Francis Fish

error: Permission denied sending UDP broadcast packets

Tue, 22 May 2012 17:25:00 +0100

Sorry, gentle reader, this one’s a bit technical.

I was reusing some of the code Apple supply for sending UDP packets between servers, but the system I’m working with listens for broadcast packets. I set it up to use the address 255.255.255.255, but got the EACCESS error: Permission denied

I found an example that did work (without using Apple’s CFSocket class) and did a line by line what’s different. You need this to do broadcast

int broadcastEnable=1;

int ret=setsockopt(sd, SOL_SOCKET, SO_BROADCAST, &broadcastEnable, sizeof(broadcastEnable));

if (ret) {

NSLog(@”Error: Could not open set socket to broadcast mode”);

close(sd);

return;

}

If you edit this into Apple’s UDP echo project then it will allow broadcast. Give thanks and praise at http://splinter.com.au/sending-a-udp-broadcast-packet-in-c-objective

LoadError: OpenSSL::SSL requires the jruby-openssl gem

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:19:00 +0000

I had to hack the bundler executable to load the jruby-openssl gem before it tried to load bundler. Then it worked.

I think the gem command uses openssl, which is built into the MRI version of Ruby, but has to be included as a gem by JRuby and therefore it happens too late.

Laments to the 10 years of Agile

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 10:21:00 +0000

Laments to the 10 years of Agile:

(Click the link above to see the original article - this is a comment I left there)

The IT project failure rate is a direct result of people ignoring (or plain removing) contingency, usually for political reasons (the Dilbert “pointy haired boss” kind). So a fail is being unable to deliver to a Waterfall-style objectives set at some remove from delivering the projects that were only possible if absolutely nothing went wrong. It goes straight back to Deming’s point about MBO vs MBP – the O’s still have it! If each iteration is an management-forced aspiration rather than based on what is possible (so the chance of “hitting” the story points is even as high as 90%) then you will soon run into trouble (in this example the chance of still being on target after 5 iterations is only around 50%). Of course, in this all to common scenario, everybody gets demotivated too and productivity starts to bomb anyway.

I agree that many people “do agile” rather than “be agile” – they see it as process rather than mind set, and so throw out all sorts of sea anchors around “doing it right”, as in being obsessed with process, rather than (and this is a point made in the quote) “doing the right thing”. As you’ve said yourself, the process-driven, analytical mind set is a much easier place to be than an open Chaordic one, particularly if you learned you craft in a process driven environment, such as an educational institution and just don’t have the models to do things any other way.

I see it as a crisis of models, of education, of plain old fear, not principles. It does seem to be getting worse, though. I think we might need a new Manifesto – somewhat less narrow than the craftsmanship movement because it needs to include people who aren’t coders but want to “do the right thing”. In fact, coding is the last thing in this, but it’s the first that everyone looks at because it’s easier to see.

It’s a great source of frustration and sadness for me that we have all the tools now, we have Deming’s insights, we have agile methods, we have methods for managing uncertainty, blah blah blah – but people still carry on doing the same old stuff assuming the results will be different next time. I think it was Einstein that said that this is a sign of madness.

PGError: ERROR: date out of range for timestamp

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 16:12:00 +0000

Note - this assumes you’ve enabled the pgbackup plugin in Heroku - as it does the full database backup for you for free - I suggest you do it right now!

Oh, the fun I just had with this one. One of my clients’ systems started throwing this message over the last week or so.

I’m lazy so I was using sqlite for my development database and Heroku’s Postgres for live.

So, thinks I, time to switch to using Postgres in my development environment, because it must be the database, mustn’t it?

I’d installed it on my Macbook ages ago but hadn’t actually used it with Rails. So I found a couple of blog posts and changed things around. I had already told Postgres to use passwords for validation.

It took me ages to realise I needed to set a password for the postgres Unix user - this was the password I needed to connect to the database. Then I followed these instructions and got my dev database set up.

So - pull stuff down from heroku and then import it to my dev environment.

Right - everything works perfectly - right!

So where is the error?

I googled for it and found a forum posting suggesting that you could have a date stamp that is outside the range of time stamps and the coercion of date stamps is going boom. Did a lot of messing around in the heroku console to no avail, trying to issue commands like analyze table and count things.

Also, the column is a timestamp anyway, so you can’t store nonsense in it in the first place.

So, I put the app into maintenance mode, took another backup, restored that backup over the existing database, and all was well.

This might be a better solution than trying to rescue the database in any event, because all of the statistics will have been reset too.

I was a little bit hampered by heroku not letting you connect to a shared database because I was trying to issue commands using Active Record - but hey - it’s free. I do wish that heroku console was slightly more informative than server error.

Rails for Designers

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:17:00 +0000

This is a short post to help designers who aren’t familiar with Rails understand their way around it enough to change things and work with developers. It assumes that you know CSS and HTML and aren’t scared of HTML that has embedded code in it.

The structure of a Rails app

Rails is a Model/View/Controller system.

Models are business logic, and storing things in databases
Views are displaying the contents of the models
Controllers co-ordinate the Model and the View

Here is a picture of the directory structure of a Rails app:

The files you care about live under app and public:

And views also breaks down like this:

This application has an extra top-level directory, artwork, that isn’t standard. I used it to keep the artwork and design files under version control.

What the directories do:

Public. This is where the root of the application is for static content like CSS and JavaScript files.
App/Views. This is where the files are stored for rendering dynamic content from the application.
App/Views/Layouts. This is where the templates that surround the dynamic content are stored.

