Linux Mint 17, Cinnamon, Firefox 31 = freeze

I've been very happy with Linux Mint 17, and the Cinnamon GUI.
Except for the occasional system freezes.  This happened usually when I was swapping between windows (alt+tab), and required a re-login.

I've spent some time looking around the web and trying to diagnose the problem.  I've found one change that seems to have cleared up the problem, and I am not aware that anyone else has mentioned it yet.  I've uninstalled Firefox (31), and replaced it with Google Chrome.  I haven't had a freeze since doing that.  Fingers crossed.

Kuṭipraveśam rasāyanam

In the Compendium of Suśruta (Suśrutasaṃhitā), there is a passage describing rejuvenation through the use of Soma, which is taken over a period of four months while living in a special hut (4.29.10).  The description is very dramatic, and I translated it in my book The Roots of Ayurveda.(2003: 125-131).

Two accounts of a parallel therapy occur in Caraka's Compendium (Carakasaṃhitā).  In one version, the patient akes Soma and spends six months naked in a greased barrel (6.1.4-7).  In another, he enters a hut, as in Suśruta's account, but Soma is not involved.  (See Roots, 2003: 76--8.)

In my discussion in Roots, I drew a parallel with the Aitareyabrāhmaṇa 1.3 in which a Soma ritual involving rebirth is described (the passage was kindly pointed out to me by David Pingree).

Now I have identified another passage that seems to be about the same ritual.

Pātañjalayogaśāstra (sūtras and bhāṣya)

In the Pātañjalayogaśāstra (i.e., the Yoga Sutras and the Bhāṣya commentary, all by Patañjali), there is a sutra that lists the means by which super powers may be attained.  Sutra 4.1 says:

super powers (siddhi) come from birth, drugs, mantras, asceticism, and meditative integration (samādhi)(janmauṣadhimantratapaḥsamādhijāḥ siddhayaḥ).  

Explaining this, Patañjali (not Vyāsa) says, in his Bhāṣya,

by using drugs means using rejuvenations (rasāyana) in the houses of the Asuras, and so on.
(oṣadhibhir asurabhavaneṣu rasāyanenety evamādiḥ).

No further explanation is given, and we are left to wonder what the "houses of the Asuras" might be.

Śaṅkara

The commentator Śaṅkara, in his Vivaraṇa, expands on this passage in a significant way. He says (1952 edition, pp. 317-18):

oṣadhibhir asurabhavaneṣu rasāyanena  somāmalakādibhakṣaṇena pūrvadehānapanayenaiva/

by means of drugs in the houses of the Asuras by elixir, by consuming Soma, emblic, and so on, completely without the removal of the previous body.   

[I am grateful to Philipp Maas for improving this translation. -- October 2016]

The use of the word "soma" suggests that this commentator is putting together the idea of rasāyana entioned in the Bhāṣya with the specific rasāyana treatment described by Suśruta (and, more briefly, Caraka).

Asurabhavana

The only place that Asurabhavana "home of the Asuras" is mentioned with any regularity is in the Pāli literature of the Buddhist Canon.  For example, in the Mahā Suññata Sutta (Majjhimanikāya 122/3, tr. by Piya Tan; tr. by Thanissaro Bhikkhu), the Buddha is described worrying about the fact that worldly people live in too-crowded conditions for proper meditation.  Asura bhavana is described as being ten-thousand yojanas wide, and is included in a listing of the various parts of the universe where living creatures live (and are crowded).  Asurabhavana is therefore a geographical location in the Buddhist universe.

In one of the British Library Stein Tibetan manuscripts, IOL Tib J 644, Vajrapāṇi is described entering an Asura Cave in order to meditate.  See J. Dalton and Sam van Schaik (2006), Tibetan Tantric Manuscripts from Dunhuang: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Stein Collection at the British Library. Brill, Leiden, Boston, p. 291.

