Fri, 05 Sep 2008
Another Long Absence
I'm back blogging after being gone for two and a half weeks. I was knocked off line by the phone company (they accidentally disconnected me) for about half that time, and I was just lazy about getting back. At the same time I was having land line problems, I also changed cell phone carriers. So I was out of touch with everyone, a practical hermit. Well, not really.
While I was offline, I was working on the software for a new blogging system. The software I'm using now in Blosxom, but it's been abandoned by its author for some time, My software now passes its unit tests and is ready to be tested online, though not to be used for anything serious. The software has now two parts, a templating system and CRUD manager, though it probably will end up being split into five parts: CGI front end, CRUD manager, persistence manager, site manager, and templating code. For those of you who don't know the lingo, CRUD stands for create, read, update, delete, the basic operations for changing a persistent data store. And CGI stands for common gateway interface, whichis the simplest protocol for tying programs to the web. It all adds up to approximately 2000 lines of Perl code and probably another 1000 or so before I'm finished. That's a lot bigger than the original version of Blosxom (about 100 lines) but there are good reasons for what I've written that I won't go into now.
Here's my obligatory Buddhist content. Another study of Buddhist meditation has been done, the usual drink this radiactive cocktail and we'll watch how your brain metabolizes it experiment. This watched twelve Zen meditators' brains while solving a trivial problem, paired with twelve non-meditators. The conclusion:
Scans revealed that Zen training led to different activity in a set of brain regions known as the "default network," which is linked with spontaneous bursts of thought and wandering minds. After volunteers experienced in Zen were distracted by the computer, their brains returned faster to how they were before the interruption than novice brains did. This effect was especially striking in the angular gyrus, a brain region important for processing language.
"The regular practice of meditation may enhance the capacity to limit the influence of distracting thoughts," Pagnoni said.
So a lot of technology was used to reach a not so surprising conclusion.
