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Shlomi Fish’s Homepage Old News Items
06-Jan-2011: Essays about Bipolar Disorder and Open Source, new open source programs, and new humour items
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 fo 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.
09-Oct-2010: 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.
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!
07-Aug-2010: “COBOL - The New Age Programmming Language”, “Don’t Abuse JavaScript”, and other news
There’s a new parodical page titled “COBOL - The New Age Programming Language”:
NASA Uses COBOL.
And so do:
- Your bank.
- Your insurance company.
- Your government.
COBOL runs your life.
A new page “Don’t Abuse JavaScript!” has been added.
JavaScript has become popular due to being useful for scripting browsers, which is acceptable due to being the only commonly-acceptable portable choice for that. However, lately, it has been utilised as a host language for many other realms where there are far saner and superior alternatives.
This page aims to explain why JavaScript should not be abused for such stuff.
There are new fortune cookies:
- dxtr: Do we have any doctors in here?
- rindolf: dxtr: with Ph.D. or M.D.?
- munik: I have a PhD in Linguistics!
- munik: ^ lie
- munik: :]
- dxtr: rindolf: I don’t care as long as they can treat patients
- rindolf: dxtr: heh.
- munik: :o
- munik: webmd.com
- munik: might be better than #perl
- dxtr: rindolf: That question would be fun in combat. “WE NEED A DOCTOR HERE!” - “PH.D OR M.D!?”
More recommended open source programs have been added to the favourite open source programs page, including Xfce, Pidgin, tmux and htop.
The Cross-platform abstraction libraries is now licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence.
There’s now a list of calculators on the numerical software page.
There are new links in the “Stop Using Internet Explorer” page the anti-Apple page, and in the PHP Sucks page,
A greasemonkey script to fix a qa.mandriva.com annoyance has been added to the Greasemonkey scripts section. Furthermore, the remove “from=rss” script was updated to deal with the even more obnoxious “from=rss” suffix in recent URLs.
I added details of my Acer Laptop to the “Computers’ Specifications” question on the FAQ.
The site’s source page was updated with up-to-date instructions.
26-May-2010: Presentation about Mojolicious::Lite and New Fortune Cookies
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).
20-Mar-2010: Division Two Magazine and “12 Things a Klingon Programmer Would Say”
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.
18-Feb-2010: “Escape from GNU Autohell”, List of Editors and IDEs and Factoids’ Fortunes Collection
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.
14-Jan-2010: New Programs, New Fortunes, and a New Revision of “The Case for Drug Legalisation”
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 maintaing 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.
14-Dec-2009: 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
19-Nov-2009: 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.
13-Nov-2009: New Material for the Stories and a Page for the XML-Grammar Project
The texts of the lists of stories and their descriptions in the Humour page and its Stories section were merged, updated and enhanced.
There are new Chuck Norris Factoids:
Chuck Norris is the greatest man in history. He killed all the great men who could ever pose a competition.
There’s also a new factoid about XSLT:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil redirects to XSLT.
The text of The Pope Died on Sunday was converted to XML-Grammar-Fiction (see below) and was continued a little. The story is written in Hebrew, and there is still no English translation.
The original screenplay The Blue Rabbit’s Log has new text and its ideas page has also been updated:
[ Mordox disappears. The Blue Rabbits arrive. Bryte sees Galku who tries to look innocent, but Bryte rushes to him and lifts him up in the air. ]
Clover: you, where’s Mordox? Tell us what you know!
Galku: What are you looking at me? I’m completely innocent!
Galku: See no incredible selfishness and total in-consideration of everybody else’s welfare and interests. Hear no incredible selfishness and total in-consideration of everybody else’s welfare and interests.
Bryte: you mean “See no evil - hear no evil”?
Galku: I knew it was a good definition.
There’s also some new text in Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead”:
[ Katie is sitting on a table in DS9. She is busy writing something on a qwerty-like keyboard attached to a small text pad. Jake approaches her. ]
Jake: Katie, oh there you are. I thought that OTF-1 left DS9 already.
Katie: yes, it did, I’m still technically working for them.
Jake: really, how?
Katie: with the marvels of technology: remote access and Q-ness.