Vācaspatimiśra

Explaining Patañjali, the commentator Vācaspati (as so often) is guessing at the meaning on the basis of his general knowledge (e-edition at SARIT): 

oṣadhisiddhim āha --- asurabhavaneṣv iti/ manuṣyo hi kutaś cin nimittād asurabhavanam upasaṃprāptaḥ kamanīyābhir asurakanyābhir upanītaṃ rasāyanam upayujyājarāmaraṇatvam anyāś ca siddhīr āsādayati/ ihaiva vā rasāyanopayogena yathā māṇḍavyo munī rasopayogād vindhyavāsīti/

He states the super power of drugs: "in the houses of the Asuras." Because a human, for a certain reason, who has reached the house of an Asura, is served an elixir by the attractive Asura girls.  After taking it, he achieves the state of never aging or dying, and other super powers.  Alternatively, by taking elixirs in this actual world, like the sage Māṇḍavya took up residence in the Vindhya mountains through the use of elixirs.

Sanskrit Vidh - On alchemical transubstantiation versus piercing

[This reproduces a post by me to the INDOLOGY list, earlier today]

I am trying to firm up the idea that vedh- means convert, transmute, or (for the philosophers among us, perhaps) transubstantiate.

The Rasaratnasamuccaya is a kind of late-ish nibandha text that brings together, organizes and medicalizes the earlier, more tantric alchemical literature.  Meulenbeld argues that it is datable to the sixteenth century (HIML IIA 670).  Earliest dated MS: 1699 CE.  This text is not bad as a representative of the developed ("classical"?) rasaśāstra tradition; one would expect less standardization of vocab. in earlier texts.
At Rasaratnasamuccaya 8.94-95 there is a definition of śabdavedha. 

from blowing of iron, with mercury in the mouth, there is the creation of goldenness and silverness. That is known as Word-vedha.

and the commentator makes it even more explicity that this is transmutation, using pari-ṇam.  Rasaratnasamuccayabodhinī on 8.95:

... tat lauhakhaṇḍaṃ svarṇādirūpeṇa pariṇatam//
that bit of iron is converted into the form of gold etc.

... yatra vedhe svarṇādirūpeṇa pariṇamet sa śabdavedha ityarthaḥ//

Word-vedha is where it converts with the form of gold etc. ...

The operation being described here is not unclear.  The alchemist puts a piece of mercury in his mouth and blows on a piece of iron.  It becomes golden or silvery.  This "becoming" is "vedha."

The Bodhinī authors were Āśubodha and Nityabodha (hence the witty title), the sons of Jīvānanda Vidyāsāgara Bhaṭṭacārya, and the Bodhinī was published in Calcutta in 1927.  So it's arguable that their interpretation was influenced by 19th-20th century thought.  However, their commentary is very śāstric and elaborate (note the Pāṇinian grammatical parsing, "dhama dhāvane ityasmāt lyuḥ" (>P.1.3.134 and pacādi ākṛtigaṇa).  And as Meulenbeld points out, they cite an exceptionally wide range of earlier rasaśāstra texts (HIML IIA 671-2).  Their interpretations are based on a close reading of classical rasaśāstra literature.  At the very least, one can say that their view represents the understanding of learned panditas in turn of the century Calcutta, that vedha meant pariṇāma, or transmutation.

The Origins of a Famous Yogic/Tantric Image (part 2)

In a post in February this year I talked about the origin and spread of the famous "lines of energy" image.  I asserted that this image was created by or for Yogini Sunita.

I had a memory of having seen the image reproduced in Mircea Eliade's book, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, or in one of Daniélou's books.  I looked at the issues of Eliade's books available to me, and at Daniélou's
Yoga: Mastering the Secrets of Matter and the Universe, that is on my bookshelf, but the image wasn't there.

Now, I can report that I've solved both these puzzles in a stroke.  In the Vienna Indology library last week, I came across an Eliade book that I'd forgotten, Patanjali et le Yoga (Paris, 1962).  And look at the cover!

Eliade reproduces the image inside the book:

Eliade captions the image "La matière, la vie, l'esprit."  As an aside, I have argued and taught in the past that anyone who says "body, mind and spirit" is reproducing a meme from Western New Age thought, and not anything specifically Indian.  The threefold division of Man in the original Sanskrit sources is normally "body, mind and speech."

