Secretstolen's Weblog

The Jedi Code

secretstolen — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:47:52 +0000

There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no death, there is the Force.

New Year

secretstolen — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:31:01 +0000

Whether the last year was quite good or rather bad for you, this is the time to make some conclusions now.

If the first is your case, just keep going the same way. Otherwise, you now have a chance to understand the mistakes and set up your mind not to make them again in the new year.

Even though you could have been doing it for the whole year, tonight is a sort of a checkpoint, which makes it easier to realise all these things, if you found it hard or just unnecessary on normal days.

Anyway, let’s all be thankful for this outgoing year, whatever it was, and wish another dose of happiness in the incoming year.

Happy new year, friends.

Even though you could do it for the whole year, tonight is a sort of a checkpoint, which makes it easier to realise all these things, if you found it hard or just unnecessary on normal days.

Eye Contact

secretstolen — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 16:48:21 +0000

Do you know how exciting it may be to meet girl’s eyes? Especially if you see this girl for the first time in your life and she doesn’t take away her eyes as notices that you’re looking at her.

For me it was quite a surprise, seeing such a confident girl. Or was she just so badly interested in me? :) Either way, it was a great feeling to have that long eyes contact (about 7 seconds, innit) and then have a smile turning to mutual laugh with the girl.

I guess I shall practise this more often, it brings lots of positive.

The Girlody Theory

secretstolen — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:54:48 +0000

Have you ever noticed that most of the girls we have or had some feelings for are associated with a melody which may be a popular song from the time you first saw the girl, or a track that played in the club when you two were dancing? (Oh, I guess I’d better say that a melody is associated with a girl instead now. More humane, isn’t it?).

Even if you haven’t, this turns out quite true for many guys including myself, and since I usually fall in love with girls rather quickly, I wanted a way to forget them as easily, which was the cause for inventing this theory.

So, basically, to forget a girl you need to listen to her melody continuously for a period of time, duration of which depends on the depth of your fall. Sooner or later you’ll get tired of it, and the appetence for the girl will go away as well.

Heat

secretstolen — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:50:52 +0000

Heat. It has all been about heat recently.

Heat can make you feel ill. As though you’ve got flu or something. You may also get a heat- or a sun-stroke, neither of which is easy to get through. And even if you’ve managed to survive, it is hardly acceptable to ease in some time, usually a week or two, ’cause your central nervous system is very weak in this period, and a relapse may happen.

Hovewer, it’s not all so bad.

Skin is the extreme part of our body, the exact one that interacts with the outworld, even if it’s presented by heat. This means that a nerve signal has to go all the way from the border – skin – to the centre – brain. I guess it should be quite hard work for it, and certainly it takes some time. And as you probably know, any signal, without a booster, tends to decrease in time.

What may be such a booster? Your mind.

So the first stage of reducing the influence of heat is to make this booster not increase the bloody signal, which is already far too strong. Here is the way to carry this out. Our brain cannot handle many tasks at the same time, and to put it off looking after one signal we need to make it busy with another. Practically, it is the matter of concentrating your mind on things other than heat.

The second stage is not only to decrease the signal, to make it weaker than it is when reaching the brain, as weak as it’s not even possible to discern it, but also to generate the opposite signal (which would work out at a negative value in the scope of the source signal if summed with it). In the context of our heat signal this means that we need to generate a cold signal and concentrate on it.

Both stages are feasible by means of meditation and only differ in the object of meditation, which may be quite random for the first stage and quite certain for the second.

Now I leave you thinking about this new information you’ve just got (yes, there’s still a lot to think about), and it’s up to you if you apply it properly and it turns into some strong and useful knowledge.

ATI strangeness, part 2

secretstolen — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 07:29:53 +0000

So today a new version of fglrx appeared in the Debian repository, which was supposed to fix the map errors (according to the changelog) that have been flooding my kernel logs for ages.

After the upgrade, what I had to find out was not only the fact that the map errors still remained, but also that my display size settings which I configured so hard a week before just didn’t work now, and I was getting the wrong-DPIed picture on my screen again. What can I say? ATI are doing their best to make the users dig deeper and deeper into various configuration routines, aren’t they? :)

So, as I had nothing better to do, I started my researches again. Since DisplaySize and NoDDC options had stopped making the effect, I decided to go the other way. I removed those lines from xorg.conf, and added a new parameter to the X-server starting command, which was this:

-dpi 86

Because I use KDE, it went into /etc/kde4/kdm/kdmrc, [X-:*-Core], ServerArgsLocal.