Jake: Q-ness?
Katie: yes, check this out.
[ Katie stands up, makes a gesture with her hand. A portal appears near the ground showing a different part of DS9. She steps into it, and the portal closes. A few moments later, a normal Star-Trek door opens and Katie steps out of it. ]
Katie: tada!
Jake: wow! So you are now “Qatie” with a Q?
Katie: Qatie [with a Qoph sound] heh, I like it.
The XML sources of the fortunes cookie files are now viewable as HTML from the web, and naturally, there are newer entries.
There’s a new design for graphics based on an old aphorism of me.
There’s now a page for the Web-CPAN XML-Grammar meta-project, which aims to create re-usable XML grammars and related tools for various purposes, and there’s a page for the XML-Grammar-Fiction module for writing works of prose.
The page design and layout were slightly improved with some important links at the bottom (Web 2.0-style), old cruft removed from the left side bar, and other changes.
29-Sep-2009: New Slogans’ Art Page, New “Objectivism and Open Source” and Improvements to the Humour Pages
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!
23-Sep-2009: New Humour Pages and Additions
The page with my own Chuck Norris facts has accumulated some newer facts:
- Deletionists delete Wikipedia articles. Chuck Norris deletes deletionists who delete Wikipedia articles.
- Chuck Norris reads all messages posted to LKML (= the Linux Kernel Mailing List), understands them all, and he kills all gnomes he sees in sight.
There’s also a new page with an ongoing collection of facts about Xena, the Warrior Princess, who is, for a change, a female target of exaggerated factoids.
- Xena can meet King David for breakfast and Julius Caesar for lunch. Without time travel.
- No one calls Xena the warrior princess “Zeena” to her face and survives. Lucky for you she hasn’t visited modern-day U.S. yet.
The Blue Rabbit Log is an old screenplay I began writing that is still under construction. It aims to be a crazy comedy about Fantasy Role Playing Games:
Galku: Yes, it is my specialty to neutralise such characters who prevent raising your ambitious evil projects.
Mordox: What did you say?
Galku: I said I get rid of such characters who prevent raising your evil projects.
Mordox: You said my projects are evil? How dare you! My projects are in no way evil. They are just incredibly selfish and totally inconsiderate of everybody else’s interests and welfare.
Galku: I couldn’t define evil better myself.
Mordox: Did I get you here to write a dictionary of the English language?
Galku: No, but as a matter of fact I am writing one myself, as a hobby. The last word I wrote the definition for was “evidently”, and I think the next word will be...
Mordox: Cut it out! Now, where were we?
Galku: I just said it is my specialty to get rid of characters who prevent raising your incredibly selfish and totally inconsiderate of everybody else’s interests and welfare projects.
I’ve started writing a conclusions and reviews page for my story The Human Hacking Field Guide
There are new English and Hebrew revisions of my story - The Enemy and How I Helped to Fight it with many corrections. Furthermore, the source files have been converted to XHTML instead of OpenOffice.org.
There is a new scene in Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead” called “Meet Q Gadol”.
I added an F.A.Q. question and answer about “What are your computers’ specifications”.
12-Sep-2009: New Aphorisms, Collections of Humorous “Facts” and Hebrew Translation of “Define Zionism”
There are four new aphorisms in the aphorisms’ collection:
A kid always wishes they were older until they are 18. Afterwards, they always wish they were younger.
There’s a new sub-section of my humour section dedicated to collections of “facts” about various things that my friends or I originated. Right now, there are some facts about Chuck Norris, why Knuth (= the famous computer scientist) is not God, some facts about Larry Wall (the software developer known for Perl) and some about how and why XSLT is evil. More additions are welcome:
- Chuck Norris read the entire English Wikipedia in 24 hours. Twice.
- Chuck Norris is the ghost author of the entire Debian GNU/Linux distribution. And he wrote it in 24 hours, while taking snack breaks.
- Bugs are too much afraid to reproduce on Chuck Norris’ computer. As a result, when he uses Microsoft Windows, it behaves just like a Linux system.
There’s now an mp3 version of the “Yonathan Haqatan” MOD Techno/Dance version (which my friend and I prepared). Hopefully, it will be good enough to be heard by people who are unable to play module files.