In the acknowledgements at the back of the book, Eliade attributes this image to Alain Daniélou's "Yoga: Méthode de réintégration (Éditions de l'Arche), pp. 171, 179 et couverture."  Eliade doesn't give a date for the Daniélou edition he copied from, but the edition will turn up sooner or later.  It was first published in 1951.

From http://www.pranayama-yoga.co.uk/

So, this image was used by Daniélou, as early as 1951, and following him, by Eliade in 1962.

The earliest edition of Yogini Sunita's book that I can find is 1965, and she only arrived in England in 1960, and started her first yoga classes that year, as reported in this newspaper clip.

So perhaps the whole story of this image has a prehistory before Yogini Sunita.  Perhaps she reproduced the image from Daniélou, or even Eliade.

Update April 2019

Here's the image in a 1949 English translation of Daniélou's book.  The caption says "with permission from 'Kalyan' Corakhour".  Kalyan was a well-known Sanskrit and Hindi journal published by the Geeta Press in Gorakhpur since 1926.  So the trail now leads to an issue of Kalyan from before 1949.  Some issues have been scanned and are at Archive.org.

Update January 2022

Found it!  After an afternoon of scanning back issues of Kalyan, I located the image in the 1935 issue: 

Unfortunately, the image available in the scan is folded over, so the whole image is not visible.  But the visible parts are definitely identifiable as the bottom half of the famous Danielou-Eliade-Sunita image. It's nice to see that it is in negative, which explains why it was negative in the early reproductions.  This is a bold idea by the Kalyan illustrator.  Later printers have preferred to reverse the image to positive.  In the volume, the illustration is on page 560 and illustrates an article by Svāmī Śrīkṛṣṇacalled "प्राणायामविषयको मेरा अनुभव"(My experience in the area of Prāṇāyāma") (pp. 554-561). 

This issue of Kalyan was dedicated to the theme of Yoga, which is no doubt why it came to Danielou's attention, over ten years later.  It contains other interesting illustrations, including pictures on pp. 389-392 copied without attribution from Haṃsasvarūpa's Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa (Muzaffarpur, Bihar: Trikutivilas Press, 1903?).  See Wujastyk 2009: 201-204 for further background on this work 

In the same issue of Kalyan, there is an unexpected article on mesmerism and hypnotism by Dr Durgāśaṅkarajī Nāgara, "मेस्मेरिज्म् और् हिप्नाटिज्म्" (pp. 538-544) that gives a history of the techniques, its use at St Thomas's hospital in London, illustrations of magnets and practitioners, and a discussion of electrical flow, the scientific basis, methods of magnetic pass, deep breathing, etc.

 

Open letter to MLBD about their publishing Mein Kampf

Update, 21 May 2014
Motilal Banarsidass responded graciously, rapidly and positively to this letter and the petition, and agreed to stop distributing the book.

Notes on the Ukrainian crisis

The Nuland-Pyatt recording

[The following is an extract, authored by me, from the WikiPedia page on this topic.  My text has been deleted four or five times by someone with a Russian-sounding name, NazariyKaminski, or by a now-deleted user called RedPenOfDeath and other sock-puppets.  So I am placing the text here, for the record.]

The Origins of a Famous Yogic/Tantric Image (part 1)

Mark Singleton

Ellen Goldberg

I'm delighted by the arrival from the bookshop of my copy of the excellent new book Gurus of Modern Yoga edited by Mark Singleton and Ellen Goldberg (ISBN 978-0-19-993872-8).

Full details of the book can be had from Peter Wyzlic's indologica.de website.





Yogini Sunita's Pranayama Image

Suzanne Newcombe

Suzanne Newcombe's chapter, "The Institutionalization of the Yoga Tradition: `Gurus' B. K. S. Iyengar and Yogini Sunita in Britain," is an outstanding description and evaluation of the impact of two yoga teachers in the UK.  One of Suzanne's subjects is Yogini Sunita (aka Bernadette Cabral), originally a Catholic from Bombay.  Although tragically killed by a car at the early age of 38, her work is kept alive by her son Kenneth Cabral and other yoga teachers (http://www.pranayama-yoga.co.uk).

