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| Friday, April 26th, 2013 | 7:45 pm
[shlomif]
 |
New Story: The Earth Angel; Soviet reversal jokes; new text in The Pope and in Selina Mandrake; “Put
Here are the recent updates for Shlomi
Fish’s Homepage.
-
There is
a new story
titled The Earth Angel which I have started to write:
Dr. Alan Stein (Attn.) had not seen that side of Samantha before. As they sat
there in the Chinese restaurant, two days before Ari, their system
administrator, left for a trip to Israel, Samantha was emitting a lot of
profanity, and sharing her frustrations of her life and the world. Dr. Stein
was beginning to regret the fact that he had agreed to comply with Ari’s wishes,
and invite her to lunch with them.
Samantha Rodriguez was the newest hire at Alan’s law firm - a brilliant
attorney in her early thirties, who looked great, was always groomed,
and got a lot of work done, despite the fact that she almost never stayed
overtime, and also took many days off. One fly in the ointment was the
fact that she was single, sexy, and kept asking her co-workers out on dates,
or accepting their own invitations. As much as Dr. Stein agreed that she had
been a good hire, he was desperately trying to avoid interacting with her.
“Anyway, I ended up telling my friend, Jasmine, who can be a real bitch
sometimes, to fuck off, and deal with her troubled life herself. I simply
ran out of patience.” she said.
“Bravo!” Ari said while clapping his hands. “By the way, Samantha, how did
you become a lawyer?”
“Oh, that's a long story.” she said while playing with her fork.
“And we’ve got time to hear it, right Mr. Stein?”
“Yes, I guess we do.” Dr. Stein answered.
“Well, I studied Linguistics as my B.A.,” Samantha said “and by the time I
graduated, my
head was filled with vocabulary, and to a lesser extent - grammatical rules, my
heart was broken from many heartbreaks, and I didn’t know what to do with
the rest of my life. I ended up narrowing it to three options: 1. Find
a paying job - as a programmer or whatever else I could land. 2. Stay in the
academia, studying for a Masters and/or a Ph.D. and — 3. Go to law school.
I figured out fucking Med School was never my thing.”
“Anyway, after consulting it with my friends, I became even less capable
of knowing what to do. So I did the logical thing - I rolled a die.”
“A die?” Ari said.
“Yes, a
ten-sided die or
a 1d10 in role-playing game parlance. That’s usually what I use. It landed
on the law school option, so that’s what I decided to pursue.” Samantha said.
“So, you placed your fate in the hand of chance?” Ari asked
“Yes, I did. Nothing wrong with doing that, if you ask me.”
“Well, everyone say you are an excellent attorney.” Ari noted.
“So they do.” Samantha said, “Maybe they are right.”
-
The translation of the already written part of my story,
The
Pope Died on Sunday is now complete:
Rachel contemplated how to start the conversation.
“So how did you become an infrastructures engineer?” Rachel asked.
“Well, ever since I was young, I wanted to be a plumber.” Greg replied.
“A plumber? Seriously?” Rachel said with astonishment.
“Yes. Very strange, but what can I do — that is what I wanted to be.” Greg
said, “I spent a large part of the summer vacations being an apprentice for
plumbers and enjoyed every moment. Anyway, after I graduated from high school,
I was planning to go through a plumbing training course and to get my
qualification. But my father approached me and told me: ‘Greg, my son, I have,
thank God, enough money so you study what you want in university. So why not
exploit that? If you want, you can become a plumber who graduated from
university.’”
And he went on: “So I agreed with him, but decided to study the closest
thing to plumbing: civil engineering with a specialisation in the engineering
of water and sewerage infrastructures. And surprisingly I realised that
a large part of it was quite interesting.”
“So did you become a qualified plumber eventually?” Rachel queried.
“Yes, I passed the course. But I still got a Bachelor’s degree in civil
engineering and that’s what I prefer to do.”
“Hmmm…” Rachel said “Finding a good plumber in this day and age, to say nothing
of one who is a university graduate, is hard.”
“Well, I cannot testify that I’m a good plumber. A person cannot testify for
his own qualities.” Greg replied.
“Well, even a bad plumber is good enough for certain needs.” said
Rachel and witnessed Greg bursting into laughter.
-
There are some new or extended scenes in
Selina Mandrake - The Slayer:
[
Selina is sitting next to her computer at home with Firefox browsing
the Hebrew Wikipedia. She keeps
highlighting words and hovering over them to find translations using a Firefox
extension.