The example we show here is from before Rails introduced the performance enhancement of the asset pipeline, it complicates things a little and I will discuss it later. What I want do do first is explain the principles.

What things do

A layout file looks something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

<title>Favorbite</title>

<%= stylesheet_link_tag :all %>

<%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>

<%= csrf_meta_tag %>

</head>

<body>

<div id=”header”>

<div class=”span8 offset8”>

<h1>

<a href=”/”><img src=”/images/favorbite-logo.png” alt=”Favorbite logo”></a>

</h1>

<%= yield :header %>

</div>

</div>

<%= yield %>

</body>

</html>

This is a very simple wrapper. It’s HTML 5, of course. The <%= %> tags are used to embed code. The :all in stylesheet link tag lets us include all of the files in the public/stylesheets directory without having to specify them individually, or you can include them one by one if you need to. This changes with the asset pipleline (but let’s not worry about that now).

You can also just put in plain old HTML code to include whatever CSS you like, the helpers are a convenience and also help with cacheing and other wondrous magic web things.

You can see two lines that I have made bold. Each contains the word yield. This is a Ruby construct that you can find out more about if you’re interested. The one that doesn’t have any arguments will render the appropriate dynamic content file. The one with :header will render any content that is in a block that has that name. For example

Hello, this is ordinary content

<% content_for :header do %>
This will appear where the yield :header tag tag is, or not appear at all if there isn’t one.
This is how you define a block, using ‘do’
<% end %>
If we carry on here it will just add into the main text.

<%= “the string here will show in the text, without the = sign nothing will happen, the results of any Ruby code need %= to show” %>

Working out what gets displayed

Rails apps have routes go to controllers, and from there to the view depending on what the controller decides to do to render the request. The surrounding layout is set by the controller. For example http://myapp.com/chickens/1/edit is asking the router to find a controller called chickens, and call the method edit in it. This will then find the chicken with ID 1 and render it to be edited if all goes well.

The dynamic code for the edit will be in app/views/chickens/edit.html.erb (ERB being a way of embedding Ruby code), inside that file you may find code that looks like this:

<%= render :partial => “form” %>

Partials a little chunks of reusable code, because no directory was given it will be assumed to be in the same directory as the other chickens code, here app/views/chickens/_form.html.erb

The convention for a partial is it has a leading underscore in its name. If the controller doesn’t explicitly say what dynamic content to render the file that matches the route will be used:

…/chickens - This will go to index method and will look for a file called index
…/chickens/1 - This will try and show the chicken with ID 1 - method/view called show
…/chickens/new This will render a form where you can create a new chicken
…/chickens/1/edit Guess!

When you save a new chicken you land in the method create, when you update an existing chicken you land in the method update. If these methods succeed the convention is that it puts a flash message saying it succeeded and takes you to the show method. Sometimes you will need to look in the controller code to unpick this.

For example if you see:

render :action => “edit”

It will use the edit file to render, rather than whatever the default one would be for the method you are in.

Picking the layout

If the controller doesn’t explicitly set a layout it will use the one defined in app/views/layouts/application.html.erb.

Configuration by convention

As you can see Rails uses convention to say where things are and you don’t have trawl through configuration files (Java) or wade through heaps of confusing code where it’s hard to work out where the application ends and the data begins (PHP guys, looking at you here).

The asset pipleline

This was introduced in Rails 3.2. There is an extra directory under app called assets. Rather than repeat the documentation I suggest you go here to find out how it works.

I hope this helps. As always if I have erred or not explained things to your satisfaction, please contact me and I will do my best to explain it better or correct any mistakes.

Thanks for reading.

Neil Gaiman: Another bit from an ancient blog

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:08:45 +0000

Neil Gaiman: Another bit from an ancient blog:

One of the drawbacks of the World’s Best Porridge Recipe for those purposes is that it’s slightly chewy, which is part of the charm.

Having experimented with porridge recipes for years now, this one sort of came together in a bunch of “what if I tried…”s that actually worked.

You need two…

Dead Time at East Didsbury

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:48:00 +0000

Sometimes time is dead time; you have to wait and hope that it will pass

Dangerous thought - how good it would be to edit your life away, but how would that be good?

Once lost it doesn’t come back, whatever it might be

So this moment is of waiting and not exactly enough, or not moving forward to where you would like to be:

So what?

Is it really that different from all the other moments?

This body waits for the next thing - driven by this mind

This mind is what cares about forward and back

This mind judges and measures

This mind does not see its own nature

So what is waiting?

What is impatient?

What is hurting?

What is sad?

Does it have a colour, shape or presence anywhere?

Can you touch it? Except maybe indirectly?

Why does it want so much?

Why does it need anything?

The thing it needs is not there.

It is closed and also open

The warm train arrives - the moment dies

Everything not contributing to learning is waste

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 21:21:20 +0000

Everything not contributing to learning is waste

Comment on Jim Highsmith's article "Velocity is killing Agile"

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:38:00 +0000

Comment on Jim Highsmith's article "Velocity is killing Agile"

Fredit inline rails view editing

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 18:19:41 +0000

Fredit inline rails view editing:

looks really interesting

chuckjhardy: Sublime Package Control

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:53:36 +0100

chuckjhardy:

Sublime Package Control

Oh hell yes, no more crap

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:52:05 +0100

Oh hell yes, no more crap:

Post explaining the personal side to the software craftsmanship movement.

My Article "old mistakes in a new guise"

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:28:39 +0100

My Article "old mistakes in a new guise":

Article I wrote and put on the Magrails site. Enjoy.

False Analogy - meh

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:27:00 +0100

Just had a stupid Twitter spat with someone about the analogy that asking someone to predict the number of bugs is like asking a chef to predict the number of people who will fall ill.