There’s now a Hebrew translation of “Define ‘Zionism’!” available.
the Spark page was updated with many corrections, new links, and more content:
As opposed to Arc, which shipped with no automated tests, Spark will be developed in a Test-driven development fashion. Namely, it will have a comprehensive test suite that will need to fully pass upon any commit to the trunk (or “master” or whatever the main branch is called).
The code of the tests is not expected to be authoritative for how the final version of the language will behave. Rather, some future design decisions will require changing the code of a lot of the tests accordingly.
I still don’t have a clear idea of how to design a lot of “big picture” Spark design decisions. While I believe that design is good, I also think that Spark should be designed incrementally, and that we can expect many design decisions to change. Test-driven development, while accepting the fact that often a lot of testing code will need to be modified, will allow us to do that.
I have added JavaScript-based text ads courtesy of AdEngage to the top of the page. My hope is that they will provide me with some extra income for maintaining the site, as a replacement to the Google AdSense ads that have been suspended. Being textual ads, they hopefully should note be too intrusive, and I hope people can relate to my desire to be rewarded for the hard work I put into the site and the costs of hosting it.
I have made several spelling, grammar, etc. corrections to some of my stories and screenplays.
Finally, I should note that I’ve heard several critiques of the new style, which emphasised some problems with it. While it is more attractive than the old one, it results in a narrow content section, especially where the section navigation menu is present. I’m currently working on trying to improve the new design or to replace it with a new one, so stay tuned.
31-Aug-2009: Wikepedians Lightbulb Joke, Open Source Licences Wars and New Fortune Cookies
There’s a new humorous bit “How many Wikipedia Editors does it Take to Change a Lightbulb?” and as an experiment I’ve enabled the JavaScript-based Disqus comments on that page.
There’s a new essay called “FOSS Licences Wars” about Open Source Licences:
When Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software) wrote his notorious blog post “Language Wars”, many people asked whether he has “jumped the shark” and that his blog will go downhill from there. I too have read the post, and agreed, that while it had a few good points, it was too based on “feeling rather than knowing”. Joel later on posted many good articles and shorter entries on his blog, but many people still recalled it as a very low-point in the blog.
Like Joel, I have a home-site and several blogs, where I post articles and essays about my thoughts, and this time I’ve decided to risk something similar to what Joel has done on an equally flamatory topic: licences of open-source software. I’m going to introduce the various options, explain a little about their motivation and then give some advice according to my own personal opinion.
It was already featured on several sites including on Slashdot.
There are some new fortune cookies in the “shlomif” collection:
PHP error debug list:
1) did you use the correct argument order? if you’re a good programmer, use the *reverse* from what you think it is. see if it works. no? you’re not a good programmer, or you learned php’s braindeadness and can go on to step 2).
2) did you think about your code? if so, don’t. php will do it for you so you can do mindbogglingly stupid stuff, such as not escape the data that goes into your sql queries.
Enjoy!
16-Aug-2009: Spark, Perl for Newbies Part 5, and Template Toolkit Presentation
I added some pages about Spark - a new dialect of Lisp under planning, including its mission statement:
While other general purpose Lisps such as Common Lisp, Scheme, Arc or Clojure have been influential and have some followers and users, none of them are actively used with the same popularity as Perl, Python, Ruby or PHP are. Spark aims to be a popular lisp dialect which will be actively used for real-world tasks, not just toy or experimentation code.
Eventually, it is our hope that some people will get paid to maintain Spark code. Some of them against their best preferences, like some people now are maintaining Perl 5, PHP or even Python code while prefering a different language. (Simply because it puts bread on their table, and they cannot get paid to write something else.)
I added the fifth part of the Perl for Newbies tutorials/presentations. Furthermore, the Larry Wall presentation, “The Taming of the Camel” is now available there (with a working link). Moreover, there’s now an up-to-date summary of the material covered.
The slides of the lightning talk about the Template Toolkit now has the up-to-date slides in OpenDocument and PDF formats.
There’s now a recommendation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail on the recommended films page.
Many of the fortune cookies were enhanced with better markup, hyperlinks and some corrections.