There is a signal, and the Pidgin icon in the status bar starts blinking.
Selina clicks it.
]
Mosheh Ben-Amram: [on IM] Hello, Selina! How are you doing, today?
Selina: I’m fine. Trying to contribute to the Hebrew Wikipedia.
These Affixes are driving
me crazy.
Mosheh Ben-Amram: Heh, עברית קשה שפה, but there are worse.
Mosheh Ben-Amram: האם את מדברת עברית? [= “Do you speak Hebrew?”]
Selina: Qtsath, or as new speakers will say Qetsath. Heh.
Mosheh Ben-Amram: Yes, one of the first words you have to learn to say,
and it’s already a Shibboleth.
Selina: Emeth. [= "True."]
Selina: BTW, are you actually Mosheh Ben-Amram (= Moses) the Hebrew prophet?
Mosheh Ben-Amram: I won’t deny that I am.
Selina: Hah!
-
I added a page of
“In
Soviet Russia” factoids:
-
In Soviet Russia, cats own you. No, wait! Cats own you everywhere.
-
In Soviet Russia, superstition believe in you. (Sawyer X)
-
In Soviet Russia, food tastes YOU! (Leuthihi)
-
“Freecell Solver Enterprises™ Acquires Google Inc.” -
a breaking news story published on 1 April 2013:
1 April, 2013, Tel Aviv, Israel:
Due to the spectacular commercial success of Freecell Solver Enterprises™’s
Enterprise Edition
and its
Webscale™ edition,
we have amassed quite a bit of cash in the bank, so we decided to make
a small but important strategical acquisition. As a result, Freecell Solver
Enterprises™ is proud to announce its upcoming acquisition of
Google Inc., which
will result in an exciting synergic merger.
Some of the upcoming changes would be replacing Google’s tech support
(which is notoriously bad) by Freecell Solver Enterprises™’s world-famous and
superb tech support (as detailed in the essay
“Seven
steps to remarkable customer service” by Joel on Software), as well
as integrating Google search into
Freecell Solver™ for an
enhanced experience in solving Freecell. We are also planning on creating
a separate YouTube top-level category for card Solitaire-related videos
(including screencasts and presentations).
Another one is
“Announcing
New Israeli Usergroups”.
-
There are some
new
sections in my essay
“Putting
all the Cards on the Table (2013)”:
During the Middle Ages, the apprentices of craftsmen graduated to become
masters, and started their own shops, at a much younger age
than 18. Today, most people graduate from high school at that age,
and are expected to remain disadvantaged until then. There isn’t a
good reason why the youth of today should not be able
to make useful contributions to arts, sciences, philosophy, and
entertainment, despite their young age and inexperience.
Here are some examples:
-
Dmitri Gaskin is a core developer of both jQuery and Drupal
and gave a talk
about jQuery on Google Tech Talks, while being 12 years old.
-
Maria Aragon was 10 years old when she was recorded performing
a cover of
Lady Gaga’s song “Born This Way”, which has received over 50 million
views on YouTube as of April 2013 (and which I like better than
the original).
-
Much previously,
Samantha Smith changed
the fate of the cold war, when being 10 years old, by the simple act of
writing a letter.
-
In the 18th century,
Carl Friedrich
Gauss started making important contributions to mathematics from a very
early age.
Our contemporary culture sort of expects kids (what Americans refer to as
children, “pre-teens”, and “teenagers”) to remain “innocent”, naïve and
inexperienced, and immature, and, as a result, most of them behave accordingly.
-
The
abstract
to my yet unwritten novella
“The Road to Heaven is Paved With Bad Attentions” is now partly translated
to English.
-
There are new quotes in
the collection of
Unix-like fortune cookies:
An engineer dies and reports to the pearly gates.
St. Peter checks his dossier and says, “Ah, you’re an
engineer. You are in the wrong place.”
So, the engineer reports to the gates of hell and is
let in. Pretty soon, the engineer gets dissatisfied
with the level of comfort in hell, and starts designing
and building improvements. After a while, they’ve got
air conditioning and flush toilets and escalators, and
the engineer is a pretty popular guy.
One day, God calls Satan up on the telephone and says
with a sneer, “So, how’s it going down there in hell?”
Satan replies, “Hey, things are going great. We’ve got
air conditioning and flush toilets and escalators, and
there’s no telling what this engineer is going to come
up with next.”
God replies, “What? You’ve got an engineer? That’s a
mistake. He should never have gotten down there; send
him up here.”
