La Salle Debain

Refudiate. [note: OUP blog may be unreachable due to heavy traffic and/or terminal embarrassment.]

I'll just go ahead and delete that draft post I've been writing about the American educational system.

Update: Oxford American Dictionary actually. Your precious literacy is safe...for now.

Wishing everyone a happy, auspicious, and prosperous Gujarati new year. (Vikrama samvata 2067 called "Shubhakrt")

For Diwali I got a smartphone after enduring years of pointing and laughing at my previous decidely dumb phone. It's a T-Mobile G1 with Google™ or in other words a rebranded HTC Dream. I didn't want an iPhone (evil) or the phone the sales people were trying to push, the G2 (very evil.) As evil is the default in the telecom industry I especially wanted the ability to run CyanogenMod and this phone, though it doesn't have all the latest whiz-bang features, is perfect for that. (Btw, people are working on porting Cyanogen to the G2 but why let your dollars encourage the carriers and their shennanigans?)

My fellow Republicans and I got a nice early Diwali present on Tuesday. ~65 seats in the House ~6 in the senate, ~18 governorships and control of ~20 state legislatures. (Some races haven't been formally called yet.) A few disappointments though. no majority in the Senate and Harry Reid and Barney Frank were not defeated. Still overall its an election to celebrate. Here are a few thoughts.

The Election System Is An Embarassment

Once again there are several races where the outcome is in doubt because of technical problems with voting. Whatever politics we have, can we agree that it is damn stupid that we still can't get something as simple as counting ballots right?

Prediction: The 2012 Republican presidential candidate will come from the Tea Party.

While I may be a Republican, I am also a Cosmopolitan East Coast Elitist so the Tea Party didn't move me much. There were a couple of cases (NY and DE atleast) where their candidates were subpar and cost us victory but the best of the new Republicans also came out of this movement. I would rather vote for one of them than Romney, Huckabee, McCain, Gingrich etc. (With the exception of Sarah Palin who is just too polarizing I'm afraid.) The Tea Party itself will subside in a few years as all populist movements do. (Ask the Hope'n'changers.)

Young People Are Dumb

Part of leftist mythology is the idea that one day "the kids" are going to rise up against the mean old corporate overlords. It ain't going to happen. There was a huge upsurge in first time voters in 2008 but that was because Obama was a novelty act not because they had suddenly discovered the merits of Keynesianism. Now Obama is old and busted so they won't vote anymore. (Not until they have kids and a mortgage sometime in the future.) They'll spend time make cool ironic signs for the Rally to Promote Comedy Central but even the prospect of legalizing pot won't get them to the polling booths in sufficient numbers to defeat the oldies. Why? Because young people are dumb.

Prediction: War With Iran

If you're President Obama what do you do now? Bipartisanship? Yeah right. Look at what happened to Rep. Cao of Louisiana, the only Republican to vote for Obamacare and one of only two GOP congressmen to lose on Tuesday. Obama actively campaigned for his challenger. Any of the new Republicans who try and compromise with the President will end up under the bus sooner or later as they well know.

The President could go full retard with the socialism (progressivism, liberalism whatever. It's all the same.) All his initiatives will be shot down but he can claim to be a martyr to the party of No. (Who will be joined in the Senate by Lieberman and whatever centrist Democrats who are up for reelection in 2012.) But this seems to be the path to a one-term presidency to me. Maybe that's what he wants. He could retire comfortably to the deanship of some Ivy League law school and make a lucrative killing on the rubber chicken circuit.

But lets assume he wants to get back in the White House in 2012. One way to get back in touch with the voters is to start getting serious about foreign policy which has either been a joke (Remember the reset button?) a travesty or just copied from the Bush administration. In particular the Obama administration has completely failed in stopping Iran from gaining nuclear technology, sponsoring terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, and oppressing its own people. War with Iran would enhance his standing with Conservatives (hey it works for me!) most liberals would go along with it and the extreme Code Pink type loonies can safely be ignored. I say it happens before November 2012.

Shailu is supposed to be a vampire princess but the effect is spoiled because she wouldn't wear the fangs.

We didn't see even one Lady Gaga. I thought that was supposed to be the hot costume this year?

My kids ate eight boxes of Froot Loops to get me this.

So the four days are up. What do I have to show for it? Well I am declaring victory because S.Y.T.Y.C.D...OMG? is playable. There is a long way to go before one would actually want to play it though.

I had to take out doors, AI, the level boss and levels for that matter. FOV is kind of erratic. But you can fight, take, and quaff things and the dungeon is nicely laid out (except for doors.) So that's good for something right? I will add all the other good stuff as time passes.