Here we are. Once I restarted the X-server, everything’s been working just fine.

One other thing I feel ought to explain is how I calculated the correct DPI value. As I already had the physical size of my LCD, it wasn’t a problem at all. The formula is:

1280*25.4/width

1024*25.4/height

Here 25.4 is a constant, and 1280×1024 is the resolution I use. If everything is correct, the results should be the same for both formulas.

Now we see that even the problems which are not obvious to solve at the first glance usually have more than one actual way to work out, and we shouldn’t lose sleep over them. Just keep digging and don’t weaken.

ATI strangeness

secretstolen — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 12:42:10 +0000

I bought a brand new videocard ATI Radeon HD3650 recently, and it’s just gorgeous. But there was a strange thing with it, which is not obvious to figure out. The card has two DVI outputs (quite same), so when I was plugging it in, I sort of tried guessing which one would be better (didn’t really think there was any difference between them though). So I chose the right one. Here ‘right’ means both right-hand (to look from the back) and correct.

An ATI card doesn’t usually run properly without any additional configuration, and this one wasn’t an exception. It didn’t work with my monitor’s DDC so that the screen size and DPI were incorrect, which expressed itself in the fact that all the fonts were huge and the text was wrong-placed. To fix that issue I added Option “NoDDC” to the xorg.conf’s Device section, and stated the physical display size of my LCD at the Monitor section (DisplaySize 376 301). Since then it started working quite well.

After that I was wondering if it could have been an issue with the DVI output I’d chosen. In order to catch on it I connected the monitor to the left output and commented out the DDC related lines in xorg.conf (which I added as said above). No surprise, I got the same display size problem. But when I went back to the fixed version of the X-server configuration file, nothing changed. Nothing, but a line saying ‘Option “NoDDC” is not used’ in the logs file. I was sort of frustrated, and connected the monitor back to the right output.

Now let’s think. Would I have linked this issue to the DVI output system if I used the left connector from the beginning? I don’t really think so. I guess I’d just have thrown the card out of the window and that would’ve been all.

So here is my advice to other happy ATI’s products users. Even though the programmers of the company don’t manage to do their work well, think of it in a positive way. Everything we’re trying to configure and work out is what we get new experience and knowledge through. Don’t be afraid of modifying anything, and you’ll probably find what you’ve been looking for. And remember that all the material things are temporary and there is no reason to take anything that happens to them to heart. In other words, just do not give a lot of shit about that sort of stuff :P

Memorability

secretstolen — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:34:43 +0000

It’s strange that we remember some things very clearly and can’t recall others at all. How does our consciousness choose what to keep in mind and what goes out of it? I’d like some memories I can’t throw out to get lost, but it’s not so easy to have an argument with your own mind about such a thing, is it? Hope the meditation will help though.

Globalisation, like

secretstolen — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:46:51 +0000

Unfortunately, there are some things that we cannot influence singly. Global problems are some of those, and they must be solved by joint efforts. Even people who are not affected at the exact moment should think about them, because nobody knows how it will turn out in a year, in a month, or maybe tomorrow.

On a level with global ecological problems there are also others, more material. Yes, it is the economical crisis. Just imagine thousands of innocent people losing their jobs because of such an abstract concept. Its consequences are not abstract though, they are quite real. I must say I am not an economist and do not know a lot about all these things, but still I cannot be silent when I see my friends having hard times through people who are absolutely not connected with them. Why do they pay for someone’s mistakes?

It looks not fair, and it is not fair, but we can hardly do something about it. So what is the point of crying and regreting? Just know, everything will be paid at the right time, and if you take your life as it is, you will be rewarded.

secretstolen — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:01:44 +0000

It was something he wasn’t born with, neither was anyone. He’s been developing it all his life, even without exact knowing of that. People mentioned it sometimes, he wouldn’t notice it though. The more time passed the stronger his ability became. It was an ability of his mind, which was much more stronger than anyone’s he knew, but he used to think that other people were the same as him. It was only found out by him in Ireland, when he was walking on windfields, listening to Secret Garden and meditating. He was stopped by an unknown power and understood it. It was his wisdom.