Satan says, “No way. I like having an engineer on the
staff, and I’m keeping him.”
God says, “Send him back up here or I’ll sue.”
Satan laughs uproariously and answers, “Yeah, right.
And just where are you going to get a lawyer?”
-
Many meaningful <meta name="description" /> tags were added to
the pages to help with the descriptions in search engine results.
-
I added a
set of links to all the pages referring to my online presence elsewhere
on the web, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Reddit.
Current Mood:  happy | | Tuesday, April 9th, 2013 | 8:33 pm
[shlomif]
|
New on Shlomi Fish’s Homepage: Summerschool at the NSA the screenplay + New Factoids
Here are the recent updates for Shlomi
Fish’s Homepage. This time, the highlight is some interesting new
content.
-
Summerschool
at the NSA, subtitled “As the
sling shoots, grown-up men will sob”, is a screenplay, which I completed and
is in a usable condition. The Hollywood
actresses Sarah Michelle Gellar (of Buffy fame) and Summer Glau (of xkcd
notability) conspire to kick the ass of the NSA (= the United States
government’s National Security Agency), while using special warfare
that is completely non-violent:
[ Black screen, SMG’s (= Sarah Michelle Gellar’s) voice, while emulating her daughter. ]
SMG: Humpty dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty dumpty had a great fall. And all the
King's horses, and all the King's men could not put Humpty together again.
[
Screen showing SGlau (= Summer Glau) laughing. SMG and she are sitting at a diner together.
]
SGlau: [Stops laughing.] Oh my God, Sarah, your daughter’s so smart.
SMG: And… funny!
SGlau: Yes. Well, what does she like aside from Mother Goose?
SMG: Oh, she loves My Little Pony. She and I watch it almost every week
together.
SGlau: Wow, you're a pega-sister, too?
SMG: I'm not addicted to My Little Pony. I swear! I can quit any time.
Just let me watch one… more… episode. [giggles]
SGlau: Hah, hah. For your information, my My Little Pony addicts’ support group
meets every second and fourth Saturday of the month, and I am currently at step
five of our twelve step program.
SMG: Sounds like a plan. I'll consider joining.
-
There are brand new factoids page of
Clarissa
Darling Facts (from the old Television show
Clarissa
Explains It All) as well as new Buffy facts and Chuck Norris
facts in the factoids
collection:
-
Tomorrow never dies, unless Chuck Norris volunteers to take it out of its
misery.
-
The Chuck Norris of the Buffyverse, has been secretly training under
Buffy’s supervision, and so far - lost every battle with her.
-
Clarissa Darling can start from “I think therefore I am” and prove
that the
grass is green, that there are about 365 days in a year, and that Isaac Newton
formulated the Law of Gravitation back in 1687.
-
I added a page about my
nickname, “Rindolf” and its etymology, as well as about
Rindolfism,
which is my philosophy.
-
There are some new quotes in the
UNIX-like fortune cookies’ collections:
I recall discussing Buffy with a Jewish American friend,
who used to be secular, and now has become an observant
Jew, and married a woman who properly converted to
Orthodox Judaism, and they have some children. We
discussed the fact
that Sarah Michelle Gellar was Jewish, and yet that many
men (and some Lesbian women) were more attracted to Alyson
Hannigan’s character, Willow Rosenberg, who was a shy and
sheepish, redhead, Jewess. Then when I mentioned that
Hannigan was only a maternal Jew, he said she is “kosher”
(because someone whose mother is Jewish and who did not
convert to a different religion, is a bona-fide Jew). I
found it amusing that you refer to women by the same word
as you do to food, but I think the ancient Hebrew word
"kasher" also means "approved", "appropriate", "legal",
etc.
In any case, both Hannigan and Gellar are now married,
and so trying to separate between them and their husbands
is not kosher. ;-)
-
Finally, the main navigation menu sports a new and more usable CSS style thanks
to the great work of Joe Crawford. Thanks,
Joe!
Current Mood: happy | | Saturday, March 23rd, 2013 | 9:28 pm
[shlomif]
|
New on Shlomi Fish’s Homepage: Selina Mandrake, NSA/Buffy/Chuck Norris facts, Yachar's Music
Here are the recent updates for Shlomi
Fish’s Homepage. This time, the highlight is a lot of interesting new
content.