It’s hard to discuss things in 140 characters, particularly if the individual is some kind of pedant who just can’t be wrong. I used the term false analogy, which was originally coined by the long-dead English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Mill meant that the analogy was being misapplied and did not fit where it was being used. However I was dealing with an über geek, who took the literal meaning of the term and started off a load of crap about how analogies are by definition false. Meh, I really must not assume that people know the same things I do. I’ve been using this term (without any problems) for years, but I also did study philosophy in my youth (30 odd years ago now).

My take was that we have more than 100,000 years of cooking expertise and 40 or so of software engineering. We’ve already been through the how do I cook that tuber full of starch in such a way it won’t poison me stage of our culinary development longer ago than most of us can conceive of. In software terms we’re still finding out that starch is good for us. Also most chefs, in my experience, don’t measure their success or failure by how ill their customers are. They measure by whether their customers come back to the restaurant, which is a result of the 100,000 years.

So, tried to make this point in 140 characters - mistake!

I got some stuff back about how our knowledge of germs and software are about the same. Still not true, actually, because there are a hell of a lot less people creating software than there are people who cook food and follow basic hygiene. But I can’t be bothered with this argument, I really can’t.

Some people just have to win, and aren’t short on off the cuff insults. So I unfollowed and blocked. Got better things to do, seriously!

The other thing I’ve noticed is that some people seem to have a supply of URL’s they need to make a point - and just throw them at you at any opportunity without even thinking. I’ve never used tumblr, but suspect that this is a symptom of using it. For example I mentioned there is a model for bugs. I really meant for how long things take, as in using kanban you can say things to the business like I can promise that a ticket takes between 10 and 15 days once it hits the started state. I got pointed at this(PDF) - I don’t care, all I’m interested in is shipping stuff that works. I leave the pedantic stuff full of meaningless definitions that don’t fit what I do to the people who care about this stuff.

Statistically, if you keep metrics about your kanban board, you can make predictions like this. You can employ different confidence limits depending on how important the predictability is. David Anderson talks about this in his Kanban Book at some length. But it’s not the kind of ISO crap, it’s predictably shipping useful stuff. I believe the book he’s writing at the moment covers it in more detail, because I heard this at his keynote at Agile Cambridge last month.

Statistics are interesting. You can say how long any particular job will take, just look at the distribution of how long it might take. That’s the way it rolls. But then I also studied statistics in my youth, and even have a B. Sc. in it.

Tweeting things like I’m surprised an agile coach would say this and lecturing a practising Buddhist about koans as analogies (although we don’t have them in the Tibetan tradition - and they aren’t analogies, but I don’t have the energy to bother explaining why) is more than a little insulting. But the interwebs are full of such comments.

In any event - that’s my take and I don’t care to discuss it with people who are going to make ill considered, insulting comments in 140 characters. Or I’ll have to go up to dickfinity on ya.

Plus I also changed my Twitter profile to spell agile with a lower case A.

Oh, and it should probably have been stupid hyperbole, not false analogy. But I didn’t want to start a row. More fool me.

How I Fast Test with Rails

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:07:26 +0100

How I Fast Test with Rails

Chapter 4 of Grtz now available

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 17:41:51 +0100

This is my comic SF novel – however it mostly takes the rise out of corporate culture … have fun.

Buddhism and Depression

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 20:52:00 +0100

Note I write this back in 2009, and was leery of making some of the things here public. I have decided that it’s better to think of others first and not worry about it. I hope this helps.

Contents

Dedication
Introduction
The ground of depression
Calming the mind
Reality and you – some things to muse on:
More help
Closing remarks
Bibliography

Dedication

Homage to Manjushri, the embodiment of wisdom. Gratitude and praise to my lama Jampa Thaye and his lama Karma Thinley Rinpoche for sharing the teachings and keeping them alive in these dark times.

Introduction

I write here to help others who have been or are afflicted with this condition. After many years struggling with it I find myself not needing the medication I used to have to take; I also have a much healthier view of the world and my own place in it. I want to share what I have discovered in the process of becoming a Buddhist, in the hope that it may benefit others.

I cannot condone anyone who is on medication for a depressive condition stopping the medication and “just meditating”. If you are ill take your medicine, talk to your counsellor, don’t be foolish. You are drowning and these medicines and skilled professionals are holding out a hand to keep your head out of the water and stay breathing. Take the hand, please. I believe that I would not be alive writing this without modern antidepressant medication and other support I received over the years. Once you are in recovery and have some control then by all means try and withdraw, but seek medical advice and support. The mind is a wonderful and dangerous thing, and these medications can also be dangerous if you don’t withdraw from them carefully.

The ground of depression

The centre of the universe

Most people feel down or unhappy at some time in their lives – we are all human and this is inevitable, something that cannot be avoided. Depression distorts your view of the world and clings to the bad and makes the good tainted and bitter. The mind’s view of reality is skewed and everything becomes wrong or bad. Depressives, like most people, are obsessed with themselves, and because they do not like themselves nothing can ever be right. They also live in a dark world of self-fulfilling prophecy where their self-hatred is reaffirmed by everything that goes on around them. It is quite usual for someone in a downward spiral of acute depression to drive away those that love and care for them and say that they should not waste their time.

Poor you. That is the thought that comes again and again. It’s a childlike view, but in fact only a more extreme form of the view that most people have, placing themselves in the centre of the universe. I used to hear a quiet, nagging voice all the time telling me I was too ill to do things and that I was tired. All the time. This voice also tells you that you can’t do things, or that you are a failure, or that everybody hates you, depending upon its mood. It is a peculiarly comforting voice because it confirms your prejudices and allows you to opt out of everything and descend into a delicious torpor.