Yogini Sunita published a book in 1965 called Pranayama, The Art of

Relaxation, The Lotus and the Rose (Worldcat).  It contained an illustration that has gone on to become one of the most famous and iconic images in yoga publishing.  The image is a line drawing in black on a white background showing the outline of a seated, cross-legged meditator superimposed on a wild network of lines, with annotations in Devanagari script. The Sanskrit word प्राणायाम (prāṇāyāma) "breath control" labels the image in the top right-hand corner.  The smaller writing, along the lines, is more or less illegible in all the reproductions I have been able to examine.  I can just discern the Devanagari alphabet being spelt out (अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ए ओ ऐ औ अं अः ...) on the right clavicle.  But the rest of the writing is unclear.  I am not confident that it is even real text, although it looks superficially like Devanagari or Gujarati script.  Only an examination of the original artwork or a good reproduction would settle the matter.

Yogini Sunita's signature

Yogini Sunita was not a confident Devanagari writer, as is evidenced by her signature in the preface to her book (in Devanagari, "yodinī saunīṭā").  She could not have produced the Pranayama the drawing herself, and must have commissioned it from a source or collaborator with a confident knowledge of Sanskrit and the Devanagari script, perhaps in Bombay.

Yogini Sunita's illustration has been reproduced almost endlessly in books and now on the internet, and there are multiple modifications and interpretations.  One of the more common is a negative version, with white lines on a black background.  Others are coloured, simplified, and interpreted in various creative ways.  It appears in various contemporary yoga-themed mashups.  The word प्राणायाम is often masked out.  The image is often shown as a representation not primarily of breath control, but of the nodes and tubes of the spiritual body (cakras and nāḍīs).

Suzanne Newcombe describes how Yogini Sunita's early death meant that her methods and ideas did not spread as widely as those of other 20th century yoga teachers.  Nevertheless, the Pranayama illustration from her 1965 book has become one of the most widely-known images of yoga in the 21st-century (Google images).

Update, July 2014: now see part 2 of this article

How To Fix A Non-Bootable Ubuntu System Due To Broken Updates Using A LiveCD And Chroot

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How To Fix A Non-Bootable Ubuntu System Due To Broken Updates Using A LiveCD And Chroot
// Web Upd8 - Ubuntu / Linux blog

If your Ubuntu system doesn't boot because of some broken updates and the bug was fixed in the repositories, you can use an Ubuntu Live CD and chroot to update the system and fix it.

1. Create a bootable Ubuntu CD/DVD or USB stick, boot from it and select "Try Ubuntu without installing". Once you get to the Ubuntu desktop, open a terminal.

2. You need to find out your root partition on your Ubuntu installation. On a standard Ubuntu installation, the root partition is "/dev/sda1", but it may be different for you. To figure out what's the root partition, run the following command:

sudo fdisk -l

This will display a list of hard disks and partitions from which you'll have to figure out which one is the root partition.

To make sure a certain partition is the root partition, you can mount it (first command under step 3), browse it using a file manager and make sure it contains folders that you'd normally find in a root partition, such as "sys", "proc", "run" and "dev".

3. Now let's mount the root partition along with the /sys, /proc, /run and /dev partitions and enter chroot:
sudo mount ROOT-PARTITION /mnt
for i in /sys /proc /run /dev; do sudo mount --bind "$i" "/mnt$i"; done
sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/etc/
sudo chroot /mnt
Notes:
ROOT-PARTITION is the root partition, for example /dev/sda1 in my case - see step 2;the command that copies resolv.conf gets the network working, at least for me (using DHCP); if you get an error about resolv.conf being identical when copying it, just ignore it.
Now you can update the system - in the same terminal, type:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Since you've chrooted into your Ubuntu installation, the changes you make affect it and not the Live CD, obviously.

