Shlomi Fish's Home Site's Journal
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Shlomi Fish's Home Site's LiveJournal:
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| Sunday, February 19th, 2012 | 7:49 pm
[shlomif]
 |
Fifth Part of Perl for Perl Newbies and New Humour Items
Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage. I know I have not
posted an update to this blog in a while, and in part it’s due to the fact
that I have not done as much work on the site as I have before the previous
update. But there is still some new things to look forward to.
There are some new items on the original aphorisms page:
Sophie: I’m hungry today.
Jack: well, wait until tomorrow - maybe this feeling will pass.
I’m now mirroring the
“English
is a Crazy Language” bit I found somewhere.
The fifth installment in the
Perl
for Perl Newbies series of presentations is now available
online. This part covers good programming practices such as using a version
control system, writing automated tests, and using accessors for objects. As
with the previous parts, this talk is licensed under the Public Domain/CC-Zero.
There are new
factoids in the
factoids collection:
Larry Wall can make shit up, and the computer will understand what he means.
There are also many new
UNIX-like fortune cookies:
- buu: PKRUMINS
- rindolf: pKrumins
- pkrumins: BYY
- rindolf: pkrumins: BUU
- rindolf: pkrumins: buu is back.
- pkrumins: rindolf: i know
- rindolf: pkrumins: he said he was close to disappearing.
- pkrumins: WHAT
- pkrumins: buu, is that true
- rindolf: pkrumins: he was sick.
- pkrumins: HE WASNT
- buu: =[
- buu: I was
- pkrumins: HOW
- buu: Genetic defects!
- pkrumins: OH NO
- pkrumins: OH NO NO NO
- mauke: substance abuuse
- buu: Owch
- buu: That joke almost qualifies as abuse
- mauke: now that I've hurt mst and buu, my work for today is done
- pkrumins: you still havent hurt me
- rindolf: mauke: hold on! You haven't hurt me yet.
- buu: haha
- * rindolf is hurt that mauke didn't hurt him.
- rindolf: Oh wait.
- mauke: just as keikaku.
- rindolf: mauke: OK, now your work for today is done.
- pkrumins: NO
I have added
a
review of Kent Beck’s Test Driven Development: By Example
to the recommended books page.
The ABC Path game's generator module is now being mentioned
in the Games ABC Path page, and the solver
and generator were also ported to JavaScript.
More prominent editors and IDEs were added to the
editors
and IDEs page.
And as usual, there are many additional links on various pages of the site.
Current Mood:  happy | | Saturday, July 23rd, 2011 | 12:48 pm
[shlomif]
|
New Translations of Stories
Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage. The first highlight is
that I’ve gone over the site and converted most ASCII single quotes and
double quotes I could find to their Unicode equivalents. In the process,
I corrected many typos, XHTML validation problems, and other issues.
There are new fortune cookies:
The worst way to waste your time is to never waste it.
There’s a translation of the
of Human Hacking
Field Guide to Written Arabic. This was done by Vieq - thanks!
The Hebrew translation of the screenplay
Humanity - the Movie is now complete.
Furthermore, the
XML-Grammar-Fiction page was enhanced with examples and links.
There’s a new
Test.pm
to Test::More partial converter, which may be of interest to programmers
maintaining legacy Perl code.
Current Mood: productive | | Friday, May 27th, 2011 | 6:29 pm
[shlomif]
|
Translations of Stories to Hebrew (For the Alternative Book Week)
Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage. Most of these are
ongoing translations of various English stories to Hebrew. These were done
in preparation for the “Alternative Book Week” in
Tel Aviv University (see its
Facebook
page). It is going to take place on Tuesday, 31 May 2011 between 09:30
and 16:30 in Tel Aviv University, next to the Gilman building, the department
of Humanities. Several indepentant writers are going to read from their
prose there, including me. You are welcome to attend, listen to the
participating writers, and provide us with welcome support and input. Hope to
see you there!
There’s a
new joke in the aphorisms and quotes page:
In Soviet Russia, cats own you. No, wait! Cats own you everywhere.
I posted the first part of my
Selena
Mandrake - The Slayer screenplay to
its
place in FanFiction.net where one can rate it and post comments. There
is some new text in the
ideas
for the future document.
