Păşind spre mine ai căzut;
Eram pe ceruri diferite.
(Nu ştiam, a fost vina mea.)

Tăcerea
S-a spart în aşchii ascuţite
Şi te-ai întors
(Nu meritam.)

Mai târziu am aflat
Că un da fără ecou
Doare mai mult decât un nu.

Şi aşa am rămas
Îngeri în ceruri paralele,
Comunicând prin nori,
Ne vom atinge niciodată.

Pe cer plutesc vise ca frunze albastre.
În aer dansează, se împletesc,
Devin prea grele şi cad.
Curg pe ferestre ca tăceri sărate,
Dau de pământ şi fac rădăcini
Care foşnesc cu frustrări verzi abia ascunse,
Reflectate în două scântei care au uitat să doară,
Şi au durut să se uite
Cum de pe cer cad visele ca frunzele.

Today I saw a crow on a white birch. The tree had no leaves, and the sun fell on its top branches. I wondered if crows can see colors and if they feel the warmth of the sun.

Today I felt cold and I digged in my closet for a sweater. I looked at the thermometer and saw summer pack its things and leave. I dreamed about living in a place where it is always warm and cloudy.

Today I saw a high school couple kissing. They held each other like they were the most precious, fragile thing. I smiled and turned away and hoped they were happy.

Today I watched a maple samara dance in the wind. It soared and swirled for minutes, as if the life it carried inside had somehow found a way to express its joy.

Today I saw a black crow on a white birch. The tree was dead, bereft of leaves. The sun fell on its top branches, suspending the morning up high where I couldn’t reach it. I wondered if crows ever have nightmares in which they are falling and they can’t  move their wings.

Today I felt cold and I remembered fear. I looked at the thermometer and saw summer betray me. I told myself that when the sun is tired, it lets the cold burn us instead.

Today I saw a high school couple kissing. Checkered tights and a buzz cut were imitating what they thought they should be feeling. I smirked and turned away and wondered why some people even bother.

Today I watched a maple samara swirl madly in the wind, and I wondered if the seed inside felt nausea.

Today, in Parliament.

Go fuck yourself. What, you’re threatening us, boy? We’ll find some other ways to deal with you.

Moldova’s Parliament convened today in its first session following the July 2009 elections. These words were uttered by Moldova’s president in reaction to a speech by one of the opposition leaders.  The incident was obscured from the place the cameras were located, but multiple sound recordings are available.

Find below two videos of Vlad Filat’s speech and Mr. Voronin’s reactions. Vlad Filat is the president of the Liberal-Democratic Party, which gained 18 out of the 101 seats in Moldova’s newly elected Parliament. The LDP is one of  four member parties in the Alliance for European Integration, a coalition of forces controlling 53 seats in Parliament, and forming a majority over the 48 seats controlled by the pro-Russian Communist Party.

Here is a translated transcript of the clip above:

Filat: I would like to make an announcement. Honored colleagues — I am referring especially to the parliamentary group of the Communist Party. Do not try, and we ask you, do not attempt to boycott today’s session. The people…

Voronin: Go fuck yourself.

Filat: That’s his upbringing, and what this man [Voronin] is able to do. In case…

Voronin: Don’t you dare threaten us, boy. He’s thinking that…

Filat: That’s what we all wanted to hear. In case… [he makes a third attempt to continue his speech]

Voronin: We will find other ways to deal with you.

Filat: … we will continue the parliamentary session with the Alliance [for European Integration].

Speaker of the Parliament: Thank you. Please convey to the secretary…

[Alliance members of the Parliament applaud.]

[The Communist group leaves the room.]

Filat tells the journalists, “Today’s outburst [the president's vulgar remarks] goes beyond any limit.”

Here is another video of the incident:

The Communist Party and its president Vladimir Voronin have been in power in Moldova for the last eight years, during which Moldova has sunk to being Europe’s poorest country, and has seen its neighbor Romania accede to the European Union. After the Communists’ possibly fraudulent win in April 2009’s parliamentary elections, street protests in the capital city of Chişinău turned violent and led to the destruction of the buildings of Parliament and Presidency. Evidence surfaced afterwards that the protesters were provoked by agents loyal to the party in power. After the parliament failed to elect a President (the Communists lacking a single vote), repeated elections were held in July.