If the bug that caused your system not to boot is happening because of some package in the Proposed repositories, the steps above are useful, but you'll also have to know how to downgrade the packages from the proposed repository - for how to do that, see: How To Downgrade Proposed Repository Packages In Ubuntu

Refrences: 1, 2, 3

Originally published at WebUpd8: Daily Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

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Fwd: Work Flows and Wish Lists: Reflections on Juxta as an Editorial Tool

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com>
Date: 18 January 2014 21:58
Subject: Work Flows and Wish Lists: Reflections on Juxta as an Editorial Tool
To: Philipp André Maas <Philipp.A.Maas@gmail.com>, Alessandro Graheli <a.graheli@gmail.com>, Karin Preisendanz <karin.preisendanz@univie.ac.at>, Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk.cikitsa@blogspot.com>

Some interesting reflections on Juxta...

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Work Flows and Wish Lists: Reflections on Juxta as an Editorial Tool
// Juxta

I have had the opportunity to use Juxta Commons for several editorial projects, and while taking a breath between a Juxta-intensive term project last semester and my Juxta-intensive MA thesis this semester, I would like to offer a few thoughts on Juxta as an editorial tool.

For my term project for Jerome McGann's American Historiography class last semester, I conducted a collation of Martin R. Delany's novel, Blake, or, The Huts of America, one of the earliest African American novels published in the United States.Little did I know that my exploration would conduct me into an adventure as much technological as textual, but when Professor McGann recommended I use Juxta for conducting the collation and displaying the results, that is exactly what happened. I input my texts into Juxta Commons, collated them, and produced HTML texts of the individual chapters, each with an apparatus of textual variants, using Juxta's Edition Starter. I linked these HTML files together into an easily navigable website to present the results to Professor McGann. I'll be posting on the intriguing results themselves next week, but in the meantime, they can also be viewed on the website I constructed, hosted by GitHub: Blake Project home.

Juxta helped me enormously in this project. First, it was incredibly useful in helping me clean up my texts. My collation involved an 1859 serialization of the novel, and another serialization in 1861-62. The first, I was able to digitize using OCR; the second, I had to transcribe myself. Anyone who has done OCR work knows that every minute of scanning leads to (in my case) an average of five or ten minutes of cleaning up OCR errors. I also had my own transcription errors to catch and correct. By checking Juxta's highlighted variants, I was able to—relatively quickly—fix the errors and produce reliable texts. Secondly, once collated, I had the results stored in Juxta Commons; I did not have to write down in a collation chart every variant to avoid losing that information, as I would if I were machine- or sight-collating. Juxta's heat-map display allows the editor to see variants in-line, as well, which saves an immense amount of time when it comes to analyzing results: you do not have to reference page and line numbers to see the context of the variants. Lastly, Juxta enabled me to organize a large amount of text in individual collation sets—one for each chapter. I was able to jump between chapters and view their variants easily.

As helpful as Juxta was, however, I caution all those new to digital collation that no tool can perfectly collate or create an apparatus from an imperfect text. In this respect, there is still no replacement for human discretion—which is, ultimately, a good thing. For instance, while the Juxta user can turn off punctuation variants in the display, if the user does want punctuation and the punctuation is not spaced exactly the same in both witnesses, the program highlights this anomalous spacing. Thus, when 59 reads

' Henry, wat…

and 61 reads

'Henry, wat…

Juxta will show that punctuation spacing as a variant, while the human editor knows it is the result of typesetting idiosyncrasies rather than a meaningful variant. Such variants can carry over into the Juxta Edition Builder, as well, resulting in meaningless apparatus entries. For these reasons, you must make your texts perfect to get a perfect Juxta heat map and especially before using Edition Starter; otherwise, you'll need to fix the spacing in Juxta and output another apparatus, or edit the text or HTML files to remove undesirable entries.

Spacing issues can also result in disjointed apparatus entries, as occurred in my apparatus for Chapter XI in the case of the contraction needn't. Notice how because of the spacing in needn t and need nt, Juxta recognized the two parts of the contraction as two separate variants (lines 130 and 131):

This one variant was broken into two apparatus entries because Juxta recognized it as two words. There is really no way of rectifying this problem except by checking and editing the text and HTML apparatuses after the fact.