I started preparing a
Hebrew
translation of my
Humanity -
The Movie screenplay.
There are two new fortunes in fortune collection.
We now mirror the web parody
“Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?” (via Websurdity and Debunking 911).
The various screenplays in English in the
stories section now
have better capitalisation, punctuation and grammar, and their visual style
was also improved. There are also many
grammatical corrections to the story
The
Human Hacking Field Guide and a lot of progress was made in
its
Hebrew translation.
The
XML-Grammar-Fiction page now
contains coverage of Screenplay-Text and Screenplay-XML, as well as examples
for the grammars and their outputs.
Enjoy!
| | Friday, May 13th, 2011 | 9:19 pm
[shlomifish]
 |
“Selena Mandrake” and Improvements to Other Stories
Here is what’s new on
Shlomi Fish’s
Homepage since the last update. It’s been a month and there are many
major changes.
A new work-in-progress screenplay titled
Selena Mandrake
- The Slayer can be found in the stories section. This is a
supernatural dramedie, that is a parody/tribute/spin-off of
Buffy the
Vampire Slayer and some other works of fiction and non-fiction. I have
a pretty good roadmap for what I’d like to write there so I hope to get the
first draft soon.
Selena: This reminds me. I really should update my Mandriva system at home.
I have not in several days, now. And to think I originally had my friend
Aaron install Mandrake Linux for me, because I thought it was cool that
it was called the same as my last name.
Jessica: Heh, maybe you should become Selena Mandriva now.
Jonathan: Or Selena Mageia.
[
Selena bursts out laughing.
]
Selena: That sounds like a name of a vampire slayer… or a vampire.
Jonathan: Or both.
Selena: Yeah. I told you about how I was nicknamed “Puffy” and then “Buffy”
during one summer camp, right?
Jessica: Yes, many times.
Selena: Yeah, I found it amusing at the time. For a while afterwards, I
insisted that my friends call me “Buffy” until I realised it was silly, and
reverted back to “Selena”.
I’ve also began translating the second version of my novella
The Human Hacking
Field Guide to Hebrew. One can find
the ongoing
Hebrew translation and its
Fiction-Text source, under CC-by-sa - same licence
as the English original. In addition, I can say that the story is being
translated to
Modern Standard
Arabic in the OpenDocument format by an Egyptian enthusiast of
open-source software, and more translations will be welcome.
In addition to all that, version 7 of my novella
The Enemy
and How I Helped to Fight It, in Hebrew and English, with many
improvements is now available online. I especially would like to thank
Miriam Erez Translations
for providing some copy-editing work.
Moreover, I explicitly marked
many of the the works of fiction
on the site, the essays,
and the software resources
with a Creative Commons licence. Share and enjoy!
There are some style tweaks, I’ve documented the use of the
EvilPHish
emblem, and there are some new
fortune cookies:
- rindolf: Mithaldu: I think most contemporary T.V. kinda sucks.
- rindolf: Mithaldu: it seems very phony.
- Mithaldu: rindolf: same, i haven’t actually switched on my tv in five years
- rindolf: I prefer a YouTube video of a kitten riding on a turtle.
- rindolf: Mithaldu: :-)
- Mithaldu: :D
- rindolf: Mithaldu: yes.
- rindolf: Mithaldu: there is one, BTW.
- Mithaldu: oh i do not doubt that
- rindolf: Don’t know if it’s authentic.
- rindolf: I saw a friendly cat today, and he purred after I scratched his head.
- rindolf: I like Friendly cats.
- rindolf: I think lolcats are very subversive.
- rindolf: Or were.
- rindolf: “Ceiling cat is watching you”
- Mithaldu: cats are the definition of subversive
- Mithaldu: they adopt you
- rindolf: Mithaldu: heh.
- rindolf: In Soviet Russia, cats own you!
- rindolf: In Soviet Russia, cats are your master!
- rindolf: Well, in Soviet Russia and everywhere.
- kent\n: rindolf: you got it backwards.
- kent\n: In soviet russia, cats are actually your pets.
