Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2007

Ideas for a possible Ninjam front end

In my nightly jams with Ninjam I've recently found out loads about how it can be improved. Firstly there's now a linux client (there's always been one but this one is gui based). It's called gninjam. Best of all is that in doing this, Tobias the author of this first derivative, separated display from core functionality creating libninjam and a front end which he wrote in Glade. Setar and Tabla improvisation on very cheap microphone I want to write a new front end for it then, using libninjam and wxpython which looks simple enough , although this is all very ambitious, and I may never actually get to do it, but here's all the ideas meanwhile: a last.fm-like client that is able to : * Simplify the process of setting up audio: loads of ninjam users get in, but cant' hear themselves, some other player, or are coming through distorted etc and have to rely on the irc window to help them. For this I'd make a "testing room" - a room run on a standard serv

Asylum Seekers Violently Deported in Easton

Right under our very doorsteps, on the streets of Greenbank that have such lovely names, there are people who look like the rest of us but live under house arrest because they would not sign documents agreeing to leave this country for somewhere more dangerous. There are people being deported all the time . There are also some broken bin bags at the end of Bellevue Road, containing some of the lost clothes of a small boy who used to go to Bannerman Road Primary School. Up till Wednesday 17th January. Felipe came home that day and barely had time to settle down after school before a helicopter pulled up outside his house, in the sky. Last time the police had come for them, on December 8th, they had been taken at 6am, out of the blue and in a very traumatic episode, to a detention centre with the idea that they would be deported as soon as a plane was free. But they were not together, the father had left the house just before they had come, and called with his lawyer and they were freed.

The racist within

There is a racist in all our hearts And it has to come out and face reality That's the ultimate reality tv - the people around us. But no-one should be abandoned: we all have prejudices, and great good can come from the worst person turning around. Because they take with them their distorted environment, and it gets to see it too. Fitting that it happens to India from it's old decaying invader, when the Buddha himself tried so hard to make a change in the barriers between different castes in Brahmanic society, castes which continue to this day to affect society there. This means there is lots of Buddhist teaching to choose from when looking at this. I'm, I guess, now just a Nichiren Buddhist, so to name a few from my adopted tradition: dependent origination, the oneness of life and the environment, but mostly the possibility that all people being living beings intrinsically have Buddhahood within them, and no-one should be excluded, no matter what they believe, from the pos