’ Kalamas, when you yourselves know: ‘These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,’ enter on and abide in them.

Gautama Buddha, Kalama Sutta

I’ll be working on the project to design an easy-to-use blog editor for Serendipity. My usability mentor is Ellen Reitmayr the usability-fu, and the technical mentor is Garvin Hicking, a lead developer of Serendipity. We’ve already had our initial discussion, and are currently planning a user survey to collect the major use cases for casual blogging with s9y. If what I learned from that one hour of a meeting is anything to go by, this program is going to be wonderfully educational, and fun.

From the intro on the competition site:

The firm set up shop in Kegalle, Sri Lanka, in 1997, not far from an elephant orphanage. In Sri Lanka there is competition between elephants and a growing human population for land. The proximity of elephants was a boon for the papermakers; for as they soon discovered elephant dung is an ideal raw material for paper products they began a range of elephant-dung paper to draw attention to the plight of the Sri Lankan elephant. This unusual product has found buyers within Sri Lanka and throughout the world. A proportion of the sales are donated to the elephant orphanage. But elephants are not the only beneficiaries. Maximus provides an income for 35 staff, and its recently established ‘Peace Paper’ scheme helps rural people earn money from collecting dung from wild elephants.

I’m glad I voted.

I have come to realize certain shortcomings of that template, hence this modified version.

There are plenty of excellent CSS-based forms solutions available online, which provide additional features such as toggable optional fields and help sections. What I have provided here is a flexible, semantically correct, and dare I say, accessible template to which such features could be readily applied.

Like the earlier version, the markup of this template is based on the accessible forms markup of Derek Featherstone. As usual, all input field widths are specified using the size attribute instead of CSS. I’ve explained the reasons in this BSS article.

The markup is quite self explanatory, so instead of detailing stuff here, I’ll let you check out the updated form template.

I was overjoyed to see the blue-green padma of this site, used as my avatar, all over the place - apparently it was a good source for creating the blue letters.