I mean simply to caution scholars going into this sort of work so that they can better estimate the time required for digital collation. This being my first major digital collation project, I averaged about two hours per chapter (chapters ranging between 1000 and 4000 words each) to transcribe the 61-62 text and then collate both witnesses in Juxta. I then needed an extra one or two hours per chapter to correct OCR and transcription errors.

While it did take me time to clean up the digital texts so that Juxta could do its job most efficiently, in the end, Juxta certainly saved me time—time I would have spent keeping collation records, constructing an apparatus, and creating the HTML files (as I wanted to do a digital presentation). I would be remiss, however, if I did not recommend a few improvements and future directions.

As useful as Juxta is, it nevertheless has limitations. One difficulty I had while cleaning my texts was that I could not correct them while viewing the collation sets; I had, rather, to open the witnesses in separate windows.

The ability to edit the witnesses in the collation set directly would make correction of digitization errors much easier. This is not a serious impediment, though, and is easily dealt with in the manner I mentioned. The Juxta download does allow this in a limited capacity: the user can open a witness in the "Source" field below the collation visualization, then click "Edit" to enable editing in that screen. However, while the editing capability is turned on for the "Source," you cannot scroll in the visualization—and so navigate to the next error which may need to be corrected.

A more important limitation is the fact that the Edition Starter does not allow for the creation of eclectic texts, texts constructed with readings from multiple witnesses; rather, the user can only select one witness as the "base text," and all readings in the edition are from that base text.

Most scholarly editors, however, likely will need to adopt readings from different witnesses at some point in the preparation of their editions. Juxta's developers need to mastermind a way of selecting which reading to adopt per variant; selected readings would then be adopted in the text in Edition Starter. For the sake of visualizing, I did some screenshot melding in Paint of what this function might look like:

Currently, an editor wishing to use the Edition Starter to construct an edition would need to select either the copy-text or the text with the most adopted readings for the base text. The editor would then need to adopt readings from other witnesses by editing the the output DOCX or HTML files. I do not know the intricacies of the code which runs Juxta. I looked at it on GitHub, but, alas! my very elementary coding knowledge was completely inadequate to the task. I intend to delve more as my expertise improves, and in the meantime, I encourage all the truly code-savvy scholars out there to look at the code and consider this problem. In my opinion, this is the one hurdle which, once overcome, would make Juxta the optimal choice as an edition-preparation tool—not just a collation tool. Another feature which would be fantastic to include eventually would be a way of digitally categorizing variants: accidental versus substantive; printer errors, editor corrections, or author revisions; etc. Then, an option to adopt all substantives from text A, for instance, would—perhaps—leave nothing to be desired by the digitally inclined textual editor. I am excited about Juxta. I am amazed by what it can do and exhilarated by what it may yet be capable of, and taking its limitations with its vast benefits, I will continue to use it for all future editorial projects.

Stephanie Kingsley is a second-year English MA student specializing in 19th-century American literature, textual studies, and digital humanities. She is one of this year's Praxis Fellows [see Praxis blogs] and Rare Book School Fellows. For more information, visit http://stephanie-kingsley.github.io/, and remember to watch for Ms. Kingsley's post next week on the results of her collation of Delany's Blake.

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Dominik Wujastyk, from Android phone.

Zooniverse and Intelligent Machine-assisted Semantic Tagging of Manuscripts

I'm very impressed by the technology being used in the War Diaries Project.  To see what I mean, click on "Get Started" and try the guided tutorial.

Once there's a critical mass of digitized Sanskrit manuscripts available, I think it would be very interesting to contact the people at Zooniverse and discuss the possiblility of a Sanskrit MS-tagging project, like the War Diaries.

