Vance Dubberly

sometimes i catch my reflection looking back at me, as though it is shocked to see me standing there. sometimes i think the apparition is the real one, and i, nothing more than a fleeting myriad of light on a momentary window pane. there, then gone. sustained in the in-between. nothing more than the real me reflecting upon what the lookers glimpse caught for that brief moment. i, a figment conjoined through a reflection to what is real. but then i have always been partial to taoist butterflies.

( inspired by a photo http://OLoboCanta.deviantart.com/art/Ghost-11084318 )

for those who don’t know of butterflies look up Chang Tzu

Autonomic Response to Ekhart Tolie

I am as disturbed by teachers who wish me to believe that the natural state of a human consciousness is loving, blissful, and compassionate as I am by those who would teach us that man is tainted by impurity, selfishness, and original sin.

It seems to me that both teachers wish to instill a false image of “true being” in their students so that when the student in one case feels pain he need return to the teacher for instruction and in the other case that when he feels joy he is stricken by the need to repent.

It is if often the the brash under-informed egoism of youth that grows into the future. The job of the old is not to pear the tree but to provide adequate soil, such that when that future bears fruit it is not withered and bitter, or worse yet, poisoned.

The universe is composed of laws which is to say  nature functions in patterns and not to say that some old man self important deity laid down  a bunch of edicts.

Those who study the laws grow wise.

Those who exploit the laws grow rich.

Those who obey the laws grow rigid.

Those who play with the laws grow happy.

Those who ignore the laws grow weary.

“To find God you must leave man and go into the creation.” says the mystic. “The works of man are tainted with  the sin of man and only by leaving them behind can you commune with your creator. All of mans institutions are sin; his culture, his governments, his cities and his religion–all sin, all corruption. For the more man builds upon his own works the further he is from God, from truth. The more grand his deeds, the more corrupt,  the more sinful.” or so said the Mystic before the Puritan nailed him to a cross.

I know the solitude my mother speaks of. It is what sustains me and protects me from my mind. It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There are other languages being spoken by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see ring-billed gulls picking the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no more and no less than the life that surrounds us. My fears surface in my isolation. My serenity surfaces in my solitude.

Terry Tempest Williams

This bit is from Refuge. A story about a the author and her relationship to her dieing mother and their families multi-generation relationship to the The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. The key phrase here, the one that so far best sumarize the book and speak most to myself is “Peace is the perspective found in patterns.” She plays this very well through the book, the water levels of the great salt lake start every chapter, the success and encroachments of the brid refuge, the quality of her mothers health as she under goes chemo, her own ability to deal with each of these fluctuations in her reality. But there is something more there, the statement pin points an underlying true in our own psyches, in fact to some degree I believe in all reality. I’ll leave it to you to figure what I mean by that, or you can just assume I’m nuts. The later of course just proves the point.

While showering tonight and feeling the pains of the of an 11 mile hike with 20 extra pounds in my back pack and the  25 extra pounds on my stomach that men my age often carry, something occurred to me, “I’m almost 40. I’m old.  This kind of  hiking hurts!”

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So unlike Rails deploying on Django on Joyent with default configs pretty much just sucks.  I’ve found if I just push stuff up the server hangs up, core dumps, basically it’s just a really awful experience.  Others I know have had the same problems so I thought I post what I’ve found. If you know of  anything else to make things kick please comment and I’ll add to the post.

Doing the below took me from 1 request a second and regular core dumps to about 15 request per second on a 256 meg accelerator. Satisfactory for a $200 a year host.

The worker mpm isn’t compiled in so you have to use prefork ( SUCK! ). If do something like use <IfModuel worker.c> instead of just working with what you’ve got or don’t modify the mpm.conf joyent set up for you you’ll get the default values which will totally hose your server. You can’t even serve static sites with their defaults without swapping.  Also tweek these values to your needs, the App this is for eats alot of RAM, has 15 modules and 60+ classes. You could prolly get away with 5 -10 on ServerLimit and MaxClients just have to watch prtstat -Z and /root/bin/jinfo -m while running ab tests and tune to your needs.

