To what extend should life be faced with emotions or rationality?

80% of the time, I'm a fully rational being. That is to say, that I try to face every aspect of my life from a rational stand point. I analyse things, try to gather as much explicit information as possible and then infer whatever is not clear to the best of my abilities. Although this is not bullet-proof nor always possible, it works fairly well most of the time.

The biggest gain here is that I'm able to abstract myself from most of those situations and be a passive actor. This brings some extra objectivity to the matter. The biggest loss is that I don't get to fully live every aspect of my life. In order to be rational, I need to constantly observe and analyse every single thing I'm involved in.

But what does "fully living a moment" actually means?

I believe each one of us has a different interpretation of what the best way to live each moments of their life is. Some may think that by being emotional they're able feel thousands of different things, emotions. Others, may think that by being rational they may be observers of what their living, hence they'll be able to gather more information from their experiences.

As of now, I believe that fully living a "moment" means finding the right balance between emotional and rational commitment for that specific moment.

Shall we seek a good résumé or a good life? Why not both?

I've heard several times - in presentations, conversations, books - that one should either seek success - work for a good résumé - or a better self - work on things that make for a good eulogy. The reasoning behind such statements vary between spirituality, science and conciousness. However, no matter how hard I try, I can't agree with that. Here's why.

For starters, I can't trust someone that states human beings are limited beings. I believe the environment we live in is limited whereas we are not. I believe the more the environment we live in limits us, the more we'll try to overcome those limits. That's part of human being's nature.

Despite that, I don't believe seeking success in our daily tasks should keep us from communicating, connecting, loving or simply being. I believe we're well capable of working an all those things that make for a good eulogy while still trying to excel in everything we do, while still trying to build that perfect résumé.

In my very humble opinion, there's no such thing as "the spiritual / scientific side of me", there's just one "I" and that's what we should care about. Splitting ourselves into several "selves" won't help with overcoming our limits, it'll just make it harder.

Rationality is the quality or state of being reasonable, based on facts or reason rather than emotions or feelings.[0]

Rationality is one of the mind concepts I stick to very hard and I really don't want to say much about it. But I'll drop this tiny thought here:

If only humans were less emotional and more rational.

What to work for? What to live for? What to work on?

I've been exited about so many things my whole life. I love everything I see, everything I read. I love learning new things, reading, studying, challenging myself. I love that feel of success when I get to do something I wanted, I love it when I finally beat myself. I love that "YEEEESSSSS" coming right out of my lungs, it's hilarious, glorious. It tastes like success.

I've those moments many times per day. Lectures, thoughts, code, books, life. Everything.

Not everything is as straightforward as it seems, though. There are things that I simple can't beat. Time, for instance, is never enough. I'd love to have enough time to do all the things I'd love to do. This all makes me impatient, which then leads to frustration.

Thing is, that I - and most likely you too - should understand that it's not possible to do everything. It's necessary to give up something, it's simply impossible to dedicate time to every single thing we want. This obviously means we've got to choose. No one wants to do that.

What should I choose? What task? What project? What benefits does X have over Y?

It's hard. Even picking something to work on requires time, Nonetheless, it has to be done.

Before doing so. Take a deep breath, write down the things you'd like to spend some time on. Take another deep breath. Pick one thing. Just one. Work on that, feel good about it and don't think about the things you didn't pick. Enjoy your moment.

Just one more thing. Do it! Don't try to do it all, you can't! You're capable of doing anything, which is different from being capable of doing it all.

What's thoughtstream for me?

It's not a blog nor a paper, nor a very limited input field (twitter, I'm looking at you). It's the best place where I can structure the mess I've in my head.

For me, it's a place where ideas can fly by along with introspections, explanations, etc. In other words, it's the place where I can print thoughts without limits. I don't have to cut them nor make them long. The thoughts I put in thoughtstream are what they are and as they are.

The fact that it is possible to group those thoughts by logical context, allow people to read them, share them and even "discuss" them is exactly what a person with much to say and share needs.