- Mithaldu: hahaha
- rindolf: kent\n: heh.
- rindolf: kent\n++
- rindolf: I feel better now.
- rindolf: Empowered but calm.
- rindolf: Thanks to the cats jokes.
- Mithaldu: world healing by cat jokes
- rindolf: Hopefully, I’ll sleep well tonight.
- kent\n: Next on the agenda. DICK JOKES!
- rindolf: Mithaldu: cats are good for healing I think.
- rindolf: kent\n: NO!!!!!
- kent\n: ( don’t worry, this won’t take long )
- Mithaldu: yes, as long as you do not own cables
- Mithaldu: kent\n: you mean it won’t BE very long
- Mithaldu: hurr hurr
- rindolf: kent\n: I’ve got 99 problems but kent\n ain’t one.
- kent\n: ;)
Hope you enjoy the new stuff on the site and stay tuned for more.
Current Mood: calm | | Tuesday, April 5th, 2011 | 10:10 pm
[shlomif]
|
New and Improved Stories, Screenplays, Aphorisms and Bits
Here are the recent updates to
Shlomi Fish’s
Homepage since the last update. A long time has passed and there are
many big and small changes, and I hope this summary will compensate for it.
There are new English and Hebrew versions of my story,
The Enemy
and How I Helped to Fight it, and some text was added to the
front page. An even better version is currently being worked on in the
Mercurial repository of the story.
There’s new text in the screenplay
Star
Trek: “We, the Living Dead”, in both parts of
“The One with the Fountainhead” and in the Hebrew story
“The Pope died on Sunday”:
[
Cut. End Credits. Phoebe is sitting on the coach reading the Fountainhead.
]
Phoebe: wow, I forgot how great the Fountainhead was. So what did Rand do
afterwards?
Ross: well, she wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation of the
Book that starred Gary Copper…
Phoebe: oooh, yummy…
Ross: yes, well, and then she worked on Atlas Shrugged.
Phoebe: [in a lyrical fashion] “Atlas shrugged from side to side. ‘Alas, my end is near!’ the lady cried.”
Monica: ehmm… Pheebs? That’s “The mirror crack’d from side to side”.
Phoebe: oh! Ayn Rand wrote “The Mirror Crack’d” too?
Ross: no, Phoebe. That was Agatha Christie.
Phoebe: Oh! Everybody knows that Ayn Rand wrote all of Agatha Christie’s
stories.
Chandler: [tongue-in-cheek]I can totally believe that, Pheebs.
After an almost complete lack of inspiration since its inception, there are
now new Larry Wall
Factoids:
Larry Wall does know all of Perl. However, he pretends to be wrong
or misinformed, so people will think he’s not as awesome as he really is.
And as usual, there are also some new Chuck Norris Facts:
Chuck Norris once wrote a 10 million lines C++ program in Microsoft Notepad
without having to use the backspace key. And it compiled without errors
or warnings, and was 100% bug-free.
There’s now a script for displaying an individual quote of the
UNIX-like
fortune cookies with a random feature.
Speaking of fortune cookies, there are some new fortune cookies, and many
of them have fixed typos:
Real programmers use a nice editor and a nice programming
language and get it done in less than O(N!).
(Vanguard in Freenode’s ##programming)
Some of the aphorisms now have Hebrew translations:
אלהים נתן לנו שתי עיניים ועשר אצבעות, כדי שנקליד פי חמש יותר ממה שאנו קוראים.
Likewise, there’s now a hebrew
translation of “Ways to do it according to the programming
languages of the world”:
-
Perl -
יש יותר מדרך אחת לעשות זאת.
-
C++ -
ישנן חמש דרכים לעשות זאת. שלוש מתוכן לא אמורות לעבוד.
-
Visual Basic -
הדרך היחידה לעשות זאת היא להשתמש ברכיב צד שלישי.
-
ANSI C -
יש, בדרך כלל, דרך אחת לעשות זאת, אבל יש יותר מדרך אחת לבצע אופטימיזציה.
-
Java -
יש בקושי דרך אחת לעשות זאת. (אבל בניגוד ל-C++, היא בטוח תעבוד.)