Blaming others

Another mental construct is pushing all your problems onto others. By this I mean siting responsibility for your happiness and well being outside yourself. This means that you can point to someone else and say “they shouldn’t have hurt me all those years ago, it’s their fault”. The Buddha pointed out that there are no external agencies that you can rely on for your happiness, because none of them are reliable. The converse is also true: you can’t blame a single person for your continuing misery, either. Most of what goes on in your head is directly under your control; you just need to learn how to find that control.

The therapeutic counselling I have had centres on challenging the depressive faulty world view. Not necessarily challenging their own sense of being the centre of the universe, but certainly that the universe is out to get them. A common test to see how ill a person is revolves around simply asking them about how they look at the world and can accept what happens their relationships, do they lose their temper, do they feel people are out to get them and so on. Most people score two or three out of twenty, depressives score above five. My counsellor told me that one of her clients had scored the maximum I felt tears spring to my eyes in sympathy for this person.

Mental poisons

Even when a depressed person isn’t curling up in a ball and waiting to die and outward appearances are reasonably good it is possible to see their mental poisons working in them. If you see yourself as something to be hated and spat upon then that is how you behave: if you are a perennial victim then you will never escape from your victim hood. I call this, metaphorically, “sticking your hand in the blender”. It is a product of low self-esteem, and that of depressives is the lowest of all.

The motor of the anxiety is the incorrect view of the world; because it seems to be “out to get you” you go into what psychologists call “fight or flight” mode. This is the physical readiness to either defend yourself or run away, that comes from our primate ancestors. The mind is locked into a place where it feels mildly threatened all the time. This makes sleep difficult and the adrenaline coursing through the body fuels irrational, aggressive behaviour. One way to combat this is to get some exercise, but of course the constant edginess and lack of sleep makes motivation hard to find. It may sound odd but I have often found a short brisk walk gets rid of at least some of the feelings of anxiety because it allows your body to get rid of the poisons in the blood.

Heavy mind

The depressive feels fixed and unchanging, in fact we all do, but the mind is in constant motion and the heaviness and “stuckness” is an illusion. The mind is not a solid thing stuck in one place, if it were then you could never learn anything or experience anything new. The mind feels heavy, like everything is being seen and heard dimly and understanding what is going on around you takes enormous amounts of energy to overcome the inertia. The heaviness affects everything and it is almost as if the sun has been “turned down” a few notches.

I remember once describing a severe episode as being like having a constant irritating noise in your ear; every thought and action was hard to do because of it. A lot of effort was needed to start doing anything and get past the fear. It prevented proper understanding of other people because just thinking itself was hard, way before any doing could even be attempted. The “noise” eventually went away and it went away when I made myself do things.

Calming the mind

The techniques described here are simple, but that does not mean they are easy. To have any beneficial effect you must be prepared to work at them. The technique described here is known as calm abiding or shamatha. It is one of the fundamental meditation techniques and has been used by many disciplines, including modern Western medicine, to calm people. 1

1	For example see A Little Book of Calm amongst many others.

The steps are as follows:

You must find somewhere you can be undisturbed and relaxed. Posture is important, the back must be straight so you can breathe properly using your diaphragm. This is why Buddhists generally sit cross legged with a cushion under their backsides; it pitches the hips slightly forward and down and gives a straight back when done properly. A straight backed chair will do. Please note that a “straight” back is actually slightly S shaped when relaxed properly with the components of the spine lying correctly on top of one another, a back that is straight like a ruler is very uncomfortable and stressed.
Get yourself into this relaxed posture looking slightly down. It may help at first to close your eyes, but usually the recommendation is to have the eyes slightly closed and relaxed. Now simply count as you breathe in and out normally, counting on the out breath. In my tradition we try to count to twenty-one and then start again; other traditions use different numbers or even none at all. The aim is to give the mind something easy and relaxing to do so that its constant running off onto different thoughts can be slowed down.
What you will find at first is that it is probably quite hard to get past about ten or so before your mind wanders off and starts worrying at something. This is fine and quite normal. You need to gently take the energy away from the thought, let it fade, and then resume the counting. It doesn’t matter where you count from, start again if you can’t remember; there is nothing magical about the number, it is just something to occupy the mind while you learn to control it a little.
Initially do not try to do this more than five minutes at a stretch. Pushing too hard will just make it push back and frustrate you. It is much harder than it sounds and your mind has deeply ingrained habits of running away down interesting mental rabbit holes. The key thing is to learn to gently catch it running away and return it to watching the breath. This also technique is good for calming yourself down if you are upset or angry by taking your attention away from the things that are bothering you.
You need to try and do this regularly every day and slowly build up the amount of time you spend on it, maybe to ten or twenty minutes. It is best to do the technique just after you have woken up. If you are only doing a few minutes you could just sit straight at the edge of the bed, get ready and then hit the sleep button on your alarm clock and use the “sleep” minutes to meditate - this means you don’t have to worry about watching clocks and worrying about being late.

It is important not to “shout” at your mind and get angry and try and force it to be still because it can’t do this simple task. It has never had to do this before, usually it can just run off wherever it likes and you are asking it to do something it has never done. As stated earlier it is simple, but not easy. Learning to calm the mind is work, you need to discover how to stop the energy of thoughts spiralling away from you by gently taking it away. The mind is a paradoxical thing; the more you fix on anything, whether you love or hate it, the more you think about it. The more you try not do do something the more you want to do it. The more you try and suppress something the more it will not be suppressed. The mind spends its energy in fixing on things for good or bad. Relaxing the mind allows it to become still and free itself from whatever is worrying it.