File-Find-Object was added to the FOSS contributions page.
Finally, the sources for the various Quad-Pres talks are now kept inside the homepage’s version control, which simplifies their build process. This is an infrastructure change that should help in the site’s maintenance.
29-Jul-2009: New Look, New Humour Items, Updated Software Pages and More
The biggest news this time is that the site has an opossum new look based on an adapted version of the smoked WordPress Theme by iconstantin. There may be some more quirks lurking in the design, so please report them to me if you find them. I’d also like to thank Zoffix Znet and other IRC people for some insights on how to fix problems I had with adapting the CSS.
There’s a new joke on the Aphorisms page:
What does “IDK” stand for? I don’t know.
It was also added to fortune cookies collection
New original bit - “Programs Every Programmers Has Written”, new fortune cookies and a a new bit I’ve copied from elsewhere: “How Many [Usenet] Newsgroup Readers does it Take to Change a Lightbulb?”
The Toggle Squares Game now has better accessibility.
The per-song volume Amarok script is now available for Amarok 2.x too.
Added OpendDBX to the portability libraries page
The page of File-Find-Object was greatly enhanced with new modules and a new blog post.
Added a page about Docmake - a Perl-based tool to render DocBook/XML.
There’s now a page with screenshots of CPANHQ, a web-interface for CPAN under development.
There are new links on the anti-bad-software pages.
The “Add This” button which sometimes caused a Flash applet to be displayed on the page was replaced by a much superior Share This button. Hope you enjoy it.
Enjoy!
11-Jul-2009: My Google AdSense Account Was Suspended - Now What?
My “Mastering cat” April Fool’s feature proved to be very popular. It was featured on Slashdot and on other sites, and drove a lot of traffic to my site. However, as it seems it had one unfortunate effect of Google suspending my AdSense account. Or at least I suspect that was the problem.
On 5-April-2009, I received the following message from Google AdSense:
Title: Google AdSense Account Disabled
Hello,
While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account.
Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.
If you have any questions about your account or the actions we’ve taken, please do not reply to this email. You can find more information by visiting https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.
Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team
I went to the page, filed an appeal and got the following response (sent in Hebrew due to Google localisation and quoted here):
שלום,
אנו מודים לך על שהעברת אלינו ערעור בנושא השבתת חשבון AdSense. הודעה זו מאשרת שקיבלנו את הערעור ששלחת.
נשתדל לבדוק את את חשבונך בהקדם, אך בהתחשב בהיקף הבקשות המופנות אלינו, ייתכן שיחלפו 48 שעות או יותר עד שנענה. כמו כן תגובתנו יכולה להתעכב, אם שלחת את בקשתך במהלך סוף השבוע. בנוסף שים לב שערעור על השבתת חשבון AdSense אינו מבטיח שהוא יוחזר.
כתזכורת, אם יש לך שאלות לגבי חשבונות שהושבתו בשל פעילות מודעות לא חוקית, עיין בסעיף ’שאלות נפוצות לגבי חשבון מושבת בשל פעילות לא חוקית‘.
תודה על הסבלנות וההבנה.
בכבוד רב,
צוות Google AdSense
Original Message Follows:
------------------------
From: shlomif@iglu.org.il
Subject: Invalid Activity Appeal
Date: Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:02:58 +0000
01_Origin: helpcenter
02_FormType: appeal_form
03_Language: en
04_AdSenseLocale: en_US
05_IP: 62.219.139.216
06_ctx:
07_Name: Shlomi Fish
08_CompanyName:
09_AdSenseLogin: shlomif@iglu.org.il
10_PubId: pub-2480595666283917
11_ExampleUrl: http://www.shlomifish.org/ , http://fc-solve.blogspot.com/
12_DisablingMonth: Apr
13_DisablingDay: 5
14_DisablingYear: 2009
15_AlreadyAppealed: no
16_OtherAccount: no
17_OtherAccountList:
18_WebAudience: It’s my personal homepage, so people who arrive at its various resources: pages about software, stories and aphorisms, technical presentations and essays.
19_UserGeography: My site is mostly written in English and appeals to International surfers. I get traffic from many countries.