-
Python -
יש דרך אחת לעשות זאת. הדרך האחת האמיתית לעשות זאת. וישנן גם דרכים אחרות.
The funny bit
“The
S Stands for Simple” (about SOAP) is now mirrored on the site. I have also placed
the stories
by a writer by the name of Oded C. that he had sent me in the past (in
Hebrew) on the site, and converted them to OpenDocument Text and to HTML using
OpenOffice.org.
The Copyrights Page
now spells out my interpretation of the various Creative Commons licences
that I’m using:
The Public Domain / CC-Zero
If the work is marked as public domain, then you can freely redistribute it,
modify it or build upon it, even without giving me credit. If you wish you
may consider the work as licensed under the
MIT/X11 licence,
the CC-by licence (see below), or any other licence. What you cannot do is
claim that you originated the original version, or sue me for any damages
caused by using or misusing the information.
All of that put aside, if you find works under this licence useful, you
are encouraged to credit me; share them under similar liberal licences;
make a small donation, either in money for me and/or for a good cause,
or by buying me interesting books,
cool T-shirts, or alternatively audio or video files (only as digital
files, for I lack the energy for pesky circular physical media),
and naturally by sending me an appreciation note that you
enjoyed them or found them of value. But I’m not forcing you to.
I’m using this licence for most of my photos (but not all of them), for some
of my presentation material, and for some of my old code, or code that
I find useful to dual-licence under it and the MIT/X11 licence.
The solver
for the game ABC Path (by
Otto Janko) is now available in the software section.
The XML-Grammar-Fiction
homepage was improved with new content and some links to the similar efforts
of Celtx and AsciiDoc.
There’s
a new FAQ about
the “EvilPHish” emblem in the top-left corner of this screen.
The technical talk
“There
are Too Many Ways to Do it” now contains
notes
in Hebrew which have been prepared in advance when giving it to the Tel
Aviv Perl Mongers.
The main navigation menu on the left was revamped and converted
to use JavaScript (which is not required to operate it). I’m planning to do
further work on tweaking it in the near future. Moreover, there’s now
a language switching widget on such pages as
the “Ways to
do it According to the Programming Languages of the World”.
Finally, I added
some
description of my psycho-medical condition to my Bio.
Hopefully, you enjoy these changes. More are upcoming.
Current Mood: accomplished | | Thursday, January 6th, 2011 | 7:23 pm
[shlomif]
 |
| | Saturday, October 9th, 2010 | 2:05 pm
[shlomif]
|
New humorous bits, fortune cookies, and updated software
There’s a new humorous bit titled “Copying
Ubuntu Bug No. 1”. It was also
featured
on my tech blog where it received several comments.
Tel Aviv, Israel: “Ubuntu can’t have all the fun only for itself”,
open source distributors are saying as they rush to copy its
Bug No. 1 titled “Microsoft has
a majority market share”.
Debian, Ubuntu’s parent distribution, has set up
Debian Bug No. 1 which also reads “Microsoft has a majority market
share”. Mandriva,
another competing distribution has set up
Mandriva
Bug No. 1: “Microsoft has a majority market share and Ubuntu has a majority
market share on the Linux desktop”. Fedora, Gentoo, Archlinux, Slackware
and other distributions are expected to follow suit.
Speaking of Ubuntu, tomorrow it would be 10-October-2010 - 10.10.10 and it
would be the release date of
Ubuntu 10.10
codenamed “Maverick Meerkat”.
There’s
a new page with a Hebrew translation of the song “Buy the Fish” from
my Humanity - The Movie
screenplay.
There are new fortune cookies in
the
fortune cookies collection and
the
RSS feed has now been fixed (the corresponding Atom feed is still broken
due to a bug in the XML::Atom CPAN module).
Often when I ask the people I train if they know Perl, they tell me “I don’t
know Perl. I can only read it.”. I wonder whether it indicates that Perl is not
a write-only language as some people like to claim.
-- Gabor Szabo (Perl Programmer and Trainer)
The solver for Black Hole solitaire was converted to C, which made
it much faster and less memory-hungry. The results and statistics of running it
on the first 1 million PySolFC Black Hole deals are available in the link.