-
I have started writing a comprehensive essay
titled
“Putting
all the Cards on the Table (2013)”, which is also syndicated as
a blog post on my
Unarmed but Still Dangerous blog. Here is the abstract for it:
What is the problem with the Technion and why is it graver in M.I.T., and
why you should watch the film
Silver
Linings Playbook to realise why it's
not a problem? Why was the David who fought Goliath a hacker, and what is the
difference between a tragic hero and an action hero? What was the second major
battle that Chuck Norris lost? What are the machines that can give us
questions (and lots of them)? Why not exerting a mental effort will make
matters go from bad to worse? Who was the Jennifer Lawrence of
Web 1.0? And
what were my two greatest mistakes, which you should not duplicate?
I got tired of truly intellectual people like me speaking in riddles
all the time and kinda lying to themselves and to others in their artworks,
and hiding a lot of what they know, so I decided to put all the cards I have
now on the table in a big tour-de-force. It's not finished yet, but still
usable, and there's more to come. Not a perfect essay, and not for everyone,
but imperfect and sweet.
-
There is an ongoing
English translation of
my old and incomplete story
“The Pope Died on Sunday”.
-
Much more text has been added to
Selina Mandrake
- The Slayer (a Buffy parody) and it is now in a usable condition:
[
There are three young men dressed as Klingons who fight with
Bat’leth in the park.
Selina is passing by and shakes her head in disapproval. The three notice Selina,
and quickly run to her.
]
Warrior #1: Hail The Slayer, we are but your humble slaves!
Selina: [Shocked] And who might you be?
Warrior #1: We are The Three - three vampire brother warriors, who have been
fighting since the dawn of time.
Selina: And you are Klingons…
Warrior #2: We can assume any form.
Warrior #1: Yes, we can fight using any weapon, and we are masters of them
all.
Selina: so you can fight with something that’s not a Bat’leth?
Warrior #1: Of course, for example, we could fight using the Huge Sword!
Warrior #2 and Warrior #3: Yeah, the Huge Sword!
The Three: [in unison] Huge Sword!
[
Warrior #1 snaps his fingers, and some of these ridiculously large swords
from World of
Warcraft
appear on the ground.
]
Selina: Wow, can you fight using them?
The Three: [non-dramatically] Eh, eh, we cannot lift them.
Selina: Guess not. [Puts her palm on her eyes.] Maybe try something smaller
and not as heavy.
-
In addition, there are many enhancements to the section of the page, including
a page about
who
I think should play the characters in the screenplay, and
an Ebook
available for purchase.
-
There are two new pages with facts about people and things:
-
NSA Facts -
about the United States’ National Security Agency:
-
The NSA knows what you did last summer. But no one, in the NSA or outside it, knows why they should.
-
The more the NSA think, the less they want to be able to think. So they think
less and less.
-
First the NSA ignores “silly” Internet memes, then they laugh at them, then
they are unable to fight them, and then they lose.
-
Facts about
Buffy Summers from the Television series
Buffy
the Vampire Slayer:
Extra additions to these or other collections of facts would be welcome.
-
There's a mirrored bit Freecell Solver™ Goes Webscale.
-
I have placed
Yachar’s
old music from Jamendo.com on my homepage, because they appear to have
been removed from Jamendo.
-
There’s a new page with a partial list of some of my
favourite
online musicians.
-
The
Chuck
Norris Facts page contains more facts and translations of some of the
facts to Hebrew:
-
There's a section of
reception
on the front page of the essay
The
Eternal Jew with a combined captioned image/meme.
-
I have placed the sources for
the
stories and screenplays in self-contained distributed version control
repositories
(DVCS) - mostly on my GitHub account,
and they contain mostly self-contained build systems. You can find links
to their repositories on their appropriate pages.
Current Mood: accomplished | | Friday, December 28th, 2012 | 9:50 am
[shlomif]
|
What’s New on Shlomi Fish’s Homepage
Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage. Most of the work this
time was done on the look, feel, and infrastructure of the site, such as the
navigation menus, but there is still some new (and hopefully interesting)
content. So without further ado, here is what is new:
-
The main navigation menu to the right now comprises of most of the pages that
were navigable and previously were present only in the section navigation menus.
Since its HTML markup was quite excessive, I decided to load most of the
content using an AJAX (=
“Asyncrhonous JavaScript And XML” or “XMLHTTPRequest”) fetch of a JSON
document, while keeping a smaller subset still usable as plain HTML for
browsers with JavaScript disabled and for search engines and other web user
agents.
I made sure that the expansion state of the navigation menu is preserved
between the pages. Moreover, the much maligned section navigation menus are now
hidden by default, but can be enabled using the button and should remember
their state between pages.