20_UserAccessMode: I haven’t checked, but expect mostly from homes, offices, universities and other schools.
21_ScrapedContent: None, except limited quotations and some pages that became offline and were preserved on my site.
22_ContentSources: It’s almost entirely my own.
23_NumAdmins: Only I.
24_UpdateFrequency: Normally, a few times a week.
25_BoughtTraffic: no
26_UsePayTo: no
27_TrafficSources: From search engines, and links in news sites/blogs. I promote recent features of my sites on my weblogs, in news sites such as http://osnews.com/ and http://reddit.com/ and to a lesser extent as blog comments on other people’s blogs.
28_AdvertiserValue: My site has a lot of high-quality content, and attracts many visitors.
29_UserIncentive: Don’t think they would.
30_ViolatedTerms: No.
31_InvalidActivity: On April’s Fools’ Day 2009, I published the following feature on my site:http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/Mastering-Cat/
It got featured on Slashdot here:
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/01/1211240
(And possibly other sites).
I suspect that it may have increased the traffic to my site (at least temporarily) significantly, which as a result got erroneously classified as suspicious activity. 32_SuspiciousData: I don’t think there was, but I’m going to go over the logs from March and April, just to be sure.
The Hebrew tells me that they’ll try to inspect my account soon, but that due to the many requests, it may take them “48 hours or more” to return to me. I haven’t received a human response to my request (after this automated reply) since this appeal was sent in 5-April, despite the fact that I submitted another appeal, a few weeks ago.
Next I tried asking the Google AdSense support forum for help. Some people there responded but none of them were Google employees. Someone suggested it was caused by the fact that I didn’t have a contact form, which doesn’t make sense because my unobfuscated email is clearly visible at the bottom of most pages, and because I have a visible “Contact Me” page with many other ways of reaching me. They also suggested it was caused by the fact I lacked a privacy policy, which is admittedly a problem, but I added one since then and if Google were so concerned about it, they could have requested that I add one, and I would have happily complied. And the lack of privacy policy does not cause a “significant risk to advertisers”. There was also something about “not allowed on personal sites”, which makes no sense, because I’ve seen Google AdSense on many personal blogs and sites.
After the initial announcement (which could have been sent automatically without human intervention for all I know), I have been unable to log into my Google AdSense account. I later tried contacting a friend who works for Google, but he’s working for Google Open Source, and could not help me with AdSense. Someone I talked with told me that Google give awful support to people with AdSense and AdWords, and it seems that I’m not an exception to this.
According to the Wikipedia Google claimed that they have disabled the AdSense accounts due to click fraud. I can swear that I have never engaged in click fraud, unless you call occassionally clicking on a few ads (probably less than 20) that were published on my site and that I found interesting as “click fraud” (during the entire time I had AdSense). I don’t rule out that someone else has repetitively or automatededly clicked on my ads, but they would gain nothing from it, because the revenues from the ads goes to me. Therefore, it seems unlikely.
I have received at least two payments from Google from my ad revenue and was happy about that, but I lost all the revenue from the last payment, including that generated by the “Mastering cat” feature, which has significinatly increased the number of hits on my site on 1 of April.
I’m publishing this entry here so hopefully someone from Google who is able to help me, would volunteer to do so. If that fails as well, I’ll have to look for a different ad provider. It’s sad that Google handles innocent web-masters like me so badly, and lack so much efficiency (despite the fact that their motto is “don’t be evil.”), especially on the service that brings them the most revenue.
25-May-2009: Toggle Squares Game, A New Privacy Policy, and Other Updates
The Toggle Squares game whose link was broken, and non-functional, was restored and placed on the main site, as a pure-JavaScript game. A method for solving it is explained in the MathVentures section.
A privacy policy has been added to the site. I’d like to thank a friend who is also a webmaster for allowing me to borrow and adapt his privacy policy.
The Anti-Apple Page now contains 99 items with links. Other pages against bad software were also updated.
The page about the Mastering Cat book, which proved to be very popular has been updated with “Thanks” and “Coverage” sections.
There are new Fortune Cookies in the collection:
Well, it’s not a threat - it’s a warning, and he won’t be harmed much by acting against my advice. A threat is something like “Stop posting political posts or I will burn your house, rape your wife and daughters, banish you to the middle of Antarctica, convert all your Perl code to PHP, and then post it on thedailywtf.com.”
