Clinging

....And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring,
Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough
Where I cling.

Oliver Wendell Holmes' - The Last Leaf

As we are born, we are at death's door. "What day? What time?" we sing.
Laugh and cry, laugh and cry endlessly 'till the end; and 'till the end we cling.
We cling. To what do we cling? To death we cling, for life passes by, such a busy thing.
We cling to that certain thing. That dependable end. Ashes that are immune to life's sting.

Heedfullness

"Just as, of all root fragrances, black aloes-root is reckoned the foremost; in the same way, all skillful qualities are rooted in heedfulness, converge in heedfulness, and heedfulness is reckoned the foremost among them.

"Just as, of all wood fragrances, red sandalwood is reckoned the foremost; in the same way, all skillful qualities are rooted in heedfulness, converge in heedfulness, and heedfulness is reckoned the foremost among them.

"Just as, of all flower fragrances, jasmine is reckoned the foremost; in the same way, all skillful qualities are rooted in heedfulness, converge in heedfulness, and heedfulness is reckoned the foremost among them.

- The Buddha
selection from the Appamada Sutta A.N. 10

Life and Leisure

Leisure

"What is this life, so full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
No time to stand beneath boughs
And stare as long as sheep and cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
Not time to turn at beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
Not time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare."

Leisure - W H Davies

Electronic Health Records? Not until...

Electronic Health Records have definite advantages. Already implemented in some countries, it has shown its advantages as well as disadvantages. There is also development of Personal health records, putting the responsibility for them to the consumer. That Microsoft and Google seem to be racing each other for this market, shows their ignorance of its complexity. Since both companies are offering the services free, it is a pity that they do not collaborate.

The danger of developing EHRs without collaboration at the international level, behoves that people will have their healthcare in one state or one country for the whole of their life. Yes, even in the same country, different states have developed their own system, based on different commercial software vendors. If a patient moves from one state to another, his wonderful comprehensive medical record becomes rubbish in the new state!

Therefore, EHR should not be developed without international collaboration. We need international open standards to ensure

• interoperability
• machine and software system independence
• free communication of information between different systems
• communication and data transfer, with and to, different hardware devices
• security
• governance
• funding and therefore cost effectiveness

Until then we will only be wasting money and resources. We need to work on a long lasting marriage and not a one night stand.

Google spits out Chrome

The announcement and the release of the new Chrome web browser by Google today is really important to the web. The Cartoon Story is here. The reason is that this company is doing everything in the web, and depends entirely on the web for its business. Therefore when they develop a browser from scratch, they are obviously going to make all their services part of the browser.

The success of Google, and the trust they have earned, is what makes this software uniquely important. This will enable users to do things in a different way, in a stable, truly multimedia enabled browser. Everything Google has developed here and there, will become "One".

Initially, Chrome will seem like competition to other browsers. But eventually it will be something quite different from what browsers were expected to be. Google would be planning to bring the Mobile web service providing devices into the Chrome scene. They have been developing software for this market too. Chrome may enable the dvelopment of a multitude of wholly different third party software for the Mobile platform. At the moment the "forgotten browser", Opera, is making inroads into the mobile market. If Chrome should also enter the mobile market with the platforms already in development by Google, then definitely we will have "The One".

Google's timing maybe just right. Let us watch.............

Teaching

"Sometimes teaching is hard work. A teacher is like a
garbage can that people throw their frustrations and
problems into. The more people you teach,the bigger the
garbage disposal problems. But teaching is a wonderful
way to practice Dhamma. Those who teach grow in
patience and in understanding."
- Ajahn Chah.

honey

"Those whom truth an wisdom lead, can gather honey from a weed"!


- Cowper

The sermon

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you."

Blessed are the poor in spirit? What is the meaning of spirit? Is it the fighting spirit? Evil spirit? poor spirited as in humble and quiet? Perhaps, it is the latter.

Who are the meek? perhaps they are those who are selfless, without a big ego. Those who know that they are not "individuals" "self" "special" but simply part of god, to be one with god. This means they are nothing on their own, as when they are one with god, this separate identity of a self is no more.

"Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, 'Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye,' and behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

This is a very important part of the sermon, as people have become habitual in judging people fast, too fast. It is best to remember this is my own life, and not judge others or find fault just to feel i am better.

Hypermethylation of DNA

Hypermethylation of DNA is a common molecular alteration in human neoplasia including renal cancer. Altered methylation has a role in silencing tumor suppressor genes. DNA methylation markers have been found not only in primary tumors, but also in serum, plasma and urine in a variety of cancer types. Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) may be an ideal candidate for urine and blood screening because the kidney is at the junction of the circulatory and urological systems. Dalgin et al (page 1126) from Boston, Massachusetts searched the selected DNA regions of 19 significantly down-regulated genes whose expression patterns correlated perfectly with RCC and normal kidney tissue. Methylation patterns were analyzed in DNA extracted from 38 paired RCC normal samples. Seven significantly hypermethylated regions from 6 down-regulated genes were found. The down-regulation of all genes was verified in mRNA and protein level. Overall, the detection of hypermethylation in these highly down-regulated genes suggests that assaying for methylation using cells from urine or blood could provide the basis for a viable diagnostic assay.

Journal of Urology Volume 180, Issue 3, Pages 802-803 (September 2008)

Why do osteodense sclerotic deposits in Prostate Cancer fracture?

This is puzzling. But it seems that this is due to the fact that while osteoblastic activity takes place, there is weak poorly mineralisedwoven bone here as well. Therefore it seems that there is a wide array of lesions. Some are dense; others are lytic.

Torvaldisms

"To me, security is important. But it's no less important than everything *else* that is also important!"

"Be honest -- sometimes painfully honest. Part of that, by the way, is not feeling shy about saying impolite things or showing some emotion. So I'd rather flame people for doing stupid things and call them stupid, rather than try to be too polite to the point where people didn't understand how strongly I felt about something."

"My personal guiding principle is that I try very hard to find people I can trust, and then try to get out of their way as much as possible. I don't mean totally unconditional trust; but on the other hand, once somebody maintains something, he really should be able to make all the normal daily decisions."

Linus Torvalds - the holder of the reigns of Linux.

Who are the meek?

"...for they shall inherit the earth" - Jesus. Sermon on the mount.

Lots of people have been asked this question - by me. The answers werඑ few. Most did not know quite what to make of it. Why the meek? The scared? of whom? God?

I will come back to this...

the selfless, knowing that one is nothing but part of god.

Perhaps there are similarities here with the damma. Selflessness. Egolessness. No individuality. One is Not.
A Christiandamma.
Our body is impermanent - belongs to nature. Our soul is endless - belongs to god. Our mind is impermanent too, and belongs again to no one.


Then is their a soul of my own? Or is it just part of God? In this case there is no business of my soul and your soul. Individually we do not really exist.......

Browsing without a mouse

Why on earth? Since the development of WIMP, the mouse has roared! Nobody can do without it, and nobody wants to!!(squeal)

I am not talking about mobile devices where this is thought to be cool!!!
http://mobizinesupdate.blogspot.com/2007/04/my-mobizines-for-mouseless-devices.html

Oh! But so many people hate the mouse. It slows them down. Gives them pain in their hands and forearms. And on laptops - those mice are just awful! See the flat tops you have to caress or the little "gears" stuck in between the keys! Bloody awful.

What can one do?

Use voice! Thats soooo cooool! Heard of Nuance and their DNS? Doesn't quite work in linux and not in Macs, but in windows, it does a wonderful job for $200 or so, until the many windows viruses hit your throat. And of course, everyone hears your password and everything you write and every site you go to.....

:-(

What can one do?

Look at these

Firefox - add on and add on and add on - what the hell do they have in it without the add ons?
http://www.universefirefox.com/add-ons/browse-the-internet-without-using-the-mouse-mouseless-browsing
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/879
http://www.rudolf-noe.de/index.php?/content/view/14/26/
http://mlb.rudolf-noe.de/

Er..! You could just press this comma key and then type in the name of the link you need too...

Opera - part and parcel for years and years - even the uses did not know they had it !
http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/nomouse/

IE?

just forget it!