After a week or perhaps longer you should notice that you have discovered that there is a small gap between having a thought and acting on it. You no longer have to react straight away. The door of the prison of reacting instantly to everything is slightly open and you realise that even when provoked or under a lot of mental strain you always have a choice in how you perceive and then react to things. As you increase the amount of calm abiding you do this sense of being a little bit in control of your mind and not having to react instantly will increase, but it comes from being relaxed, not from fighting or getting frustrated. The next step is to work out what to do with it.

As your awareness of the workings of your mind becomes sharper you will also notice that there is a “voice” to your mind that has the thoughts you are taking the energy away from and allowing to fade. A depressed person’s voice is usually saying negative unhelpful things quietly and persistently. Now that you are aware of the voice you can challenge its assumptions and stop listening to it. This is also the voice people hear when they are justifying themselves, it is very strong and good at justifying anything. You can see it better in other people when they do something selfish or inconsiderate and then make themselves out to be some kind of martyr beyond criticism, realise that this voice is there in your head too and learn to recognise it. When I didn’t want to do something I used to hear a voice telling me I felt ill, now I just do things that need to be done and I don’t hear the voice any more – it’s very liberating.

You will not become some kind of saint overnight, but you will gain some insight into the workings of your own mind and some control over its constant wandering and self justification. You need to treat yourself with the compassion and patience you would treat a frightened child learning some new task, because that is what you are attempting. You are trying to get the tools to lead that child away from the painful trap it has made for itself to somewhere better, so be patient and kind to yourself first. Tibetans have a saying: leap like a tiger, walk like a tortoise. 2 Your intellectual understanding may happen very quickly, but changing your actual behaviour and core beliefs based on that understanding will take a lot of time and patience.

2	Lama Jampa has written a book with this title aimed at beginners on the Buddhist path, which also explains shamatha mediation. See http://www.dechen.org/shop/books.html

Reality and you – some things to muse on:

A depressive’s view of their place in the world is incorrect and damaging to their peace of mind. This section consists of a few Buddhist ideas that may be unfamiliar that can give you a more rational perspective. There is nothing mystical about them, they are just a different way of looking at the world that might be unfamiliar to someone brought up in the West.

Impermanence

Because the things you think will make you happy will eventually cease to be, just like they once didn’t exist, you cannot rely on them. Your mind has tricked you into believing that if you have that thing, have a relationship with that boy or this girl, possess that car or this house, then you will be happy. Oddly, as a depressive, you already know this isn’t true because your depression tells you so. Your view of your place world is much more honest than most people’s, but that doesn’t mean the dark things you also believe are true, either.

How does this help you if you are depressed? The first thing to say is that impermanence means that your unhappiness is no more permanent than happiness, it will pass. It may seem unbearable but it will pass. Impermanence can seem bleak, because it means that the things that “make” you happy are always going to leave you too. So, enjoy them while you have them and then accept they will leave eventually, you are nothing more than a caretaker. There is no need to be permanently miserable and no need to look back all the time. By the same token living in the future can be painful because it will not conform to what you want either. The only thing you have is the moment you are living now and one of the things the calm abiding meditation technique outlined earlier does is help you become much more aware of that moment.

Who is in control?

Because the world you live in is shaped by your mind you have some control over it. Not the crazy idea that you could do something like change the weather, but more that you can put a coat on if it’s cold and that bad weather ruining your plans just means you need to make other plans. One thing you always have control over is how you react to events. Things don’t “make” you happy or unhappy, they come and go. The chocolate cake you crave for doesn’t “make” you eat it, it’s just cake. The strange thing is that this view gives you more freedom to act and find contentment – the cake will taste better too because you aren’t answering a craving but eating because you are hungry and are free to enjoy it for itself.

To return to the question again – how does this help you if you are depressed? In essence you feel bad because of choices you have made, usually unconsciously, about how you react to the world and other people around you. It starts with the centre of the universe being your own perceptions and feelings, then everything that happens to you is loaded with a heavy significance and seems to have been designed to hurt you and twist you up inside. Of course, you may also have a predisposition to feeling like this too, which makes getting onto the downward spiral easier than it might be for other people.

The process is self reinforcing – if you feel bad you withdraw and want to be left alone, things happen and your mind puts a slant on everything that makes you feel like the world is out to get you so you withdraw some more. Perhaps you lash out, either directly or indirectly at the world, or get drunk and behave really badly (for example) and maybe some things that really are meant to hurt you happen because other people are annoyed with you, so you withdraw some more. Eventually you feel terrible and hurt inside and can’t remember when it began, then anxiety hits.

Calm abiding meditation gives you the tool to see the spiral happening if you use it properly. You also need to start questioning the global conspiracy to make you miserable and upset – laugh about it to yourself a little, it isn’t real, nobody has the time or the energy to do such a thing - particularly if you manage to do it so well on your own without any help. Ask yourself: why would they bother? In terms of the infinite universe we live in you really aren’t important enough, we are all tiny impermanent bubbles frothing on a wave and have little to worry about really.

Even if someone is out to “get” you because of some history you have with them you don’t have to join in any more. You can shrug and move on when they try and hook you with some juicy morsel that allows you to be angry and upset. No-one forces you to react to anything, however you might feel. It’s quite likely that you are “sticking your hand in the blender”, as described earlier. No-one is making you do repetitive self-destructive things or lash out and roar like a wounded bear. You can choose not to once you realise that there is a gap between thinking something and doing it.