Version 1.03 of
libtap,
a C library for testing using
the Test Anything Protocol (TAP)
is now available with several improvements.
Many of the code excerpts in the
Perl for Newbies
series were corrected for Modern Perl practices.
The website also now has a better “404” page, and as usual there are many
new links in the various pages. Enjoy!
Current Mood: productive | | Saturday, August 7th, 2010 | 3:02 pm
[shlomif]
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“COBOL - The New Age Programmming Language”, “Don’t Abuse JavaScript”, and other news
There’s a
new parodical page titled “COBOL - The New Age Programming Language”:
NASA Uses COBOL.
And so do:
- Your bank.
- Your insurance company.
- Your government.
COBOL runs your life.
A new page
“Don’t Abuse
JavaScript!” has been added.
JavaScript has become popular due to being useful for scripting browsers, which
is acceptable due to being the only commonly-acceptable portable choice for
that. However, lately, it has been utilised as a host language for many other
realms where there are far saner and superior alternatives.
This page aims to explain why JavaScript should not be abused for such stuff.
There are new fortune
cookies:
- dxtr: Do we have any doctors in here?
- rindolf: dxtr: with Ph.D. or M.D.?
- munik: I have a PhD in Linguistics!
- munik: ^ lie
- munik: :]
- dxtr: rindolf: I don’t care as long as they can treat patients
- rindolf: dxtr: heh.
- munik: :o
- munik: webmd.com
- munik: might be better than #perl
- dxtr: rindolf: That question would be fun in combat. “WE NEED A DOCTOR HERE!” - “PH.D OR M.D!?”
More recommended open source programs have been added
to the favourite
open source programs page, including Xfce, Pidgin, tmux and htop.
The
Cross-platform abstraction libraries is now licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence.
There’s now
a
list of calculators on the numerical software page.
There are new links in
the “Stop Using Internet Explorer”
page
the
anti-Apple page, and in the
PHP Sucks page,
A greasemonkey script to fix a qa.mandriva.com
annoyance has been added to the Greasemonkey scripts section.
Furthermore, the remove
“from=rss” script was updated to deal with the even more obnoxious
“from=rss” suffix in recent URLs.
I added details
of my Acer Laptop to the “Computers’ Specifications” question on the
FAQ.
The
site’s source page was updated with up-to-date instructions.
| | Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 | 10:22 am
[shlomif]
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| | Saturday, March 20th, 2010 | 10:18 pm
[shlomif]
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| | Thursday, February 18th, 2010 | 5:44 pm
[shlomif]
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| | Thursday, January 14th, 2010 | 8:51 pm
[shlomif]
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| | Monday, December 14th, 2009 | 10:58 pm
[shlomif]
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New Text for The Blue Rabbit’s Log, The Parable of the Elephant in the Circus, Directory of Numerica
New text was added to The Blue Rabbit Log screenplay:
[
A crowded pub in the role-played world. The Blue Rabbits enter.
]
Clover: OK, now that our horses are in the stable, we can get some rest. [Hands
some coins to the pub-man] Meals and drinks for the six of us.
Guy sitting on a stool at the bar (Guy #1): hey, I think I recognise you. You’re The
Blue Rabbit Adventuring company, right?
Clover: yes, we are. [does a rudimentary bow] Clover, at your service!
Guy #1: hell, I ain’t need your service!
Guy #2: yeah, we don’t need no adventurers’ service here.
Guy #1: yeah, problem with adventurers - they are trouble makers. They create
troubles where none exist before so they can solve them later.
Guy #2: yeah! [and he shakes mugs with Guy #1]
The Computer Art page
was made more semantic and accessible.
I added my
contributions to Mandriva to the page “Contributions Made to External
Open-Source Projects”.
A
new
mini-directory of prominent Numerical Software (currently heavily
incomplete) has been added to
Open Source
resources section.
The “shlomif”
collection of fortunes which was getting very big and out of control
has span-out
the
Freenode #perl fortune cookies
and
Freenode
##programming fortune cookies. There are some new fortunes there.