BTW, just in case you didn't know this. We just released the first alpha version of marconiclient. wOOOOOOOOOOOt!

$ pip install 'python-marconiclient>=0.0.1a1'

Keep in mind it's an alpha version. Not full-featured and most likely a bit buggy.

The missing features are:

• Support for shards (Patch is already under review)
• Support for claims
• Some endpoints are missing (health, for example)

I'd like to meet new people this year. All kind of people. I want to learn from them and give them all the things I've to share. All this has got me thinking about many things related to what human relationships are built on.

In my humble opinion, there are many factors that come into play when we relate with other people. There's a bit of trust, curiosity, empathy, faith and perhaps even love. Neither of these things are mutually exclusive nor inclusive. They all can be combined together based on people's mood, personality and interests. I'm pretty sure there are more than five things that come into play when people relate with each other.

From the above, I'm personally more interested in what trust and love mean. I've been in love my whole life. I simply love being in love. It's not like nothing bad has happened to me. I've had ups and downs my whole life but it's been a whole lot of fun so far. All that said, I think trust is a very complex one.

People tend to trust each other. When I meet new people, I automatically trust them. I'm not saying I'd give them my credit card but I trust them based on what we expect from each other. This trust exists from the very beginning of the relationship and lasts forever, unless one of the parts breaks it.

One thing about trust that makes it even more interesting is the fact that it can be regenerated. When the trust is broken, it can be rebuilt. Betrayers can gain other part's trust again. This obviously depends a lot on the part that has been betrayed, but essentially trust can be rebuilt.

Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives - Sissela Bok

Lately, I've been putting some thoughts around the bandwidth, storage and performance in Marconi.

A queuing service is not actually about queues, it's about messages. If you think about it, the real resource that travels from one endpoint to the other are messages. There are all kind of things that happen from the moment a message is sent and the moment it is received but at the very end, the message is all that matters.

Queuing services' reliability exists just because no one don't one to loose messages. Message routing exists because it is important to be able to tell the message where it should go. Filters exist because not every node wants to get all messages, they need to be selective. I could go on with this but I think I made my point.

With all that in mind, the resource that we need to improve and make sure it's as lightweight as possible during the whole transmission period, is the message.

In Marconi, it's possible to configure the maximum size allowed per message. This is a huge benefit for users because they can tune their setup based on their needs. However, something that is not being taken under consideration is that not all storage would work well with all kind of message sizes. For example, SQS has a maximum message size that is not configurable, which means that someone willing to bake Marconi with SQS won't be able to use a maximum size for messages that is bigger than SQS's. Now, bare with me. I know that example is crazy and that most probably no one, ever, will do that. Just take what it is, a crazy example.

Thankfully, Marconi has support for shards. It allows users to deploy Marconi and have several backends backing it up concurrently. With shards, it's possible to tell Marconi what storage to use for each queue. Although this is great, I don't think it's enough.

There's one thing that we need before we can call this feature useful for-real™, though:

Routers

Routers help with directing messages to their final destination. In the case of Marconi, they'll help with putting each message into the right storage. The idea is to make routers configurable at every possible - and reasonable - level. Routers should allow users to control the message flow based on the source, some headers, rate, queue flavors, size, etc. Most of the existing technologies allow users to do that already, nothing new so far.

Now, what if we take advantage of the routing support and we move it down to a field level.

Imagine a very write-heavy queue with a fairly high message size - documents, for example - sharing a store with other queues. In a scenario like that, other queues may be penalized by the queue with big messages. We could argue this saying that it could be possible to dedicate a cluster for that specific queue and leave the other for the most lightweight queues. However, for the sake of the argument, lets say that is not possible.

A possible solution for that would be to split the message into 2 separate resources, one containing the body and the other the rest of the message. The later would be routed to the shared storage backend whereas the former would be routed to a dedicated storage for 'big things'. This will keep the main storage lighter and it won't penalize other queues. The body will be kept in a separate storage and it'll be retrieve as soon as it has to be sent to the client.