Imagine that you spend your life walking around a town or city, when you pass down a particular street you fall down a hole in the road. It is painful takes a lot of time and energy to escape from. The next time you fall down the hole again because you weren’t paying attention to your whereabouts. This keeps happening until you learn to pay attention to what is happening around you. One day you walk past the hole. Another day you walk down a different street. It is is literally all in the mind, and you can choose how you react to things. Yes, you are a prisoner, but you locked yourself in there – no-one else did – and you can escape if you are willing to work at it. And no, you can’t sue anybody, everybody falls down the hole – it’s part of learning to take responsibility for your life. 3

3	I think this is from Spiritual Materialism

Permission to hate

This section has an odd title. It is a reflection on how your actions allow others to behave towards you. If you hate someone and behave towards them in a hateful way, for example saying or doing unkind things towards them behind their back, what does it allow them to do? It makes it OK for them to do the same to you, doesn’t it? In fact it’s even worse than that – it makes it OK for anyone to do it to you, never mind your enemies.

Hating gives permission to hate. This is true of all negative activity: if it has been made “normal” to do it then it will be more likely to happen. You need to consciously guard the way you think and behave so you don’t give others permission to be negative or unkind back to you. It also gives you the authority to gently point out that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable, without being hypocritical.

The wonderful and enriching thing about this is praise gives permission to praise, loving-kindness gives permission for loving-kindness. It’s better to start from there, isn’t it? This may sound cheesy to some, but think about it, being trite doesn’t stop it being true, does it?

In a probably too simplistic nutshell, this encapsulates the concept of karma. It isn’t some kind of ridiculous caricature of divine punishment. It’s just that any action has consequences in your life and it’s always better to choose kindness than misery.

When you are extremely depressed it is easy to fall into a habit of thinking “everybody hates me, I am worthless”. Then, being human, you kick against it and become angry. So you look at the world with an angry face. The world will look back at you like a mirror. I learned to look people in the eye (go gently at first or people will be scared of you!) and smile. Then I listened to what they were saying without interrupting 4. Suddenly a lot of barriers that used to hurt me, things continually going wrong and making me angry and upset, just disappeared. It’s very hard to make this transition but worth trying.

4	We have two ears and one mouth and should use them in that proportion. I don’t know who said this originally, but it is good advice.

As has been said here over and over again, take small steps and don’t beat yourself up if you slip back. One small change to a bad habit every day, or even every week, and you will change irrevocably for the better quite quickly. But you aren’t perfect – it’s fine not to be. Our Western education system teaches us that you must be right all the time, and in some religious systems there is a concentration on sin and blame to the exclusion of our human potential for goodness. But you are human and therefore imperfect, so it really isn’t a big deal to be what you are 5. Learn from your mistake, look for how your anger, pride or whatever it was ambushed you and work out what to watch for. Next time that mistake probably won’t happen – but something else will! It’s the human condition, and it’s what you have to work with, so relax.

5	I fact you can be nothing else!

Stopping the voice

I came up with this technique after realising that I had a self-deprecating voice in my head, constantly criticising me and putting me down. I’m not sure how Buddhist it actually is, but I did find some benefit from it so I will outline it here:

Give the negative voice a face, in my case I imagined a black crow sitting on my shoulder.
Let the voice start speaking – its voice is loud and scratching, irritating in the extreme.
Look at the crow, or whatever creature you have imagined.
Remove it gently it from your shoulder and say, to it “I will not listen to you any more”.
Offer it a cake or something pleasant and ask it to leave with a smile on your face.
Do not listen to it any more. Seriously, that’s all it takes. You may have to do this quite a few times, particularly when you are stressed and upset by the voice. But it can be done.

Looking past the end of your nose

Everybody’s favourite topic of conversation is themselves. Depressives do not differ from anybody else on this score, but unfortunately they are hampered by a strong dislike of themselves, even an irrational anger, and it hurts to constantly be thinking of something you hate. Ask yourself this: if you dislike yourself so much why do you think about yourself so much?

Depressives feel isolated, like they are the only people feeling these terrible feelings about themselves and the world around them. The fact is that everybody is deluded and acts like they are in a film of their lives, with a script they can control, when in fact they only really control how they react to things and what choices they make when a choice can be made. As was said earlier, it’s likely that your unhappiness is more honest than other people’s; your depression has given you insight into the inevitability of things breaking and ending – it is good to muse on these things. The problem is you need to get rid of the tendency to take this insight to an unhealthy extreme and hurting yourself.

The Middle Way

In the West we have been infected with a binary blindness. Things have to be good or bad, right or wrong. The path you follow must be one thing or another, if you aren’t for X (pick one) you must be against it. If you live a binary life it’s easy because you don’t have to make decisions about a lot of things, or even take responsibility because you are just following the edge of the maze of life by always keeping to one side of the path. Usefully, someone else has usually set up the distinctions so you don’t have to think about it. For example alcohol is banned by some religions, in Buddhism we take a vow not to become intoxicated, because that’s when you can lose control and do or say something you will later regret. But it isn’t banned outright, people are expected to find the limits they are comfortable with and live within them. They are expected to think for themselves and know what they need to do to stay on the right side of this 6.

Monks and Nuns are not allowed alcohol. They also have many other vows and pledges that lay people don’t. The Tibetan saint Milarepa, who was an ascetic rather than a monk, said that he simply wasn’t strong enough to be a house holder like his own master Marpa. The monastic vows make things easier, not harder, if you approach them in the right way.

