Hemingway on Art

Interviewer

Finally, a fundamental question: As a creative writer what do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact itself?

Hemingway

Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

From The Paris Review, Issue 18, 1958. Taken from the Paris Review Interviews Vol I, Picador, 2006.

Mildred Loving

A modest homemaker, Loving never thought she had done anything extraordinary. ‘It wasn't my doing,’ Loving told the Associated Press in a rare interview a year ago. ‘It was God's work.’

As quoted in the Washington Post’s obituary, regarding their take on the State of Virginia.

YCombinator's 30 Ideas to be Funded

Number 8 on the YCombinator's "Startup Ideas They Would Like to Fund" is dating:

Dating. Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear. But anyone who wants to start a dating startup has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you're going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem.

I wonder how this chicken and egg problem could be broken. Could it be by providing another value added service as a side product? Maybe you can help search music on the Internet and this could be used to build up a "profile" of people which might be able to bootstrap you. Or maybe one can use already established social space like Facebook, create an innovative Facebook dating app? Dating is always going to be attracting a lot of interest so it is a good idea to be thinking a solution.

Reinventing the Web?

I wonder what Opera Software will be launching on June 16th. There are some clues in the web page source code and it seems to be updated periodically. The first clue in the code is inside the description meta tag:

<meta name="description" content="The Web is your browser. Discover how fast and fun the Web can be." />

And in the comments:

<!--
We start our little story with the invention of the modern day computer.
Over the years, the computers grew in numbers, and the next natural step in the evolution was to connect them together. To share things.
But as these little networks grew, some computers gained more power than the rest and called themselves servers ...
-->

The description tag makes me think of a new Opera widget/extension/customization framework with a supporting cloud service (notice the cloud image on the page) that enables an easier and more comfortable web browsing. I certainly don't know what the features could be, so this idea is just a shot at a wide possibility in this area.

The embedded HTML comments makes me think of P2P browsing of some sort. Can Opera be preparing to roll out a new technology that would be blurring the line between web browsers (ie. the clients) and the web servers? P2P is not the exact wording I'm looking for, I'm looking for something which doesn't have a name yet, much like the Google Wave technology unveiled at the I/O conference.

Whatever it is, we'll have to wait until the 16th for sure. I hope it lives up to its promise :)

Balkanlar: Bu şarkı kimin?

Global Voices Online sitesinde Balkanlar ve Katibim şarkısı ile ilgili bir yazıyla karşılaştım. Bulgar yönetmen Adela Peeva İstanbul'da arkadaşlarıyla (bir Makedon, Sırp, Yunan ve Türk) yemek yerken arkadaşlarından her biri çalan şarkının kendi ülkesine ait olduğunu iddia etmiş. Bu olay üzerine belgesel çekme düşüncesi yerleşiyor ve kamerasıyla Yunanistan, Arnavutluk, Bosna Hersek, Makedonya, Sırbistan ve Bulgaristan'a giderek şarkıyı takip ediyor.

"Katibim" şarkısı benim de çok sevdiğim şarkılardan birisi ve bu şarkının tüm bu Balkan ülkelerinde söylendiğini bilmiyordum. Belgeselden anlaşıldığına göre bunu o ülkelerde yaşayan pek çok insan da bilmiyormuş. Her ülkede melodi aynı kalsa da şarkının sözlerini değiştirmişler. Şarkıyı hangi milletin hangisinden aldığını bilmiyorum ve açıkçası bunun çok da önemi yok. Çok güzel bir şarkı ve kültürlerin nasıl birbirlerinden etkilendiklerini çok güzel bir şekilde ortaya koyuyor. Zamanınız varsa ve özellikle bu şarkıyı seviyorsanız belgeseli izlemenizi öneririm, şarkı farklı ülkelerde farklı sözlerle her çalındığında yüzümde bir gülümseme oluştu.

Damien Rice - Cannonball

I had listened to this song before many times but I didn't think it was any special. This morning, while running it came up again in my mp3 player and it has kept with me ever since. I just can't stop muttering the melody and lyrics :)

Here is the song and the lyrics to captivate you as well. Enjoy!



cannonball

there's still a little bit of your taste in my mouth
there's still a little bit of you laced with my doubt
it's still a little hard to say what's going on
there's still a little bit of your ghost your witness
there's still a little piece of your face i haven't kissed
you step a little closer to me
still i can't see what's going on
stones taught me to fly
love taught me to lie
life taught me to die
so it's not hard to fall
when you float like a cannonball
there's still a little bit of your song in my ear
there's still a little bit of your words i long to hear
you step a little closer each day
so close that i can't see what's going on
stones taught me to fly
love taught me to lie
life taught me to die
so it's not hard to fall
when you float like a cannon
stones taught me to fly
love taught me to cry
so come on courage
teach me to be shy
'cause it's not hard to fall
and i don't want to scare her
it's not hard to fall
and i don't wanna lose
it's not hard to grow
when you know that you just don't know

No space left on device?

Today I was trying to install a PHP module but I kept getting "no space left" errors. This was interesting because my disks were not full in terms of both space and the number of inodes as evidenced by "df -k" and "df -i" commands. Then I found out that file system errors might be a cause for this. I didn't want to check mounted disks using fsck program so I used this page as a reference to easily check the file system on the next boot simply by creating a forcefsck file inside the root directory. After the file system check, I can confirm that the error went away.

I suppose file system checking should be one of the first things one should check in such a irregularity.