Shlomi Fish's Home Site

New Story: The Earth Angel; Soviet reversal jokes; new text in The Pope and in Selina Mandrake; “Put

2013-04-26T16:45:14Z

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:
1. 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.
2. 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).
3. Much previously, Samantha Smith changed the fate of the cold war, when being 10 years old, by the simple act of writing a letter.
4. 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.

New on Shlomi Fish’s Homepage: Summerschool at the NSA the screenplay + New Factoids

2013-04-09T17:33:53Z

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!

New on Shlomi Fish’s Homepage: Selina Mandrake, NSA/Buffy/Chuck Norris facts, Yachar's Music

2013-03-23T19:28:58Z

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:
1. 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.
2. Facts about Buffy Summers from the Television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  - Buffy will always find a wooden stake to slay vampires, even if it means she will have travelled 100 years back in time, to plant a tree nearby.
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:
- Chuck Norris helps the gods that help themselves.
- Chuck Norris can make East and West meet.
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.

What’s New on Shlomi Fish’s Homepage

2012-12-28T07:50:29Z

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.

What’s New on Shlomi Fish’s Homepage

2012-10-03T17:15:39Z

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!

New and Updated Material on My Homepage

2012-06-14T10:18:07Z

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.

Fifth Part of Perl for Perl Newbies and New Humour Items

2012-02-19T17:49:20Z

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.

New Translations of Stories

2011-07-23T09:48:24Z

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.

Translations of Stories to Hebrew (For the Alternative Book Week)

2011-05-27T15:29:44Z

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!

“Selena Mandrake” and Improvements to Other Stories

2011-05-13T18:19:16Z

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.

New and Improved Stories, Screenplays, Aphorisms and Bits

2011-04-05T19:10:36Z

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.

Essays about Bipolar Disorder and Open Source, new open source programs, and new humour items

2011-01-06T17:23:20Z

I’m sorry for not updating the site’s news feeds for a long time, and as expected there’s quite a lot new.

There’s a new humorous bit in the Aphorisms collection:

Shlomi’s Father: If you don’t sort the dishwasher, the dishwasher won’t be sorted.

Shlomi: No, it won’t be sorted by me.

Shlomi’s Father: No, it won’t be sorted at all. We will throw away the dishwasher.

Together: Along with all the dishes.

There’s a new Chuck Norris fact:

Chuck Norris can make the statement “This statement is false.” a true one.

There are new fortune cookies.

Due to an incident where one of my domains was blocked by a anti-spam blacklist, we now have an anti-spam Policy

I have a new page about me mentoring others in the world open source and/or open content. Also related is the new page about how to start contributing to open-source software.

I have made my essay titled “Dealing with Hypomanias” live and previously announced it on my non-technical blog. Also see a recent related post on the Just 1 Random Guy comics/blog about his experience as a person with Bipolar disorder.

There’s a a new greasemonkey script for expanding the descriptions of Freshmeat.net.

The Black Hole Solitaire Solver page now includes a description of the tables in the SQLite dump that collected the data from running the solver on the first 1 million deals of PySolFC.

There’s a new solver for Kakuraso which is a puzzle game that can be found on the Brain Bashers site. That solver was written in Python using lp_solve.

Another new project is Module-Format, which is a Perl 5 module to perform bulk operations on the various notations for Perl modules.

The Linux Kernel “make xconfig” enhancement patch was updated for the newly released 2.6.37 kernel.

There are some new links in the pages against bad software.

I’ve also updated my resumes.

The site’s building instructions were updated but may still be incomplete.

New humorous bits, fortune cookies, and updated software

2010-10-09T12:06:03Z

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!

“COBOL - The New Age Programming Language”, “Don’t Abuse JavaScript”, and other news

2010-08-07T12:02:55Z

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.

Presentation about Mojolicious::Lite and New Fortune Cookies

2010-05-26T07:22:26Z

The slides for a presentation I’ve given about the Mojolicious::Lite web-development micro-framework are now online.

There are new fortune cookies on the Fortune Cookie collection:

rindolf: She’s a hot chick.

rindolf: But she smokes.

go|dfish: She can smoke as long as she’s smokin’.

The “Stop Using Internet Explorer!” was enhanced with two new links and the browser coverage there was updated.

There’s now a collection of other high-quality lists of open source software on my favourite free software page.

Here is a stub page for the “Announcing Freecell Solver™ Enterprise Edition” bit.

The front page was styled to look less like a blog, which will hopefully make fewer people think that that is indeed the case.

Some new text was added to the story The Pope Died on Sunday (in Hebrew).

Division Two Magazine and “12 Things a Klingon Programmer Would Say”

2010-03-20T20:19:09Z

Division Two Magazine and “12 Things a Klingon Programmer Would Say”

I’ve set up a mirror of the old Division Two Magazine site that went offline and was replaced by a parked domain. Lots of gems there:

Today I’m going to tackle one of the hottest topics in the industry, comparing Microsoft’s latest offerings to the offerings being released by the major Linux players for both network servers and desktop solutions. I am going to steer clear of “total cost of ownership” arguments, because Microsoft has already funded extensive research that has proven Windows is cheaper to own and operate than Linux. I’m going to be looking at the issue from a pure usability perspective. Which platform saves me the most time? Which platform has the features I need? Which platform has the best third party applications and utilities?