The world around you isn’t binary, some kind of flip flop into either/or. Before the Buddha became enlightened he subjected himself to terrible deprivations, starving himself so that he could lose his attachment to his body. One day he heard a musician talking to his apprentice: if the strings are too tight then the instrument will not play, if they are too loose then they will buzz and not play either. Buddha realised that the proper path is between all extremes. In fact a great many of the deep teachings about the nature of reality revolve around this point.

How does this help you if you are depressed? You are in an extreme state of mind and it makes you think and act in extreme ways. You may give other people the benefit of the doubt and even encourage them to do better rather than pouring down heavy criticism on them but you won’t do it for yourself. Speaking personally my own perfectionism held me back trying all kinds of things I am now quite good at. Saying you won’t do something is very different from saying you can’t.

You need to examine what you do and see if you are following an extreme path, for example no exercise or too much exercise, working too hard or being lazy, overindulging in chocolate or alcohol. Instead of being a binary person, going for boom and bust start trying to find the middle way. Use the habit of strong introspection depression has given you to examine what you do for these on/off patterns and start trying to be more like the strings that are at the correct tension. Binary people are also completely helpless when they are confronted with anything new, who wants to be like that?

More help

I am a member of the Dechen community, found at http://www.dechen.org. We run classes to introduce people to Buddhism and simple meditation techniques, you can find out more from the website. We also occasionally teach from the texts on sending and taking that might be a logical next step after you have been working on calm abiding for a while. In any event if you go looking for a teacher you need to satisfy yourself as to their qualifications; make sure that they studied under a recognised teacher themselves, and that their teacher has given them permission to teach. Do not be afraid to ask questions of people, it is part of the tradition for a potential student to make sure that the teacher is properly qualified and they will not be offended in the slightest.

Be warned, though, that Buddhist teachers teach Buddhism first. For Buddhists the purpose of meditation is to eventually gain enlightenment. A sincere teacher will not turn you away if you are in distress, but if you want tuition in calm abiding in a secular context it may be better to go to a yoga teacher or class. Any activity that involves movement and calming the mind will be useful.

If you are really suffering and have read this text I hope it helped you gain a better perspective on your problems. You must acknowledge your distress and get help, once you get past a certain point is is extremely difficult to resolve this condition on your own. I know from my own family that depression can kill you, so don’t take it lightly or pretend you can get by as each day becomes even harder than the last. Western medicine has come a long way in the last few years and you may not like the side effects of the pills they give you, but side effects are better than being dead and beyond help. Then you can think about other ways of sustaining yourself in the long term.

Closing remarks

Traditional texts open with a dedication and explanation of their purpose as this one did. They close acknowledging the origin of the teachings contained in them. In that vein I dedicate whatever merit this text may have to the benefit of others, with gratitude to my lama, Jampa Thaye.

Bibliography

Eight Verses for Training the Mind, trans. Lama Jampa Thaye, Ganesha Press

The Way of Tibetan Buddhism, Lama Jampa Thaye, Thorsons 2001

Leap Like a Tiger, Walk like a Tortoise, Lama Jampa Thaye, Ganesha Press, 1994

The Telescope of Wisdom, Karma Thinley Rinpoche, trans. Adrian O’Sullivan, Ganesha Press, 2009

The Four Thoughts that Turn the Mind to Dharma, Lama Jampa Thaye, Ganesha Press

Luminous Mind, Kalu Rinpoche, Wisdom Publications 1997, see particularly section 1

The Great Path of Awakening, Jamgon Kongtrul, trans. Ken McLeod, Shambala Classics 2005

Dhammapada, Dharma Publishing 1985

The Art of Happiness, HH The Dalai Lama,

Awakening the Mind, Lightening the Heart, HH The Dalai Lama, Thorsons. 1997

Buddha, Karen Armstrong, Phoenix, 2002

Footnotes

The Warm Gun on sale now

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:37:00 +0100

Back in the 1980’s I wrote a dark novella called The Warm Gun. It’s not autobiographical in a plot sense, but some of the things in it did happen to me. The horrendous beating at the beginning of the book, for example.

The machine it was originally written on died and I had a copy of it on paper, so I scanned it all in and then converted it, I did have the beginnings of a new draft as well.

I have put the new draft with the old and made it make sense.

I’m looking at how to build an audience for my fiction and other works and decided that a relatively pain free way of doing this would be to publish things for the Kindle. So I registered and put it on there, after purchasing a suitable cover picture from iStockPhoto.

The novella isn’t Hollywood, it doesn’t have clear endings, people don’t always get what they want. It doesn’t have that irritating Ruth Rendell thing where the bad guy or gal dies in a fire to expiate their guilt. It also predates me becoming a Buddhist, so some ideas are not ones I currently hold.

In any event, I wanted it to be free but Amazon need to cover the distribution costs, so I made it as cheap as I could. I hope you enjoy it.

Imported Comments:

Paul Jackson

I’ve downloaded a copy on to my wife’s Kindle and look forward to reading it - can you sign her Kindle cover!?

Namespaces in Rails 3 and respond_with

Sat, 07 May 2011 10:49:48 +0100

Assume we’ve got a namespace of Customer and in that a controller for Organisations.

This doesn’t work

class Customer::OrganisationsController < ApplicationController

  respond_to :html 

  def update
    @organisation = Organisation.find(params[:id])
    @organisation.update_attributes(params[:organisation])
    respond_with [:customer,@organisation]
  end

end

It redirects to the customer_organisation show method without checking for errors. I think it should work, but the respond_with code doesn’t handle it properly. Instead, try this:

class Customer::OrganisationsController < ApplicationController

  respond_to :html 

  def update
    @organisation = Organisation.find(params[:id])
    @organisation.update_attributes(params[:organisation])
    respond_with @organisation, :location => customer_organisation_url(@organisation)
  end

end

I’m not sure it’s annoying enough to want to patch it. There are a lot of edge cases in Rails in general around name spaces. Also, note it’s not just update that needs this but also create.