There is a FOSS software that can write with a mouse! But here we don't want those sweet creatures....(Sorry Micky and Jerry and all those loved mice from our favourite world of believing)

Using Gmail? mouselessly - http://email.about.com/od/gmailtips/qt/et_keyboard_gm.htm

Define Your Own Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts

To change the default Gmail keyboard shortcuts to more handy keys:

• Follow the Settings link in Gmail.
• Go to the Labs category.
• Make sure Enable is selected under Custom keyboard shortcuts.
• Click Save Changes.
• Follow the Settings link again.
• This time, go to the Keyboard Shortcuts section.
• Edit all desired keyboard shortcuts.
  • Use '\' together with the corresponding decimal ASCII code to use non-printable characters. "\27" stands for ESC, for example, and "\127" for DEL (you cannot, alas, use the latter for the text input field only accepts three characters).
• Click Save Changes

Eureka! No mice, see? see?

Opera - the future was here!

The Opera browser has a small user base on the desktop - just less than 2%! That is because it was not given free, initially, like the other browsers. It was arguably the best browser but the others were free. Something like what happened to Apple Mac and the IBM PC race, long long time ago.....

However, it is a great browser with lots of ability built in. Even though other browsers claim certain capabilities as "firsts", in fact they were already in use in Opera. But no one knew, as hardly anyone used the damn thing!

Tabbed browsing - Firefox thingy ? No. Opera had it long ago. Page zooming, Malware protection, phising protection, pop-up blocking, download manager, BitTorrent client, web feed aggregator, speed dial with thumbnails of the many pages - all started here! Others followed..............

Usability and accessibility features were in it during conception. voice control, page zooming, keyboard shortcuts - the works!
email, chat, news!
By the way who supported CSS first? standard compliance?

But, Firefox catches up! Just like Microsoft did to the Apple OS.

Now, it can match all of the above. It is free it is FOSS. It is the standard browser to develop web sites for!

However Opera is going into the mobile market and the games market (Wii is one!) in a BIG way! There it will live, grow and rule! So the story goes, unless the Mozilla Org destroys the ring of course......

On Guard!

GUARD YOURSELF LIKE A FORTIFIED CITY

"Like a border city, guarded within and without, so guard yourself. Do not let slip this opportunity (born as a human), for they who let slip this opportunity grieve when born in a woeful state."

-The Buddha

Letting Go

It is an interesting thought in today's world that if one wants true happiness, it is achieved by letting go. But it is still true, and is something for everybody to keep in mind. It is not easy to think in this way, but I think i am getting there, albeit, slowly.....

Slightly different from giving, which is also a good thing to do and more so, a good way to practice before getting to the stage of letting-go. Giving (to others) is of two types; to give expecting something in return and to give something expecting nothing in return except happiness and contentment that the act gives. The latter is by far the better.

Let-go little by little until one can let go of one-self.

Canadian study of genetics to fight cancer

A very important long term study of genetics of a large population regards the effects of genetics on cancer has been initiated in Ottawa, Canada. This is going to be, hopefully, a very useful endeavour.
It will track

• 300,000 randomly selected Canadians
• ages 35 to 69
• for at least the next 20 to 30 years

The study will be gathering information on health and lifestyle through surveys and the collection of blood and other specimens, according to the partnership.

sinhala tiddlywiki

The nice things about using sinhala unicode and fonts is that one can change apps into sinhala, almost :-)

install Sinhala unicode in Ubuntu Feisty with sayura input system or keyboard

(hopefully these instructions are useful even for those new to linux)

1. Get everything ready
Using synaptic (system->administration->synaptic package manager)
install
language-pack-si-base
scim and scim-dev
dpkg and dpkg-dev
autotools-dev

2. Install sinhala unicode font
download the sinhala unicode font
http://sinhala.sourceforge.net/files/lklug.ttf

open the terminal (applications-accessories-terminal or there is a little icon on top of desktop.). The terminal IS the quickest, easiest, best place to do most of the stuff, and is the ONLY way in some instances. So get used to it!

type the following and press the enter key.
mkdir ~/.fonts

or in synaptic package manager
right click in home directory as it opens or file menu - create new folder and name it
.fonts (period or full stop at the beginning)

open the file manager nautilus ( the home icon on the desktop)
in the menu bar
in view - click on show hidden files.
copy the lklug.ttf file you downloaded into the directory .fonts
in view menu click on show hidden files again to disable what you did first.
click again in show hidden files to disable it.

back in the terminal (more fun!) type:
fc-cache -fv

press the enter key

there will be some output

check that the font is enabled by typing

fc-list :lang=si file

it will tell you something about the file - that means it is installed.

log out and log in again (No need to shutdown).