All that may sound a bit weird. Why would you do that instead of putting the big message in the storage that is good for 'big messages' in first place?.

One reason I could think of is that not all stores will be good for big messages and not all stores will be good for 'fast messaging'. For example, if you've Marconi deployed on top of an AMQP broker, I wouldn't suggest sending huge messages through the broker but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to take advantage of the performances of the broker. In a case like this, keeping splitting the message could make sense. It'd be very simple to store the message's body into swift and send the rest of the message to the broker.

The idea is definitely not bullet proof, it's just an idea, but I'd definitely like to explore it a bit more.

Let me quote myself:

... being fully aware of what's happening won't help with making what will happen next any better.

I know this thought is a bit extremist but here's why I think it's true.

Things happen because people act. If you don't act, nothing will happen. If you don't apply any force on an object, it'll resist to change its current state (inertia). Your actions depend on the things you are thinking and the things you've been aware of. You can't experience things that will happen, you can experience things that are happening, though. Things that will happen are meant to occur, until then you can just be aware of what's happening.

With that said, think about how the things you're doing now, which you are aware of, can make the things that will happen next better. If you can't, for sure, change the things that will happen, how can be aware of what's happening make those things any better?

What you can do, though, is to act in a way that will eventually influence the things that will happen in the way you expect. Your actions will certainly influence the things that will happen but you don't know if they'll make them any better.

Another cool thing would be to have a 'preview' button. :)

Another idea I posted in the old stream is that it'd be nice to have a way to reference cards from other cards. This would kinda add a way to extend people thoughts and share opinions without 'replying' to the card.

I don't think there should be a 'reply' feature in thoughtstreams since every card is not supposed to start a conversation but share a thought.

In the previous stream, which I deleted by mistake ( T_T ) I proposed having a way to create branches from thoughts without creating a brand new stream. The idea is to keep everything under the same context - the parent stream - and at the same time being able to elaborate a thought a bit more without extending it much. The branch could be merged into the original stream at some point.

Graphically, it'd look like git branch graphs :)

mmh, I re-posted some cards from another stream here and then deleted that stream. That deleted all the re-posted cards. :/

Is there actually such a thing as 'present' ?

This may sound really weird but I sometimes doubt about the existence of such thing like present. I've come to the conclusion that present is a way to group past and future events within a loop.

This pretty much follows from Albert Einstein's 'Special Theory of Relativity' , more precisely from Relativity of Simultaneity . Einstein phrased this as: People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion

And I couldn't agree more...

Alejandro said in one of his cards:

If I spend all my time improving myself, it comes at a cost.

This is a really interesting thought and I'd like to dig more into it.

How does 'self-improvement' actually happen?

Theoretically, being mindful should help with self-improvement. By being aware of what's happening right now, people should be able to notice things that would've passed unnoticed otherwise. Furthermore, by noticing things, people should also be able to improve the noticed aspects of their lives - or the things they're doing - that don't feel right.

If you were fully focused while reading the previous paragraph, you should have noticed that I said 'people should' as opposed to 'people will'. The reason I did that is that, somehow, people always feel that self-improvement comes with future plans and that the present is unfortunately already gone, which means there's no way to improve anything there. Therefore, being fully aware of what's happening won't help with making what will happen next any better.

These cards should also be hidden from the atom feed.

A label could be anything, most likely a size-limited field:

"Spoilers about the hobbit" "Spoilers" "Sexual content" ....

For example, If I have a stream where I review movies as opposed of 1 stream per movie, I could mark a specific card as containing spoilers about a specific movie. In this case, a reader who has already seen that movie could read the card.

Another way to do it, and perhaps a more generic one, would be to have a 'sensible content' label that could be shown as a lightbox - not a designer, forgive my lack of good terms - on top of the card with a custom message.