I added the text of
the parable of the Elephant in the Circus:
I once walked to a circus and saw a huge elephant tied to a small poll with a
rope, just standing there. So I wondered why is the elephant so obedient and
doesn’t break away from the stick with all of its enormous strength and mass.
So they told me this story: once when the elephant was very young, it was tied
to the pole the same way. Naturally, it didn’t like that and tried to escape,
but try as it might, the rope and the pole were too strong for it. So the
elephant eventually gave up.
Finally, the section navigation menus of the various sections are now
formatted in a nice, expandable, GUI-like tree (assuming JavaScript is
enabled). If JavaScript is not enabled, there’s a standard HTML fallback. This
is thanks to
jQuery
TreeView Plugin
| | Thursday, November 19th, 2009 | 10:04 pm
[shlomif]
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Second Revision of “Create a Great Personal Home Site”
The second
revision of the essay “Create a Great Personal Home Site” has now
been finally published and is available for public viewing:
It’s amazing how much has changed since I’ve published this article
a few years ago. The most important trend was probably that personal blogs
seem to have become much more prevalent than personal web-sites up to
the point that some people referred to www.shlomifish.org as a blog. I have
been annoyed at this to some extent, and even wrote
an entire
essay about the distinction between a home page and a blog and why
this homepage is not a blog.
Nevertheless, as an
active blogger, it’s not that I hate blogs or try to underrate them -
it’s just that I think that I invest more effort and rigour in writing
articles or essays on my home page, than I do on the various random stuff
I post to my blogs. (Or to other similar public channels, such as mailing
lists, web forums, comments on other people’s blogs, etc.). I also feel that
it is easier to find posts on my personal web-site than on most people’s
blogs.
Current Mood: productive | | Friday, November 13th, 2009 | 3:19 pm
[shlomif]
|
New Material for the Stories and a Page for the XML-Grammar Project
The texts of the lists of stories and their descriptions in the
Humour page and its
Stories section
were merged, updated and enhanced.
There are new
Chuck
Norris Factoids:
Chuck Norris is the greatest man in history. He killed all the
great men who could ever pose a competition.
There’s also a new
factoid
about XSLT:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil redirects to XSLT.
The text of The
Pope Died on Sunday was converted to XML-Grammar-Fiction (see below)
and was continued a little. The story is written in Hebrew, and there is still
no English translation.
The original
screenplay
The Blue Rabbit’s Log has new text and its ideas page has
also been updated:
[ Mordox disappears. The Blue Rabbits arrive. Bryte sees Galku who
tries to look innocent, but Bryte rushes to him and lifts him up in
the air. ]
Clover: you, where’s Mordox? Tell us
what you know!
Galku: What are you looking at me? I’m
completely innocent!
Galku: See no incredible selfishness and
total in-consideration of everybody
else’s welfare and interests. Hear no incredible selfishness and total
in-consideration of everybody else’s welfare and interests.
Bryte: you mean “See no evil - hear
no evil”?
Galku: I knew it was a good definition.
There’s also some new text in
Star
Trek: “We, the Living Dead”:
[ Katie is sitting on a table in DS9. She is busy writing something on a
qwerty-like keyboard attached to a small text pad. Jake approaches her. ]
Jake: Katie, oh there you are. I thought
that OTF-1 left DS9 already.
Katie: yes, it did, I’m still
technically working for them.
Jake: really, how?
Katie: with the marvels of technology:
remote access and Q-ness.
Jake: Q-ness?
Katie: yes, check this out.
[ Katie stands up, makes a gesture with her hand. A portal appears near the
ground showing a different part of DS9. She steps into it, and the portal
closes. A few moments later, a normal Star-Trek door opens and Katie steps
out of it. ]
Katie: tada!
Jake: wow! So you are now “Qatie” with a
Q?
Katie: Qatie
[with a
Qoph sound]
heh, I like it.
The XML sources of the
fortunes cookie files are now viewable as HTML from the web, and
naturally, there are newer entries.
There’s a new design
for graphics
based on an old aphorism of me.
There’s now a
page for
the Web-CPAN XML-Grammar meta-project, which aims to create
re-usable XML grammars and related tools for various purposes, and there’s a
page for
the
XML-Grammar-Fiction module for writing works of prose.