Go to

http://si.wikipedia.org/

If you can read sinhala on the page, that is it!

copy some of that text and then open the open office wordprocessor and paste the stuff into a new document. From the font list select lklug


3. To get a keyboard installed to type in sinhala...

The Sayura keyboard system from Anuradha Ratnaweera is at
http://www.sayura.net/im/


create a directory called sayura
Now download the scim-sayura-0.3.3.tar.gz ( the o.3.3 will change with time as versions will change) and put it in the above directory
http://www.sayura.net/im/scim-sayura-0.3.3.tar.gz

unpack in terminal (CLI) or file manager(nautilus has to be opened as su - to do this open the terminal and type sudo nautilus - then in nautilus, right click the file and select "extract here")
or in terminal (more fun!)
cd to directory (cd sayura) formed and type
tar -xzvf scim-sayura-0.3.3.tar.gz (some output will be seen)
cd scim-sayura-0.3.3

The following HAS to be done in the terminal in the scim-sayura-0.3.3
.
sudo dpkg-buildpackage -b

the deb package will be made and found in the sayura directory.
install it by opening the terminal and cd sayura and then
sudo dpkg -i scim-sayura_0.3.3-1_i386.deb
(or in synaptic package manager opened as su you can select the file by right clicking ans select open with Gdebi package installer)
check in system-preferences-scim input method setup that sinhala is installed
check in system-administration-language support to see if everything is OK there (in my case as I open it it said there were some files to be installed, and i said OK).

Then shift-space or ctrl-space will bring a little icon on the system tray(right bottom), click on it and you will get a list and you can pick sayura from the "other" list.

shift+space will change between the two languages.

Changing weather patterns, anything new?

There is a lot of concern about changing weather patterns around the world. But if we look back into the history, not so long ago, there were severe weather changes too.

• During the El Nino cycle in 1789, 600,000 people died in just one region of India due to severe drought.
• The nineteenth century blizzard of 1888 paralysed East Coast from Cheasapeake Bay to Maine
  
• the "year of no summer" in 1816
• The eighteenth century brought tremendous cold and snow - the "little ice age"
• Thomas Jefferson wrote about a global warming during his time!
• Hurricanes in Havana in 1932 killed 3500 plus people
• The Great Blizzard of 1978 in Ohio lasted 2 days
• The El Nino in 1997 was the biggest and hottest in 150 years

Therefore weather changes are nothing new. But are we more, or less vulnerable to their effects today? We know how in the ancient past whole civilizations disappeared due to drought and other adverse weather conditions. Some survived by moving to different locations. Can we do the same? Do we have any safeguards, that they did not have? Do we have greater weaknesses today. that will give rise to greater disasters in human numbers than at those times?

facebook and twitter and others

The socializing in Twitter and Facebook, though very popular, seems to be a bit of a bore. There is also a lot of nastiness and indecent language. People seem to want to hurt others, and disagreements are made rudely, quite often.

It is not to say that there are not any decent people about, but unless something is done to control harassment these places are going to get less people joining in and more people leaving.

Few people are making any use out of it, mostly among family members who are living away from each other.

Hm!

Maybe I am missing some hidden fun?

AUA recommendations and Clinical Practice Guidelines

The American Urological Association's Bladder Cancer Clinical Guideline Panel has put out a new version of the CPG in 2007 for Superficial or Non-muscle invasive Bladder Cancer. They have developed a nice way of expressing the levels of evidence based support that gives flexibility to the practising clinician, which is practical.

• Standard
• Recommended
• Options

This is a method that needs to be followed in CPGs.