(See “Windows vs. Linux on the Server and the Desktop” by Jorge Lopez, MCSE for more.)

I also added “Top 12 things likely to be overheard if you had a Klingon Programmer” (which was also not originated by me):

12) “Specifications are for the weak and timid!”

11) “This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual Pentium processors if I am to do battle with this code!”

10) “You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you’ve read it in the original Klingon.”

There are two new fortunes on the shlomif-fav collection.

Added Waf to the “Software Construction and Management Tools” directory. Added Bluefish and Code::Blocks to the list of Editors and IDEs.

New links in anti-Apple page, and the “Stop Using Internet Explorer“ page.

Finally as part of the conversion of the Website META Language’s build system from GNU Autotools to CMake, the web-site’s build process was cleaned up and updated to build more cleanly.

“Escape from GNU Autohell”, List of Editors and IDEs and Factoids’ Fortunes Collection

2010-02-18T15:40:22Z

There’s a new joke in the aphorisms’ collection:

English spelling aims to be consistent. Publicly and methodically.

I added a new fortune cookies’ collection with factoids about Chuck Norris/etc., concentrating the ones from the collections of facts section. There are also some new fortune cookies there:

Shlomif:BTW, have you read my stories yet?

Sjors:I haven’t

Shlomif:Ah.

Shlomif:If you read my stories, I’ll give you 1,000,000 virtual dollars.

Sjors:Causing me to have a lot of extra virtual time!

Shlomif:And be virtually rich.

Shlomif:And then you can virtually bribe virtual politicians.

Shlomif:And buy a lot of virtual goods.

Shlomif:LOL.

Sjors:Then, I’d be virtually happy

Sjors:Too bad... :P

Shlomif:It’s a virtual win-win situation.

Shlomif:You can hire many virtual programmers to write a lot of virtual code for KMess.

Shlomif:“My old virtual dad used to say to me: ‘virtual money does not bring you virtual happiness, my virtual son.’”

There’s a new page with a list of text editors and IDEs. I also added a page titled “Escape from GNU Autohell!” explaining why the GNU Autotools suck so much and why you should switch to CMake or a different (and better) alternative.

I added a new Greasemonkey script for providing self-links for headers with an id= attribute.

The Freecell Solver project intro now contains a summary.

New Programs, New Fortunes, and a New Revision of “The Case for Drug Legalisation”

2010-01-14T18:51:39Z

I added the 5^n riddle page to the puzzles section.

Two new fortunes have been added to the fortunes’ collection:

rindolf: Su-Shee: “I always wonder why the people I hang out with are so pedantic. And then I remember: because they are so pedantic.” — a Perl-ILer. ;-)

Zaba: rindolf, because they use warnings

* rindolf adds “use Zaba;” to his code.

Zaba: oh no, I’m being used!

* rindolf adds “abuse Zaba;” to his code.

rindolf: Next: “misuse Zaba;”

Zaba: ouch!

The English version of “The Case for Drug Legalisation” is now at the second revision with a note about “Why Politicians Support The Prohibition”.

There’s now an automated solver for Black Hole Solitaire available on the site and I also started maintaining libtap again. I also added a Ruby script for setting the names (and number) of XFCE’s workspaces/virtual desktops.

Links to some prominent programs were added to the Directory of Numerical Software page.

The annoying text-on-hover over the sections of all the DocBook/XML-based essays (using the title attribute) was eliminated by using a DocBook/XSL customisation.

Finally, I performed many changes to the homepage’s internals and build system that will allow for an easier maintenance into the future.

New Text for The Blue Rabbit’s Log, The Parable of the Elephant in the Circus, Directory of Numerica

2009-12-14T21:00:13Z

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

Second Revision of “Create a Great Personal Home Site”

2009-11-19T20:05:57Z

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.

New Material for the Stories and a Page for the XML-Grammar Project

2009-11-13T13:21:31Z

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.

New Slogans’ Art Page, New “Objectivism and Open Source” and Improvements to the Humour Pages

2009-09-29T11:06:40Z

There’s a new page in the computer art section with graphic designs for slogans in SVG formats. Unless noted otherwise, they are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (Unported) licence. Next, I’m planning to prepare some more designs, and make some merchandise based on them.

The style of the sites’ pages was tweaked, so the main article text will be wider.

The licensing of Humanity - The Movie was clarified.

There are new shlomif UNIX fortune cookies and some new ones in subversion:

bzr is slower than Subversion in combination with Sourceforge.

Dazjorz (17-September-2009)

The ideas page of The Blue Rabbit’s Log screenplay was heavily reformatted.

There’s some new text in the Conclusions and reviews of The Human Hacking Field Guide.

The Second Revision of my essay “Objectivism and Open Source” is available.

I added a list of “planets” (= feed aggregators) that syndicate my blogs.

Many spelling/grammar/etc. errors were corrected in the Perl for Newbies series courtesy of Mike McClain.

I hope you enjoy these new additions, and have a happy Sukkoth!

New Humour Pages and Additions

2009-09-23T19:14:49Z

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 speciality 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 speciality 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”.

New Aphorisms, Collections of Humorous “Facts” and Hebrew Translation of “Define Zionism”

2009-09-12T12:17:20Z

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.

Wikepedians Lightbulb Joke, Open Source Licences Wars and New Fortune Cookies

2009-08-31T20:00:23Z

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!