The page design and layout were slightly improved with some important
links at the bottom (Web 2.0-style), old cruft removed from the left side
bar, and other changes.
| | Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 | 12:58 pm
[shlomif]
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| | Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 | 10:12 pm
[shlomif]
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New Humour Pages and Additions
The
page
with my own Chuck Norris facts has accumulated some newer facts:
-
Deletionists delete Wikipedia articles. Chuck Norris deletes deletionists
who delete Wikipedia articles.
-
Chuck Norris reads all messages posted to LKML (= the Linux Kernel
Mailing List), understands them all, and he kills all gnomes he
sees in sight.
There’s also a
new page with an ongoing collection of facts about Xena, the Warrior
Princess, who is, for a change, a female target of exaggerated factoids.
-
Xena can meet King David for breakfast and Julius Caesar for lunch. Without
time travel.
-
No one calls Xena the warrior princess “Zeena” to her face and survives. Lucky
for you she hasn’t visited modern-day U.S. yet.
The Blue Rabbit
Log is an old screenplay I began writing that is still under construction.
It aims to be a crazy comedy about Fantasy Role Playing Games:
Galku: Yes, it is my specialty to neutralise
such characters who prevent raising your ambitious evil projects.
Mordox: What did you say?
Galku: I said I get rid of such characters
who prevent raising your evil projects. Mordox: You said my projects are evil? How dare you! My
projects are in no way evil. They are just incredibly selfish and totally
inconsiderate of everybody else’s interests and welfare.
Galku: I couldn’t define evil better myself.
Mordox: Did I get you here to write a
dictionary of the English language?
Galku: No, but as a matter of fact I am
writing one myself, as a hobby. The last word I wrote the definition for was
“evidently”, and I think the next word will be...
Mordox: Cut it out! Now, where were we?
Galku: I just said it is my specialty to get
rid of characters who prevent raising your incredibly selfish and totally
inconsiderate of everybody else’s interests and welfare projects.
I’ve started writing
a conclusions
and reviews page for my story The Human Hacking Field Guide
There are new English and Hebrew revisions of
my story - The Enemy
and How I Helped to Fight it with many corrections. Furthermore, the
source files have been converted to XHTML instead of OpenOffice.org.
There is
a
new scene in Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead” called “Meet Q Gadol”.
I added an
F.A.Q. question and answer about “What are your computers’
specifications”.
Current Mood: productive | | Saturday, September 12th, 2009 | 3:13 pm
[shlomif]
|
New Aphorisms, Collections of Humorous “Facts” and Hebrew Translation of “Define Zionism”
There are four new aphorisms in the aphorisms’ collection:
A kid always wishes they were older until they are 18. Afterwards, they
always wish they were younger.
There’s a new
sub-section of my humour section dedicated to collections of “facts”
about various things that my friends or I originated. Right now,
there are some facts about Chuck Norris, why Knuth (= the famous computer
scientist) is not God, some facts about Larry Wall (the software developer
known for Perl) and some about how and why XSLT is evil. More additions are
welcome:
-
Chuck Norris read the entire English Wikipedia in 24 hours. Twice.
-
Chuck Norris is the ghost author of the entire Debian GNU/Linux
distribution. And he wrote it in 24 hours, while taking snack breaks.
-
Bugs are too much afraid to reproduce on Chuck Norris’ computer. As a
result, when he uses Microsoft Windows, it behaves just like a Linux
system.
There’s now an mp3 version
of the “Yonathan Haqatan” MOD Techno/Dance version (which my
friend and I prepared). Hopefully, it will be good enough to be heard by
people who are unable to play
module files.
There’s now
a
Hebrew translation of “Define ‘Zionism’!” available.
the Spark
page was updated with many corrections, new links, and more
content:
As opposed to Arc, which shipped with no automated tests, Spark will be
developed in a Test-driven development fashion. Namely, it will have a
comprehensive test suite that will need to fully pass upon any commit to the
trunk (or “master” or whatever the main branch is called).
The code of the tests is not expected to be authoritative for how the final
version of the language will behave. Rather, some future design decisions will
require changing the code of a lot of the tests accordingly.