-
There is a new HTML Tutorial in Hebrew
under work. Currently, there is only one section, and some aspects of it are lacking.
-
There is a new
list
of text processing tools and
a list of networking clients in the
software
resources section.
-
I added new quotes to the
fortune cookies collection:
- Yaakov: I LOVE YOU ALL WITH A GREAT HUGE LOVE
- rindolf: Yaakov: HOW MUCH DOES YOUR GREAT HUGE LOVE COST?
- Yaakov: It's on offer half price today.
- rindolf: Yaakov: I WILL OFFER YOU 200,000 VIRTUAL DOLLARS FOR YOUR GREAT HUGE LOVE.
- Yaakov: The regular price is free of charge.
- rindolf: Yaakov: oh nice.
- * rindolf buys Yaakov's GREAT HUGE LOVE.
- rindolf: I LOVE YOU ALL WITH YAAKOV'S GREAT HUGE LOVE.
-
The third version of my essay
“Open source,
Free software, and Other Beasts” is now live. It was converted from
DocBook 4 to DocBook 5 and greatly enhanced.
-
Also new is the
countdown
program which is similar to the UNIX sleep command, only displays the
amount of time remaining.
-
There’s a new and open source
solver for the so-called “Binary Puzzles”. It is still
incomplete.
-
There is a new geek song parody (under work) titled
“Can I SCO Now?” sang to
the music of Jennifer Love Hewitt’s “Can I Go Now?”:
Can I SCO now?
Sue who you wanna sue,
it doesn't matter anyhoo,
it's time to litigate.
Can I SCO Now?
Say what you wanna say,
we don't care anyway,
we're going to inflate.
Can I, can I, SCO now….
-
I now mirror The Fountainhead’s parody
“The Fountainhead
Starring Skull Force”, whose original link went offline, but which I was able to find a mirror of. Enjoy.
-
There are now a page
with some links against Java
and a page
with some links against “SOAP”.
-
Support for the MathJax
JavaScript library was added to the pages in the
MathVentures section
enabling most modern JavaScript-enabled browsers to pretty view the mathematical
formulae there.
-
There are some
new
additions to the original Aphorisms and Quotes page:
The English Wikipedia: now you don’t see it - now you do.
-
I restored the display
of the images in my “There are Too Many Ways to Do it” lightning talk.
| | Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012 | 7:15 pm
[shlomif]
|
What’s New on Shlomi Fish’s Homepage
Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage. The first item of
note is that I implemented an automated test suite for the site, with a
test for lack of trailing whitespace, and a spell checking test
(powered by
Text::Hunspell and
Hunspell). The many problems
pointed by these checkers were fixed, resulting in a very large patch to
review this time.
Aside from the spelling corrections, here are the items of interest:
The meta section now
has a section navigation menu.
I added the incomplete geek parody song
“I’m
the Real Tim Toady”:
May I have your attention, please?
May I have your attention, please?
Will the real Tim Toady please match up?
I repeat: will the real Tim Toady please match up?
We’re going to have two problems here.
jnoakes’ page about
Graduate
Student Jokes, which I have enjoyed, and which has gone offline,
has been restored on the site:
You know you’re a grad student when…
- you can identify universities by their internet domains.
- you are constantly looking for a thesis in novels.
- you have difficulty reading anything that doesn't have footnotes.
- you understand jokes about Foucault.
- the concept of free time scares you.
- you consider caffeine to be a major food group.
- you've ever brought books with you on vacation and actually studied.
- Saturday nights spent studying no longer seem weird.
A
page with a List of Text Processing Tools has been added to the software
resources sub-section.
There are new additions to the
Aphorisms and quotes collection:
If it isn’t in my E-mail, it doesn’t exist. And if the whole world says one
thing and E-mail says another, Email will conquer
(Said to me in a private conversation by an Israeli Linux enthusiast.)
There are also some new quotes in the
Chuck
Norris Facts page:
Chuck Norris is the reason why the Knights who until Recently Said “Ni”, are no
longer saying “Ni”.
Finally, there are some new
fortune cookies:
Enjoy!
Current Mood: happy | | Thursday, June 14th, 2012 | 1:18 pm
[shlomif]
|
New and Updated Material on My Homepage
Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage. There are quite a few
changes this time.
The humorous document
“It’s
not a Fooware - it’s an Operating System.”, mostly written
by me, was restored from the perl.net.au wiki which is currently down:
Lots of people heard Emacs haters complain that “Emacs is not an editor - it’s
an operating system” or something along these lines. So here we're trying to
concentrate other such programs that are no longer limited only to their
original purpose, but rather expanded to cover lots of other stuff. So you'll
know that Emacs is not alone.