Moldova has been separated from  Romania by the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov pact between Nazi Germany and the USSR. To this day, there is Russian military presence in a breakaway region near Moldova’s eastern border. With state-controlled media and a quarter of its working population employed abroad, Moldova is struggling between those nostalgic for the days of Stalin’s glory, and those who seek the promise of a better future inside the European Union.

Pictures taken in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. See the full set here.

Collages made with Screenie.

If you ever looked for song lyrics online, you know how most lyrics sites are. Plenty of ads, popups, silly scrolling flash gadgets, bad punctuation, and no easy way to send in corrections. Why not apply to lyrics the same community-driven editing model that has made Wikipedia so successful?

LyricWiki.org has done exactly that, and more. They have provided an API, making it easy for media players to query the database and fetch the lyrics for a specific song. To get an idea of this project’s success, check out these stats. At the time of this writing, LyricWiki is the fifth largest MediaWiki in existence, and the largest wiki that is not a Wikipedia or Wiktionary. What an inspiring example of a community built around the ideals of improving content and making information available. What could go wrong?

Well, how about this. Who owns the copyright on song lyrics? Right, the artist who wrote them. And who represents the artist? Right, a record company. And what do record companies do to nice sites like LyricWiki?

The following message appeared in the lyrics applet of my beloved Amarok earlier this week:

Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions from some of the major music publishers we can no longer return lyrics through the LyricWiki API (where this application gets some or all of its lyrics).

My first thought when seeing that was, “Huh?! It used to work yesterday.” Apparently, less than 24 hours have passed between the announcement that developers need to change their applications, and the moment the LyricWiki API actually stopped working for retrieving lyrics. In a way, this is a good thing. I hope a lot of users put the pieces together and figured out who is really to blame.

Now let’s see how Amarok handled the situation. Within 12 hours, the bug report had a patch. In the next two hours, the patch was tested, and a glitch was found and fixed. The next day (still less than 24 hours from the time the bug was reported), the patch was pushed to Git. As an Amarok user observing this process from outside, I thought the turnaround time was pretty darn good!

Unfortunately, getting this fix to the users was not as quick and painless. Since lyrics fetching is done in a script, there is no need to recompile Amarok. Furthermore, we have KNewStuff for installing and updating scripts (among other things). So we are just a step away from allowing users to fix the lyrics problem using Amarok’s Script Manager. Why not take it?

(Besides the fact that the script is not on kde-apps, another minor issue is that it only works for Amarok 2.1.1 and trunk. Because of this, the script needs modifications to work with Amarok 2.1, which is still shipped by Kubuntu. But nothing that can’t be fixed in code in 5 minutes.)

Congrats to the Amarok team for being so close to greatness! Amarok was one of the apps that switched me towards KDE in my early days with Linux (the other one was K3B). So I’m glad to see it rocking even harder today.

Now let me return to LyricWiki for a minute. Can someone enlighten me as to why the music publishers would impose such a restriction on them? If I were an artist and you came asking for my lyrics, I would gladly give them to you and thank you for listening to my stuff. I’ve heard of people selling music, but… selling lyrics?!

I hope that as technology makes recording and distribution cheaper, more artists will take matters into their own hands and release their stuff independently.

PS. If you are reading this on Planet KDE and wondering who I am, Hi! I am doing a GSoC project in Akonadi / KMail, mentored by Thomas McGuire. I may provide an update about that later, if the mood strikes.

I think people are color-blind in the morning. When I wake up and look out the window, I can’t tell if the sky is blue or gray. Likewise, I can’t tell which way this day is going to take me. And sometimes a bit of grogginess is all it takes for a thought to take me by surprise.

When you are reading a book or having an intellectual conversation, your mind expects to be challenged by ideas that are unfamiliar. Your abstract thinking is fully en garde, acting as a filter and a shield. It foresees things, protecting you from surprise, and it tempers emotions like anger or exultation.

Daytime adult thinking provides a middleman (a proxy) between you and the world. This middleman is stronger than you (he will not cry in public if he can avoid it), and unlike you, he can see himself through the eyes of others. He is your personal ambassador to the world. You might be screaming inside, but he will keep his composure. You might be disgusted, but he will remain polite. You might be about to jump off a building or tell someone you love them — he will betray neither.