<IfModule prefork.c>
StartServers 4
MinSpareServers 2
MaxSpareServers 2
ServerLimit 5
MaxClients 5
MaxRequestsPerChild 0
ListenBacklog 100
</IfModule>

### deflate.conf

# this is defaulted to 9 which is stupid. Lets not spend 50ms compressing output
DeflateCompressionLevel 5

### Kill these processes. Webmin is for losers who should stick to windows or go back to kindergarden and the other two are imap processes that are just creating a security vulnerability and eating resources why any of them are enabled by default is beyond me.

svcadm disable imap
svcadm disable webmin
svcadm disable authlib

### settings.py

DEBUG = False
TEMPLATE_DEBUG = False

# I’m only working in english for this site
USE_I18N = False

# if you have gzip middleware in place get rid of it. ( this really makes a difference ) mod_deflate is already in place so you’re trying to gzip a gzipped stream… ( if you core dumping apache this is probably why ) C is faster than python by and order of magnitude so lets  just use mod_deflate.

‘django.middleware.gzip.GZipMiddleware’, # delete this

# Template context processors

these should go bye bye

“django.core.context_processors.debug”,
“django.core.context_processors.i18n”,
“django.core.context_processors.media”,

## listenIPs.conf
## virtualHost IP’s

#replace * with the actual IP address also do this if you have virtualhosts… so the vhost is isn’t listening on *:80

Listen 0.0.0.0:80
Listen 0.0.0.0:443

## Stuff you prolly already do anyway as it’s pretty standard. Cause we don’t want django handling requests for static files

# actually if you can put your images, css, and js in a separate virtualhost all together you’ll prolly get even better performance.

<!Location “/static”>

SetHandler None

</Location>

<!Location “/media”>

SetHandler None

</Location>

<LocationMatch “\.(jpg|gif|png|css|swf|doc|js|pdf)$”>

SetHandler None

</LocationMatch>

## expires.conf

# add png, css, js, jpg, etc… to expires.conf the access plus value is up to you … more stable the site longer it should be
# this won’t help an ab score but it sure helps the end user

ExpiresByType application/x-javascript “access plus 10 days”
ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 10 days”
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 10 days”
ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 10 days”
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access plus 10 days

Wilderness is where the known breaks down. Where one becomes lost. Where the pavement, dirt roads and even, the most rudimentary of trails come to an peter out. It is where the known fragments, whether the known be geo-physical or psycho-graphic. When we enter the wilderness we leave the what is safe.

The wilderness is physical it is that place where our feet tread on new surfaces,  our eyes see new sites, where our hearts race with exhilaration and anticipation and fear, where we fear for our safe return to civilization.

The wilderness in intellectual is that place where we our reality is in jeopardy. Where what we know, what we trust, and what we believe become subject to new truths.

Wilderness is a continuum. For some people wilderness may be a short walk on a nature trail, for others it a hundred mile trek into lands uncharted. For some it may be reading about a new religion, for others creating one.

Wilderness is a condition a state of being. It is the antithesis to civilization, but only the antithesis because civilization dictates that which is not part of it, is it’s opposite. Wilderness is the antithesis of civilization but civilization is not the antithesis of wilderness. Wilderness encompasses civilization, it gives birth to it.

Wilderness is important not for it’s thrill or it’s aesthetic value but above all to our very survival.

The only place something new ever occurs is in the wilderness.  Everything else is derivative. Not in ones personal life, not in society, not in nature is anything ever created except under the conditions of wilderness.

Alliance proposes establishing Route 66 national monument

Interesting idea which I doubt will pick up enough steam to go anywhere.  Hope to see it happen though, more for reasons of history than for simply containing the growth the the 29 Palms Marine Waste, err, I mean base. Had the pleasure of doing a mile based travel guide at http://www.themotherroad.com about 8 years ago ( looks like the Daily Presses servers have been hacked and they don’t know it yet ), got to talk to alot of people at the Mojave River Valley Museum, Goffs, and and the Needles Regional Museum. There are a lot of stories along this route, alot of history, not only of Route 66 but also of early California prior to 66. Is well worth preserving what is left of it.

‘ wish this wasn’t necessary. I tend to side with the citizens of the East Mojave when it comes to restrictions on public land, the government should stay out. Unfortunately it seems these days the only way to protect yourself from one government agency is to align yourself with another. What’s worse? Restricting land so nobody can get on it– filling the quite desert nights with bomb blasts, interrupting bighorn sheep migrations with acres of solar panels — blotting out beautiful quite vistas with power lines, hauling in billions of tons of LA crap to dump in a beautiful serene environment, or putting up placards, gates, and drawing in another 100,000 casual tourists whose noisy city habits should stay in the noisy city. They all suck, but I’ll take the last above any of the others. I can point out to a tourist that the beauty of this place is it’s quite expansive sereneness. It’s kinda hard to do that with a freight train or a missile.