Kanzepharaz of the one thousand and eight spires. Kanzepharaz capital of the Empire of K'thorv and since the succesful end to the war that led to the annihilation of the Pleiadic Oligarchy in K'threl, the richest and most splendid city in the Middle World. Kanzepheraz whose real estate prices have soared e'en beyond the calculation of the rainbow abacus of Thobis Himself.

Anathomelis, a princeling of the Imperial Clan needs a location for his new and expanded orgy dome. Yet the only available—and affordable on a seventh rank civil allowance—place left in the city of one thousand and eight spires is the tomb of Pharaz the First and Subsequent, lich-emperor of the Jerelite dynasty and his eldritch retainers. Before the construction-serfs can move in, the tomb must be cleared of its unshriven and non-rent-paying denizens.

As His Principalities' chief swordbearer it has fallen to you to make the tomb of Pharaz safe for gentrification. Treasures and honors await you if you succeed. Aeons of torment in the Planes of Unlife await you if you fail.

WILL YOU RISE TO THE CHALLENGE?

rec.games.roguelike.development is having another challenge, this time to complete a roguelike game in four days. My previous attempt to write one in seven days was a failure but as I can build upon my previous work, I think I can make it this time.

This time I did not waste lots of time thinking of a name. S.Y.T.Y.C.D...OMG? and The Real Housewives of Mordor were the only ones under serious consideration.

With that crucial task out of the way, I spent the morning ripping code out of A.L.F. wherever possible. In the afternoon, I looked into dungeon generation.

My previous experiments with this sort of thing were pretty convoluted but now I think I have a simpler algorithm which still provides a random yet plausible-looking map. It basically goes like this:

1. Divide the map into a grid of sectors.As the S.Y.T.Y.C.D...OMG? map is 60×80, my sectors are 20×16 giving 3×5 grid.
2. Mark each space on the map as impassable.
3. In each sector, pick a random square as its "center" not too near the edge of the sector.
4. Join each pair of centers first W -> E and then N -> S. with passable spaces. These will be the corridors and doing it this way ensures all sectors will be connected. Last time, my mistake was making rooms first and then corridors which is much more complicated to get right.
5. For each sector, there is a 2/3 chance it contains a room. If there is, randomly a number of spaces to each side of the center square. These will be the dimensions of the room. Make all the spaces in the resulting rectangle passable.
6. Randomly take a quarter chunk out of some rooms making them "L" shaped for a bit of variety. (at some point I can add round, polygonal or other shapes.)
7. Create "walls" by making all the outer boundary spaces of the room impassable again. This also ensures rooms do not touch or overlap.
8. If a wall meets a corridor, turn it into a "door." Doors don't do anything yet but eventually will be locked, trapped etc.
9. Finally, place monsters, treasure, and items in the room.

In the evening today (Tuesday), the Debconf organizers arranged for a screening of the Creative Commons licensed film "Sita Sings the Blues" by Nina Paley. I went to see it as I had missed it when it was first released among tales of trials and tribulation at the hands of copyright meanies.

So first let me say yay Free Culture!, boo Intellectual Property! etc. etc. Now we have that out of the way...

"Sita Sings the Blues" has two main narrative threads: The breakup of Ninas relationship with her boyfriend and the Ramayana particularly a story from the uttarakanda about how after Shri Rama returned from Lanka, Sita had to undergo the agnipravesha to prove her chastity and even after she passed that test was eventually banished to the forest. I had an adverse reaction to this film. In fact I stayed to the end to be polite but I left afterwards as soon as I could. I had almost a physical feeling of nausea and I was surprised by this. Since then I have been pondering why this is so.

It's not that its blasphemous. Shri Rama is not just a "perfect man", he is God (an avatar of Vishnu Bhagavan as is briefly touched upon in the film) for millions of people so, well, yes it is blasphemous but its more Rowan Atkinson style rather than Norwegian Black Metal style blasphemy. One never gets the impression that the author hates Hinduism or Indian culture—the opposite in fact. And in fact it is not uncommon in our culture to speak of Sita and Rama in this way. They are not remote authority figures but as familiar to us as our own friends and family and the Ramayana is not just about events that happened long ago it is relevant to our lives right now. Even the "good woman done wrong by big dumb male jerk" narrative is not unknown. (See the Uttararamacharita of Bhavabhuti for instance.) though I would suggest reducing the Ramayana this way is akin to treating the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as a book about towels.