I still don’t have a clear idea of how to design a lot of “big picture” Spark
design decisions. While I believe that design is good, I also think that Spark
should be designed incrementally, and that we can expect many design decisions
to change. Test-driven development, while accepting the fact that often a lot
of testing code will need to be modified, will allow us to do that.
I have added JavaScript-based text ads courtesy of
AdEngage to the top of the page. My
hope is that they will provide me with some extra income for maintaining the
site, as a replacement to the Google AdSense ads that
have
been suspended. Being textual ads, they hopefully should note be
too intrusive, and I hope people can relate to my desire to be rewarded for
the hard work I put into the site and the costs of hosting it.
I have made several spelling, grammar, etc. corrections to some of my
stories and
screenplays.
Finally, I should note that I’ve heard several critiques of the new style,
which emphasised some problems with it. While it is more attractive than the
old one, it results in a narrow content section, especially where the
section navigation menu is present. I’m currently working on trying to
improve the new design or to replace it with a new one, so stay tuned.
| | Monday, August 31st, 2009 | 10:58 pm
[shlomif]
|
Wikepedians Lightbulb Joke, Open Source Licences Wars and New Fortune Cookies
There’s a new
humorous bit “How many Wikipedia Editors does it Take to Change a
Lightbulb?” and as an experiment I’ve enabled the JavaScript-based
Disqus comments on that page.
There’s a new essay called “FOSS Licences Wars” about Open Source Licences:
When Joel Spolsky
(Joel on Software) wrote his notorious blog post
“Language
Wars”, many people asked whether he has “jumped the
shark” and that his blog will go downhill from there. I too have read
the post, and agreed, that while it had a few good points, it was
too based on “feeling rather than knowing”. Joel later on posted
many good articles and shorter entries on his blog, but many people
still recalled it as a very low-point in the blog.
Like Joel, I have a home-site and several blogs, where I post articles
and essays about my thoughts, and this time I’ve decided to risk
something similar to what Joel has done on an equally flamatory topic:
licences
of open-source software. I’m going to introduce the various
options, explain a little about their motivation and then
give some advice according to my own personal opinion.
It was already featured on several sites including
on Slashdot.
There are some new fortune cookies in the “shlomif” collection:
PHP error debug list:
1) did you use the correct argument order? if you’re a good programmer, use
the *reverse* from what you think it is. see if it works. no? you’re not a good
programmer, or you learned php’s braindeadness and can go on to step 2).
2) did you think about your code? if so, don’t. php will do it for you so you can do mindbogglingly stupid stuff, such as not escape the data that goes into your sql queries.
Dazjorz
Enjoy!
| | Sunday, August 16th, 2009 | 10:40 pm
[shlomif]
|
Spark, Perl for Newbies Part 5, and Template Toolkit Presentation
I added some pages about Spark - a new dialect of Lisp under planning, including
its
mission statement:
While other general purpose Lisps such as Common Lisp, Scheme, Arc or Clojure
have been influential and have some followers and users, none of them are
actively used with the same popularity as Perl, Python, Ruby or PHP are. Spark
aims to be a popular lisp dialect which will be actively used for real-world
tasks, not just toy or experimentation code.
Eventually, it is our hope that some people will get paid to maintain Spark
code. Some of them against their best preferences, like some people now are
maintaining Perl 5, PHP or even Python code while prefering a different
language. (Simply because it puts bread on their table, and they cannot get
paid to write something else.)
I added the
fifth
part of
the Perl
for Newbies tutorials/presentations. Furthermore, the Larry
Wall presentation,
“The
Taming of the Camel” is now available there (with a working
link). Moreover, there’s now
an up-to-date summary of the material covered.
The slides of
the
lightning talk about the Template Toolkit now has the up-to-date
slides in OpenDocument and PDF formats.
There’s now a
recommendation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail
on the recommended films page.
Many of the fortune
cookies were enhanced with better markup, hyperlinks and some
corrections.
File-Find-Object was added to the FOSS contributions page.
Finally, the sources for the various Quad-Pres talks are now kept
inside the homepage’s
version control, which simplifies their build process. This
is an infrastructure change that should help in the site’s maintenance.
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