My Resumés have been enhanced and updated.
There is a new version of the First-Come First-Served Readers/Writers Lock.
01-Apr-2009: New Book Coming Soon
It’s official! I’m going to publish a new book soon, and I placed a new interview with me about it. Read it so you’ll understand why Mastering cat would be an essential addition to your collection of technical books.
31-Mar-2009: New Humour Items and Links
a new aphorism was added to the humour collection:
Wikipedia has a page about everything including the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_sink .
Recommendations for GDB, Ack and the improved windows console, have been added to the favourite open-source software page.
There are new fortunes in the fortunes’ collection.
New links were added to the page about Apple, the one about MySQL, to the page about Windows Vista, and to the “Stop Using Internet Explorer!” page.
My GnuPG Public Key was updated , and I now link to my Plurk account on my contact page page.
13-Mar-2009: The Homesite Build Instructions are Operational Again
The build instructions for the main www.shlomifish.org site are now operational again after a long time when they were out-of-date. Part of the reason why they were not kept out of date was that the public sources of the site have grown out-of-date from those stored in my local copy. This was recently fixed with some kind insights and guidance by Matt S. Trout. Since I promised 50 U.S. Dollars to the first person that will help me fix my source control problems, and Matt provided all the help I ended up needing, I will donate them on his behalf to the Englightened Perl Organisation. Many thanks!
And here are the rest of the changes in the site’s content that took place since the last update - for those who are not only interested in building it.
There are two new bits in the collection of Aphorisms:
God gave us two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we read.
The File-Find-Object homepage was updated with more text.
There are new links in the against bad software pages.
A lot of broken HTML and XHTML in the site was fixed, and all the pages were made to validate.
New Fortune Cookies were added and existing ones were fixed (and there are some more in the pipe):
Mel|work Yaakov: icke==troll? rindolf Mel|work: no, he’s not a troll. Yaakov Mel|work: No, icke is just... enthusiastic about “channel purity” Mel|work k.... * rindolf hates when people abuse the == operator in English for “contained in” apeiron rindolf, “icke contained in troll”? That’s not what Mel|work meant. tarbo sure he did, if you make troll a set of users rindolf apeiron: what he meant by icke == troll is that icke belongs to the set of trolls. rindolf apeiron: not that every troll in the world is icke. apeiron rindolf, No, he was asking if icke is a troll. icke $icke->isa(‘Troll’); icke (false) rindolf apeiron: is-a means “contained in the set of objects with the property of” rindolf apeiron: mathematically speaking. apeiron rindolf, Okay, so you’re assigning the mathematical meaning of == to its usage in a *perl* channel? apeiron rindolf, Now who’s fiddling with meanings, eh? rindolf apeiron: whatever. apeiron ‘whatever’ is what those who have lost their argument say. rindolf apeiron: whatever. apeiron ^ QED rindolf apeiron: whatever. PerlJam apeiron: I thought that’s what people who don’t care say. apeiron PerlJam, If one doesn’t care, they wouldn’t respond. PerlJam apeiron: whatever PerlJam ;-) rindolf LOL.
A coverage and commentary section was added to the recently published “Optimizing Code for Speed” essay.
12-Feb-2009: “Optimizing Code for Speed” and more minor changes
A new essay about optimising code for speed has been published:
We’ve all seen the fact that while computers got faster, software has often become slower to run unless the hardware is upgraded. The so-called “Gates’ Law” claims that commercial programs decrease in speed by half every 18 months, due to various reasons. It is well known that the various versions of the DOS operating system ran adequately on a PC XT’s and 286’s and that a Intel 386 was a “lean and mean DOS machine” as a certain journalist claimed back then. On the other hand, Microsoft Windows 3.0 and Microsoft Windows 3.1 already required a fast 486 computer to be ran comfortably, while Windows 95 was barely usable there and needed a Pentium computer. Windows XP already ran slowly on a Pentium machine and required a high end Pentium III or Pentium 4 computer. Windows Vista requires even more hardware resources than Windows XP, up to the point that many computers in use today cannot run it comfortably.