I also added a a new
aphorism:
We agree. But do we agree to agree?
There are some new Factoids:
If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad will go to the
mountain. If the mountain will not come to Chuck Norris, then the mountain will
suffer Norris’s wrath for not complying with his whims.
And there are also some new
fortune cookies:
- Su-Shee: SO I TURNED TO YOU FOR HELP IN TIMES OF DESPERATION…
- Botje: desperation is for wimps
- anno: prosperation?
- Altreus: deprecation is an outdated concept and we prefer not to do it
- Su-Shee: let’s deprecate deprecation.
- alpha--: agreed.
- alpha--: oh wait.
- Su-Shee: that would be a deprecation
- rindolf: Who will watch the watcher?
- rindolf: Who will deprecate deprecation?
- Su-Shee: shouldn’t someone deprecate the deprecator in that case?
- * rindolf deprecates the deprecator who is deprecating deprecation.
- Altreus: that's OK, it's not deprecated yet
I found many typos in the
fifth part
of the Perl for Perl Newbies series before and during giving the talk
at the Tel Aviv Perl Mongers and also
prepared some notes for it in Hebrew (which can be found in the
series’s front
page).
The Transcript of the Perlcast interview with
Tom Limoncelli, about his book Time Management for System
Administrators has been restored from the currently offline perl.net.au
wiki:
Josh: Getting back to where we had started on that planning your day at
the beginning of the day, before you check your email. You claim there, that
whenever you're prioritising your activities, you really only need three
categories and not, you know, a top-ten list, or anything like that. Could you
explain that a little?
Tom Limoncelli: that comes from the fact that I used to try to really be
specific about the priorities of my action items. So I put something in my
to-do-list, and I'd say well, you know I'm ranking their importance from 0 is
not important, and a 100 is the world is going to explode if I don't do it
right now. And I spent so much time calculating "Wow, is this more like a 63 or
a 67, is it a 67? Wow!". And I just spent so much time trying to get an exact
priority. In some cases, the task would have been done already. You know I've
spent too much time prioritising.
I'm not sure where I picked this up, but someone recommended three priorities:
A - it's due today; B - it's important; and C - everything else. Generally, if
it's a day where I have any A's at all - that's all I'll be working on. And the
way projects go, I'm generally working on that for the whole day. So that's
sort of the exception. Most of the time I'm working on B's, which are things
that are important, and C's are sort of those would-be-nice-kind-of-things.
And the nice thing about breaking it into this a simple A, B, C priority scheme
is that first of all, you're spending less time picking your priority. And
secondly, when you're planning your day, in that 5-minute planning period, you
can look at your tasks and say "You know, I wanna work 8 hours today, I have
one hour of meetings, so I'm down to 7 hours", and then you can look at your
tasks and say "Is this more than 7 hours worth of work?". Because it's written,
I can start actually doing this kind of planning, and say "That's more like 14
hours worth of work, so those C priorities and B priorities - I'm gonna move
them to the next day's to-do-list." Or maybe, OK, I have time for my A's and my
B's and the C's get moved.
The third version of my essay,
“The
Case for Drug Legalisation”, is now live, with several major
improvements. They are in large part, thanks to someone who commented on my
essay, and allowed me to use their text, and who chose to remain anonymous.
I have set up project pages for
MikMod, a
module files player, which I now maintain, and for
Website
META Language, a sophisticated HTML preprocessor, which I have also
been maintaining and recently released its 2.2.0 version.
Also in the software section is a
How
to Contribute to my Projects sub-section with a concentrated and
ongoing “HACKING” document.
And, naturally, there are also many smaller enhancements, such as new links,
fixes for broken links, new <meta name="description" />
tags, and corrections of typos. I’ve also moved the site’s version control
repository from a Subversion repository that required a username and password
to access to a
publicly-accessible
Mercurial repository. More details can be found on
the Site's Source Code
page.
Current Mood: productive | | 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 independent 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]
|
“COBOL - The New Age Programming 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]
 |
| | Saturday, March 20th, 2010 | 10:18 pm
[shlomif]
|
| | Thursday, February 18th, 2010 | 5:44 pm
[shlomif]
|
| | Thursday, January 14th, 2010 | 8:51 pm
[shlomif]
|
| | Monday, December 14th, 2009 | 10:58 pm
[shlomif]
|
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]
|
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 |
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