Even the milder criticism that it is not accurate is offbase because although the Sanskrit poem by Maharshi Valmiki is the canonical rendition of the Ramayana, there are other well-known versions. Not just in Sanskrit, the Hindi retelling by Sant Tulsidas called Ramacharitamanasa is more popular than Valmiki. Also speaking as someone who has preached Ramakatha "professionally" I can tell you that even the priests do not stick to the letter of the text. It is encouraged and expected that they will riff on the basic stories adding or removing details according to the needs and taste of the audience. And the device of the three narrators made me smile as this is exactly the kind of discussions that go on after hearing the Ramakatha. (I must say Paley picked a notably illiterate trio though.) One place where this fell flat was when they discussed the alleged discrepancy between Sita living simply in the forest and dropping a trail of jewellery on the way to Lanka. Although I can imagine someone at some point saying, "Do not question these stories" not at this point. Even the most retarded westernized Indian would know that removing ones ornaments is a sign of widowhood. A married woman would only do that in extremis certainly not just merely because she was a hermit. In a few cases some extra details might have helped the story. It was not explained that Ravana does not just have rakshasas in his command but he is one himself. (And he certainly wasn't a good guy until one day he got up and kidnapped Sita.) Shri Ramas brother Lakshamana accompanied the couple into the forest to Lanka and back but he only pops up (for no apparent reason) at the end. But look at me, I'm turning into one of those people who rant about Star Trek continuity errors or complain that the Romans in a gladiator movie have the wrong helmets for that time period etc. One has to cut a storyteller some slack and I entered the screening determined to be charitable.

It's also not because I don't really see much connection between the two stories. Getting dumped by someone who simply loses interest in you hardly seems equivalent to being trapped by a moral code that doesn't allow for individuals feelings. Paley could have easily made "Princess Leia Sings the Blues" and it wouldn't have changed the significance much. But in India people make far more tenuous connections between the epics and events in their own life so one can hardly complain about that.

Aesthetics are not the problem either. The first version of the Ramayana I ever read was the Amar Chitra Katha comicbook version which partly influenced the visual style of this film. (In fact you briefly see it in one scene when different editions of the Ramayana flash by.) Hindu popular culture is very gaudy. (See Ramanand Sagars '80s Ramayana Hindi TV serial, which was very reverential, insanely popular and tacky beyond belief.) The animation in this film is very good and quite artistic.

"So Jaldhar", you might be asking if you've read this far, "what exactly is your problem with this film?"

I have read the Valmiki Ramayana in Sanskrit with the commentaries from beginning to end. I've read other Ramayanas in Sanskrit, Gujarati, and English. I have read the comicbook, I've read anti-Ramayana polemics. When you learn Sanskrit in the traditional way the first lesson, in the declension of masculine gendered nouns ending in vowels is rAma.h rAmau rAmA.h ... I am well aware there are different emphases, different interpretations in various versions. Why can't I accept this as just another take on a story that has shown its fluidity over and over again? It's just...wrong on a subrational level. How can I put this? Imagine you are flipping through the TV channels and you see your grandparents amongst Lady Gaga's backup dancers. Or you came home one night to find everything that was on the floor meticulously glued to the ceiling. Over the course of my life (to hear my mother tell it my first exposure to the Ramayana was before I could speak.) I have developed a mental bond with this story a certain idea of how it should be. I think so has Nina Paley. And this is the problem. "Sita Sings the Blues" is Nina Paleys Ramayana not mine.

I missed yesterdays report but there was not a lot to say anyway. I've made further progress on the DHCP problem in the sense that I can make it go away if I use NAT in VMWare instead of Bridged networking. Tried compiling gcc 4.4.4 and ran out of disk space.

I've been feeling guilty about not volunteering so that evening I assisted the organizers by eating some of their excess baked ziti. It's my civic duty.

Today (Sunday) was Debian day. I spent some time in the hacklab trying to compile gcc again. This time I ran out of inodes. I did manage to get to two of the presentations. One was about the GSoC projects various students are doing. Perhaps next year Debian Minix will be a subject for GSoC? The other one was by Andy Oram about FLOSS Manuals. They are doing important work in Free Software documentation and have developed some interesting tech towards that end. One is CSS3 print profile support. This will be a relief for anyone who has had to deal with the bletcherous XSL. Another is booki a platform for collaborative writing and editing. I shall be following the progress of this project as I hope to make a big contribution to Debian documentation soon. Andy works for O'Reilly and after the talk we had some informative discussion about the publishing world. This "hallway track" is the great thing about gatherings like Debconf.