Very good sentences

In a perfect centrally planned socialist state everyone is part of a hierarchy pursuing the same end. If that end is the one true good, that society will be perfect in a sense in which a capitalist society, where everyone pursues his own differing and imperfect perception of the good, cannot be. Since most socialists imagine a socialist government to be controlled by people very like themselves, they imagine that it will pursue the true good—the one that they, imperfectly, perceive. That is surely better than a chaotic system in which all sorts of people other than the socialists perceive all sorts of other goods and waste valuable resources chasing them. People who dream about a socialist society rarely consider the possibility that some of those other people may succeed in imposing their ends on the dreamer, instead of the other way around. George Orwell is the only exception who comes to mind.

That's from David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom, which I'm reading online.

I love YouTube!

Awesome!

Let a thousand nations bloom

That's the title of Patri Friedman's blog.

"Seasteading is the entrepreneurial way to fix government. By competing with it, instead of complaining about it."

-Patri Friedman, The Seasteading institute

Of interest

1) 20 Ted talk for foodies

2) Wikileaks wrap-up

3) The world needs French lessons

4) Cellular biology and artificial 'mirror cells'

How to get a text listing of an XBMC movies database

This outlines how to get a text listing of your XBMC movies in the format

Title (year)

Step 1)
Export the database. Instructions here

Step 2)
Grab the following xls file. Credit goes to waldherr.org. This is their file with very few modifications.

Step 3)
Parse the xml. On ubuntu simply run:

xsltproc xsl_filename.xsl database.xml > output.txt

waldherr recommends msxsl.exe for windows


How to get an HTML listing of an XBMC movies database

Use this xsl file, follow the instructions here, or on ubuntu run the command

xsltproc ./title_year_link_html.xsl ./database.xml >XMBC_videolisting.html

This is very basic. It doesn't even use the html output option. Surely this can be done better. Way better. It does generate a search query to themoviedb.org though. An example:

Fight Club (1999)
Wayne's World (1992)

Sometimes the search takes you right to the movie info (as the first example), but if there's a collision, it takes you to a search results page.

Anarchist themes in hip hop

Lets play a game. I'll give you a name, and you tell me the first words that come to your mind. Ready? Lets go:

Tupac Shakur


So? What did you think of?

'Rapper' or 'hip-hop artist' was likely the first thing.

If you're not a fan, then likely things like 'gangster', 'thug', 'criminal' come to mind.

If you are a fan then maybe you thought of 'poet', 'genius', 'martyr', etc.

Did you think of 'Anarchist'?

To me, his lyrics are filled with allusions to the coercive nature of the state. A good example is the last verse of "Me Against the World". His best verse, in my opinion.

Listen to the whole thing, or jump directly to the verse in question.

With all this extra stressing
The question I wonder is after death
After my last breath
When will I finally get to rest from this oppression?
They punish the people that asks questions
And those that possess
Steal from the ones without possessions
The message I stress
To make you stop 'n study your lessons
Don't settle for less
Even the genius asks questions
Be grateful for blessings
Don't ever change, keep your essence
The power is in the people and politics we address
Always do your best
Don't let the pressure make you panic
And when you get stranded
And things don't go the way you planed it
Dreaming of riches
In a position of making a difference
Politicians are hypocrites
They don't wanna listen
If I'm insane it's the fame
Made a brother change
It wasn't nothin' like the game
It's just me against the world

Rackable or Portable - a new hardware mantra

Now you can get badass portable hardware on the cheap, like the acer revo (~$200) or similar devices. They come with NVIDIA's Ion chipset, which supports DirectX 10 and 1080p over HDMI. For "normal" stuff (web, media, etc.) it's perfect. And it even runs XBMC (which you should try if you haven't. It's AMAZING)

For storage and heavy lifting, you can get equally badass rack-mounted machines, like this 2U barebone server (~$1000) that comes with 6 hot swappable drives. Imagine 6x3TB hot swappable drives configured using ZFS. It would be all the storage I'd ever need. In fact the day I fill up that volume would be the day I burn all my technology and walk off into the woods.

There are still some legacy BIOS issues with the 3TB drives though, and legal issues with native ZFS support in Linux, so I'm waiting.

But in the meantime, everything I now buy will be either rackable or portable. To me, anything in between is akin to living in the suburbs. Sure it's cheap and it looks nice. But it's the worst of both worlds - an unholy compromise between rural and urban living. You get neither the space and freedom of living in the middle of nowhere, nor the conveniences of living close to a bunch of people. The same can be said of a typical desktop PC.

5 lessons learned in Rio

Recently I had the opportunity to attend a conference in Buenos Aires. Being mildly obsessed with BJJ for a few years now, my first thought after hearing about the conference was "I have to go to Rio".

Rio was definitely an amazing experience. I want to go back already, but time was tight and I lost alot of it while There. Not only to all the lovely distractions Rio has to offer, but time was also lost to language barriers, national holidays, food poisoning, etc. Shit happens I suppose - both figuratively and literally.

Here are the 5 things I wish I had known or done that would have made my trip better.

1) Learn Portuguese

English in Rio isn't widely spoken. Language barriers often slowed me down or sent me off in the wrong directions. If you speak Spanish, apparently they can understand you, but I'd consider some survival Portuguese essential before going back again.

Before leaving I started some audio lessons, but lets face it - learning a language is hard. Its more exhausting than a workout. I soon got lazy and gave up. Big mistake.

If you know me, you know that I can't say enough good things about the Pimsleur Method. I did all 90 lessons before going to Japan and after getting off the plane I was immediately talking to people (admittedly not the most interesting conversations, but being able to say "how much is this?", "where is that?" is HUGE). The Pimsleur method is expensive, but definitely worth it. There are, of course other ways to acquire it, but I would never do anything like that and neither should you.

2) Book a place at Connection Rio

Not having alot of money, I stayed at a hostel called The Mango Tree in Ipanema. The Mango Tree is a great place. Easily the nicest people I've met in hostels (I had beer unlabelled in the fridge for 4 days - nobody drank it. Name another hostel where that would happen!) and was alot of fun. But hostels tend to one giant party which, while fun, is not the best environment for training.

I would have loved to have stayed at Connection Rio - A hostel devoted to fighters who came to Rio to train. Dennis (the owner) is a great teacher one of the nicest guys ever. He let me hang out there (even though I wasn't staying there) and let me train with him at GordoJJ - a 2 minute walk down the road. As an added bonus they have a washing machine you can use. Trying to keep my Gi smelling good while living in a hostel was challenging.

3) Have decent cardio

What can I say, I'm lazy. I hate cardio and it hates me. The only time I do it is when I'm gearing up for a tournament. But everyone I rolled with in Rio either had a Black Belt (and didn't even break a sweat while tapping me), had the hunger in a bad way or were training for tournaments. Some of them were animals - training 2 or 3 times a day. My cardio didn't stand up at all. I'm doing at least 2 months of strength and conditioning before I get on another plane to Rio.

4) Figure out the bus routes

Staying in Ipanema and training in Barra the Tijuca, I had to take buses back and forth. There's alot of them, and many seem to follow the same routes. I think I wasted alot of time waiting for a "175" when many other buses going past would have taken me to the same place. I have no real advice on how to figure out the bus routes of Rio. If anybody does, I'd love to hear it.

5) Use this GoogleMap

This map, was a godsend! It helped me find the original Gracie Barra school as well as the places mentioned above.