Tools for cataloguing Sanskrit manuscripts, no.1

In the post-office today I saw this piece of board that's used as a size-template to quickly assess which envelope to choose.  This is a formalized version of the same tool that I used for the many years that I spent cataloguing and packing Sanskrit manuscripts at the Wellcome Library in London.  I made a piece of board with three main size-outlines, for MSS of α, β, γ sizes.  Anything larger than γ counted as δ.  Palm-leaf MSS were all ε.

It was nice to see the same tool being used for a similar job, in an Austrian post-office!

Corrupted font spacing in terminal

I had this problem, that was solved by purging pango-graphite:

sudo apt-get purge pango-graphite

From Gnome to Cinnamon

Gnome 2 and 3

Ubuntu with Gnome 2

Ubuntu with Unity

After moving to Ubuntu GNU/Linux for all my work, in 2009, I used the default interface, Gnome 2, for a while.  Later, with version 3, Gnome moved to a completely new concept, but Ubuntu forked the development and moved to Unity, so I did that too.  

Gnome 3

Gnome 2 and Unity both had their virtues and their flaws.  The six-monthly upgrade cycle ("cadence") was never as smooth as it should be, so there have often been niggles that lasted a few weeks or months.  I didn't like Unity's two different search boxes.

Ubuntu with Gnome 3

I started using the Gnome Shell, ver. 3, on Linux (Ubuntu) after seeing my friends and colleagues using it at the TeX conference in Trivandrum in 2011.  I really liked Gnome 3, but with the update from 3.6 to 3.8 and 3.10, they did some major, major things wrong, and I've finally dumped it, in favour of Cinnamon.

The biggest boo-boo in the development of Gnome from version 3.8, was fooling with the default file-manager, Nautilus.  Many people have complained about the stripping out of function, like split-screen, and that was bad enough.  So was the nonsense about shifting the menus to the panel bar (or not!).  But what hasn't got mentioned so much (at all?) is that the new Nautilus changed all the keyboard shortcuts and rearranged the shortcuts relating to the menu system.  So Alt-F didn't bring up a "File" menu any more, for  example.  Right mouse-click+R didn't begin renaming a file.  If one uses computers all day, then one's fingers get trained, and no interface designer should mess with that stuff without expecting backlash.  With Nautilus 3.8, it was like being a beginning typist again, looking at my fingers, chicken-pecking for keys.

I liked the general design model of Gnome 3, with the corner switch to the meta level for choosing programs, desktops, and so on.  Searching for lesser-used programs with a few keystrokes rather than poking hopelessly through nested menus.  Much better.  A genuine and valuable contribution to the vision of how a computer should work.

Thanks to Webupd8, I was able to work around the Nautilus problem by uninstalling it and using Nemo instead.

But things just kept going wrong.  The shell crashed too often.  On two of my machines it stopped coming up at login, and had to be started manually.  Only after a couple of weeks did I track this down to a bad file in ~/.config/gnome-session (and I'm still not 100% sure).  Frequent crashes of the gnome-control-panel and other utilities.  More and more extraordinary tweaking to make it comfortable and useable.  Finally, I've had enough.

 

Cinnamon

Ubuntu with Cinnamon

I'm in my first few days of using Cinnamon, and so far things are okay.  I'm running Cinnamon on top of Ubuntu.  It's like stepping back in time, a bit, all those menus.  But one doesn't have to use them, and with a bit of tweaking one can set things up so that actual shell behaviour is very similar to Gnome 3.6.  Nemo is there - what a relief.  Alacarte actually works, but I've dumped it in favour of Menulibre in any case.  Configuration and tweaking is much nicer.  Many useful add-ons, and although I liked the http://extensions.gnome.org system, Cinnamon handles the add-on business in a much more integrated way.  Ibus+m17n work as expected again.  In general, it's an update from Gnome 2 in the direction of Gnome 3 but not the whole way.  And it seems more stable, which is critical to getting work done.

Human interfaces

“Because I believe interfaces to government can be simple, beautiful, and easy to use.”

-- Jen Pahlka, via Tim O'Reilly's blog.