Imported Comments:

malclocke

respond_with :customer, @organisation should work, without the square brackets

Magrails Survey Results

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 22:16:38 +0100

Total responents 40

This is a temporary home for this while the main site is built.

Would you attend an Agile Charity Day (there will be a Ruby one anyway)?

Answer	Count	%
No	5	12.5
Yes	35	87.5

Would you prefer a one or two day conference?

Answer	Count	%
Two	11	27.5
No preference	14	35.0
One	15	37.5

Would you like to be on a panel for a balloon debate?

Answer	Count	%
Yes	2	5.0
?	5	12.5
Maybe	13	32.5
No	20	50.0

Would you attend a post conference Ruby or Agile Dojo?

Answer	Count	%
No	2	5.0
Yes	38	95.0

Would you or your company be interested in sponsoring Magrails?

Answer	Count	%
Yes	1	2.5
?	4	10.0
Maybe	14	35.0
No	21	52.5

Would you like to help with the organisation of the conference?

Answer	Count	%
?	2	5.0
Yes	7	17.5
No	12	30.0
Maybe	19	47.5

What Agile topics would you like to see and discuss?

Answer	Count	%
Is coaching really necessary to make the transition?	9	22.5
Can you resolve the tension between YAGNI and flexibility	10	25.0
Theory of Constraints	13	32.5
YAGNI means YAGNI	15	37.5
Ideas are cheap – a discussion of “Rework” and “Linchpin”	18	45.0
Combating blame culture	19	47.5
10 years on – what have we achieved, what mountains are still to climb?	20	50.0
The trap of the Agile Waterfall	23	57.5
Be honest, Agile doesn’t always work	23	57.5
Lean and Agile – the same soup or different cuisines	23	57.5
Agile planning	28	70.0

What Agile topics would you like to see that weren’t in the list?

agile v fragile – when to say no. It’s a fine line between being flexible and being stressed and overworked with constantly shifting directions or new features.
How to start off
Estimation
CEO ACME org. Take 2 Agile pills a day for 6months. SWOT for the CEO.

What Ruby/Rails topics would you like to see and discuss?

Answer	Count	%
What’s this Rack thing?	14	35.0
The predictable talk about writing DSL’s	15	37.5
Useful things in Active Record for fun and profit	16	40.0
Ruby makes me smile	18	45.0
Does No SQL mean non-Relational?	21	52.5
BDD is all very well, but I think in code	23	57.5
What’s so good about Rails 3?	25	62.5
Ruby 1.9 for fun and profit	28	70.0

What Ruby topics would you like to see that weren’t in the list?

Building cross-platform mobile applications with Ruby – introduction to Rhodes
Better Rails application design
transition to rails 3 – routes
bundler
unobtrusive js
Ruby 1.9 v 1.8
which editor – textmate, vim, eclipse… maybe textmate etc. hints and tips
improving productivity (I use textmate but I’m sure I’m not using a tenth of what it can do for me)
Setting up an agile rails project – the plugins
test frameworks etc you should use (ie do it at the start cos retrofitting things like cucumber etc is painful)
Rails deployment strategies – phusion v mongrel etc. (I use passenger as it comes on a single box but there must be better ways)
Event Machine – writing truly evented systems
Making stuff work quickly with quality.

What Balloon debate topics would you like to see that weren’t in the list?

IDEs make you dumb
what’s really happening under the hood
Cucumber’s wonderful, really

Answer	Count	%
YAGNI vs flexible	8	20.0
ready, aim, fire or ready, fire, aim?	10	25.0
Following processes makes you stupid	12	30.0
Strong typing is for weak minds	15	37.5
XP/Scrum/Kanban – throw them out the basket	17	42.5
User stories are a bad idea	18	45.0
Test driven – bad idea, good idea, what are these test things?	27	67.5

Francis Fish

error: Permission denied sending UDP broadcast packets

LoadError: OpenSSL::SSL requires the jruby-openssl gem

Laments to the 10 years of Agile

PGError: ERROR: date out of range for timestamp

Rails for Designers

Neil Gaiman: Another bit from an ancient blog

Dead Time at East Didsbury

Everything not contributing to learning is waste

Comment on Jim Highsmith's article "Velocity is killing Agile"

Fredit inline rails view editing

chuckjhardy: Sublime Package Control

Oh hell yes, no more crap

My Article "old mistakes in a new guise"

False Analogy - meh

How I Fast Test with Rails

Chapter 4 of Grtz now available

Buddhism and Depression

The Warm Gun on sale now

Imported Comments:

Namespaces in Rails 3 and respond_with

Imported Comments:

Magrails Survey Results

Would you attend an Agile Charity Day (there will be a Ruby one anyway)?

Would you prefer a one or two day conference?

Would you like to be on a panel for a balloon debate?

Would you attend a post conference Ruby or Agile Dojo?

Would you or your company be interested in sponsoring Magrails?

Would you like to help with the organisation of the conference?

What Agile topics would you like to see and discuss?

What Agile topics would you like to see that weren’t in the list?

What Ruby/Rails topics would you like to see and discuss?

What Ruby topics would you like to see that weren’t in the list?

Suggested Balloon Debate topics

What Balloon debate topics would you like to see that weren’t in the list?