This label could be use to hide cards that the writer considers contain sensible content that could affect others in some way. Opening them or not is up to the reader.

@jtauber started a new stream about how 'spoilers' warnings could be implemented in thoughtstream. One way to do it, the one he's proposing, is to have a flag on streams or even thoughts themselves that would mark them as spoilers.

In this case, readers would be able to choose whether they want to open it or not. It would be also possible to hide the thought from the front-page.

I dug more on my previous thought.

I concluded it yesterday by questioning the benefits behind 'mindfulness'. What's the real gain and at what cost? I'm not really into the 'experimental' - which is weird coming from a developer - side of things but I gave it a try this time around.

According to what literature says about mindfulness, it's a state where you're aware of what's happening right now. In order to know what's happening, you've to be aware of what's around you as well, otherwise, you'd be aware of just a fraction of what's really happening.

I was taking a shower and I decided to be mindful, I started breathing and focusing on the water, the air around me, the temperature of the water, the noise outside my shower, the brightness of the light, etc. I focused on what I was feeling, the fact that the temperature was changing in the bathroom. I kept focusing on things, I focused, I focused, I... wait, I'm literally focusing on things... focusing...

Isn't focus - or attention - a cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect and ignoring everything else?

If I need to focus on every little thing around me in order to be aware of what's happening right now, Am I really actually being aware of everything? or Am I selectively paying attention to one thing at a time for small fractions of time?

After all, isn't seeing the big picture something that brings clarity?

Here's a thing. I like the concept behind mindfulness. I think it express pretty well what being focused means to me. It's not just about doing something and knowing you're doing it. It's about knowing that you're doing it and being aware of what is happening in that exact moment. You've got to be aware of what you're doing, what you're feeling, what you're thinking, what is going on around you and whatnot. But, at the very end, what's the big benefit of this whole state of mindfulness? What's the real gain and at what cost?

I started working on a websocket transport for Marconi. It's pretty cool to see it perfectly fitting into the architecture and being able to use it without much effort. The code is here.

As for now, it just proxies Marconi's public wsgi transport. The goal is to use this transport as another reference for the work going on the API layer.

We - alcabrera and myself - had a great pair reviewing session yesterday. We went through the sharding patches and I now feel more confident about letting them land.

There's still some more work to do there, but they're in a better shape now.

Wow, it's Wednesday and I can't still believe how great the last OpenStack summit was. We've amazing news and a bunch of new ideas. As far as Marconi is concerned, this is going to be a very busy development cycle.

We've been triaging some ideas as a daily routine in the last couple of days. This ideas come either from ourselves or external users that have shown interest in Marconi.

Some of those ideas are really valid, others have been rejected mostly because they'd have broken Marconi's conceptual integrity.

Here's the list of ideas. Link

I'm impress with how many things to do, discuss and plan we still have in Marconi. The number of tasks keeps growing, new ideas come out of the blue and the whole team sticks together working on it!

Great work guys!

This is the second year Marconi applies as a project for the OPW program. The last year it didn't gather much attention, probably because it was really really young. Now that it has grown quite a bit, It caught the attention of 2 women that are willing to work on it.

AMAZING!

We're now thinking about having schema versions defined on the server side that can be consumed by both the client and transports. The idea is to also be able to expose that through Marconi's home page, have extensions and whatnot. Here's the blueprint for that:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/marconi/+spec/cross-transport-api-spec

Quee's API has been split in 2 separte drivers. This means it is necessary to run an 'admin' node to expose the admin API. The admin API exposes things like stats, health, shards management, etc.

The migration to testr has revealed interesting things about nosetests and Marconi tests themselves.

I really like Marconi's architecture. It has the right level of abstraction and customization. Users can deploy Marconi based on their needs and current infrastructure.

I wonder what other people think about it.

We are currently working hard on a partitions feature that will ease the scale of Marconi server's horizontally. Not exactly rocket science but definitely and exiting feature to have.