It is probably a good thing that we have this public persona at our service. Without it, the world would look too much like a kindergarten, or a madhouse. But while the middleman filters our thoughts and feelings, presenting to the world a watered-down, more acceptable version of ourselves, he also works the other way around. The trickster knows more about the world than he will let us see.

If a person you care about hurts you, your ambassador will not disclose the full implications of that until you safely lock yourself in your room. If the girl of your dreams has just agreed to a date, your ambassador will not let you jump with joy until she isn’t looking. If some epiphany is staring you in the face, your ambassador will pretend omniscience to avoid looking ignorant or surprised.

(Your ambassador is also a bullshit detector. That’s why dreams are so fascinating when you wake up and he is asleep. But come morning, he will promptly convince you they didn’t happen.)

The ambassador is not infallible. He will occasionally let things slip, especially when he is half-asleep, tired, or inattentive. This is why seeing seagulls in the morning can make you smile like a child. This is why you write some of your best poems when you haven’t slept in 20 hours. This is why some seek to tranquilize their ambassadors with weed.

The more interesting case, though, is when the ambassador lets something slip because he doesn’t think much of it. These are the things which make you do a double take and ask yourself, “How could I miss that before?” These are the truths that come to you out of left field, the insights that let you see the world obliquely, and find meaning by surprise.

A girl in an English class, pointing out the difference between being in love with love and being in love with someone. A remembered dream that allows you to acknowledge and contain your fear. Something you see, that brings up a vivid memory from childhood. A guy giving voice to thoughts you never thought anyone else could have.

There is meaning, connection, and truth everywhere, but we are often too caught up in everyday things to notice. Catch yourself off-guard sometime, and today might take you to surprising and wonderful places.

Got a laptop with an Intel GMA? Is Alt+Tab slower than you would like? Does Plasma take forever to move or resize an applet? Maybe you didn’t think it could get better?

Try playing with the options in xorg.conf. This is a good starting place.

In my case lspci shows ‘Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a42]‘, and putting

Option  “AccelMethod”   “UXA”

in /etc/X11/xorg.conf has improved things significantly. UXA acceleration has been disabled by default in Ubuntu because it caused problems for some people, but in my case enabling it has made everything snappier, and also gotten rid of the drawing artifacts I used to see.

It also caused suspend to stop working (assert in X upon waking), but a recent fix to xserver-xorg-video-intel takes care of that. Distros might have released an update by now, but if you’re using Kubuntu and can’t wait, you can grab the packages from this ppa.

Snappy plasma, working suspend, happy user.

Update: Here is a post with another trick, using the -graphicssystem raster option of Qt programs. It makes switching tabs in Konsole faster, and it does wonders for long lines in Kate!

keywords: unfinished, experimental, expired, extinct

In a forest with no mirror,
To the eyes of God none dearer,
Lives a lone fawn that fawns not.

Treading softly on the grass she’s
Crushed the rush and rushed the crushes,
Dreaming of her amaranth.

She knows not the rocks from flowers,
For amidst these early hours
She’s only been hit by one.

Her mind raced in thoughts confounded,
But despite heartthrobs unwanted,
Her step is again now calm.

Eyes dancing with joyous laughter,
She sings out her silent light that
Rocks and flowers like alike.

Looking high at heaven’s towers,
From afar she smells the flowers
Waiting to be kissed by one.

But my dear deer, not a flower
By its own will and its power
Ever leaves the land he loves.

They too wait for a desired
Brown-eyed fawn to quench their fire,
But alas they move cannot.

Thus Sisyphus’ sweet sweat showers
Brows of deer and crowns of flowers
In a world that’s wired weird.

Now the forest with no mirror
To the eyes of God none dearer
Witnesses the fawn’s first tear.

She will learn amid her hours
To dodge rocks and pluck the flowers
Till she finds her amaranth.

And the forest will behold her
Eyes of brown alone no longer
Grow old with her amaranth.

… you can select non-contiguous regions of text by holding Ctrl while selecting with the mouse! (If you have a table, it will select a rectangle instead.)