Sanskrit manuscripts lost with the Titanic

Adheesh Sathaye mentioned today that the terrible sinking of the Titanic in 1912 was also the occasion of the loss of fourteen Sanskrit manuscripts of the Vikramacarita.  The MSS were on their way from Bombay to Edgerton in the USA.

Here is Edgerton's account, also kindly supplied by Adheesh.

There's an uncomfortable ambiguity in Edgerton's prose, regarding the predicate of his expression "terrible disaster."

Kenney on the poor success-rate of editorial conjectures

I cite this page of Kenney's The Classical Text often, partly in my own mind, and partly to friends and colleagues.  So I thought I'd reproduce it here.

The point being, be careful with conjectures, and remain sanguine that - if it is ever possible to check - over 95% of your conjectures will be wrong.

-----

• Dawe, Repertory.
• Boeckh
• Madvig, Adversaria.

Checklist of things to do on reinstalling Ubuntu

I'm finally moving to 64 bit Linux (since all my machines are fine with that).  My disks have my /home and root files in different partitions, so I can erase and reinstall Linux itself without touching any of "my" files.  This works flawlessly, and the new installation comes up with all my old desktop settings etc.  Since the Ubuntu Software Center's "sync" function still doesn't work properly, here are some installations and customizations that I like:

"ucgadkw" and UCL

Dear colleagues,

For about 25 years I had an email account at University College London.  It was "ucgadkw@euclid.ucl.ac.uk" from 1988, and then "ucgadkw@ucl.ac.uk" with aliases to "wujastyk@ucl.ac.uk" and "d.wujastyk@ucl.ac.uk".  After leaving UCL in 2009 I was given honorary status, so the accounts continued, as did access to my filestore, that for many years was the INDOLOGY website. 

But that has all now been unplugged and switched off. I was not informed or warned about this, and a UCL computer support person has just told me that it is unlikely that I'll be given access to my old files because apparently they don't belong to me, but to UCL ("work for hire").  I have a backup, but it is slightly out of date.

There's obviously a lesson here: if you care about your work, don't store it exclusively on a university computer.  Strange thing to say, but unfortunately true. 

Minimal example of XeLaTeX with Velthuis input mapping

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{polyglossia}

\newfontfamily
  \sanskritfont [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit]{Sanskrit 2003}

\begin{document}

\sanskritfont
\noindent\huge

aasiidraajaa nalo naama viirasenasuto balii|\\
upapannairgu.nairi.s.tai ruupavaana"svakovida.h||

\end{document}

Resources for OA book publication

My post "Some OA journals that publish S-Asia related research," was self-evidently devoted to journals.

There is also a growing field of services for publishing OA books.  Some research funding agencies, such as the FWF in Austria, require contractually that books too should be published OA.  To me, the business model for OA book publishing is less clear than that for journals, and I see many difficulties.  Nevertheless, the field is growing.

Some resources:

• Directory of Open Access Books
  
  "The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact."
• Knowledge Unlatched
  
  "Knowledge Unlatched is a not-for-profit organisation committed to helping global communities share the costs of Open Access publishing so that good books continue to be published and more readers are able to engage with them."
• Open Humanities Press
  
  "The basic idea is simple: making peer-reviewed literature permanently available, free of charge and freely redistributable by taking advantage of the low cost and wide access of internet distribution." ... "After looking at the various efforts underway, we concluded that an editorially-driven international press, focused on building respect through its brand, is what is required to tackle the digital 'credibility' problem. With OHP, we aim to emulate the strengths and flexibility of commercial presses, while avoiding the institutional limitations of the university-based e-presses."
• Open Edition
  
  "OpenEdition is the umbrella portal for OpenEdition Books, Revues.org, Hypotheses and Calenda, four platforms dedicated to electronic resources in the humanities and social sciences."
• Open Edition Books
  
  "OpenEdition Books est une plateforme de livres en sciences humaines et sociales. Plus de la moitié d'entre eux est en libre accès. Des services complémentaires sont proposés via les bibliothèques et institutions abonnées."
• Open Access Publishing European Network
  
  "Online library and publication platform.  The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of Open Access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of dissemination, quality assurance and digital preservation."