Now, while software simulations that run directly against the CPU and memory (and possibly hard-disk) are still running much faster than before, the responsiveness of the system itself does not seem to improve much.
The Mini-Intro “Welcome to Linux” lecture was now integrated into the rest of the site. There are two versions of its slides available: one with a point-by-point display (useful for presenting interactively), and the other with all the text displayed at once (useful for browsing from the web).
New Fortune Cookies have been added to the fortune cookie collection:
R is similar to other programming languages, like C, Java and Perl, in that it helps people perform a wide variety of computing tasks by giving them access to various commands.
23-Jan-2009: New Programs and Other Updates
The Greasemonkey Scripts page was updated with a new “Get Rid of ‘from=rss’ in the URL” script (useful for people who are subscribed to the web feeds of Slashdot.org or similar), and two specialised scripts for helping in the transcription of the Ozy and Millie comics
I added a page about the File-Find-Object CPAN Module (originally by Olivier Thauvin) which has been an ongoing project of mine recently.
Open Text Summarizer was added to the List of Israeli Open Source Projects.
New links were added to the anti-Apple page, the anti-MySQL page, the page about Windows Vista, and the “Stop Using Internet Explorer!” page
The Fortune Cookies Page was updated with new fortune cookies.
The Essay “Why Closed Books are So 19th-Century” was updated.
19-Nov-2008: New Software-Related Pages
New Fortune Cookies Have Been added to the fortune cookie collection
the list of Firefox plugins on the “Favourite Free Software of Mine” was updated: deprecated plug-ins were removed, while some new useful plugins have been added.
A New Open Source Software Project - File-Dir-Dumper is now available.
The List of Israeli Open-Source Projects was updated with new projects.
A new page - “PHP Sucks” (originally by czth) was added based on a one that went offline.
New links were added to the Against Apple Inc. page (including many jokes), to the against MySQL page, and to the “Links against Windows Vista” page
13-Oct-2008: New Riddle, a new Greasemonkey Script, and Updates
A new riddle about two gates and two angels was added to the MathVentures section:
There’s a famous riddle that goes like this:
You are standing in front of two gates (a left one and a right one) - one leads to paradise and the other leads to hell. You don’t know which gate leads where. Besides the gates, there are two angels: one of them always tells the truth and the other always lies, but you also don’t know which one is which.
You have one question to ask one of the angels, in order to find out which gate you should follow. What would that question be?
I’m now mirroring the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Star Trek - The Next Generation”, which I highly enjoy.
A new Greasemonkey script to provide links back to the repository for Subversion repository browsers is now available.
The page of the gringotts-shlomif patch was updated to reflect the fact that development of Gringotts has now resumed elsewhere, incorporating the original patch.
VirtualBox, Hex-a-hop, and Gringotts were added to favourite free software page.
The Fortune Cookie files can now be compiled as an RPM.
Added a free musical downloads section to my links page.
New links were added to the pages against bad software.
21-Sep-2008: du-output-analyser, fortunes, and links.
Here is the list of changes to Shlomi Fish’s Homepage since the last update.
The du output analyser has been added to the Bits-and-Bobs programs page.
a source files list was added to the Unix fortunes collection for easy downloading of the source.
New quotes/fortune cookies were added to shlomif, paul-graham, shlomif-fav
New links were added to the following pages:
- The Links Page
- The “Case for File Swapping” page
- The “Stop Using Internet Explorer” Page
- The Anti-Apple Inc. Page
- The Against MySQL Page
- The Against Windows Vista Page.
Many broken links and emails have been fixed, and there are many corrections to typos.
05-Aug-2008: Presenetation Sources, Interviews and updated Resources
In 2004, lkcl wrote an article on Advogato saying “Love is Golden: All Ideas Have and Always Will be”. For a long time, I’ve been supplying the HTML material for my presentations under permissive, free-content licences, but did not supply the source code and markup used to generate them. Inspired by the article, I set to remedy it, and now there are links from the individual presentations to the source tarballs.
Note that some presentations were created using other tools, and so are not available with their source yet, but hopefully this will be remedied soon, too.
The two Interviews with open-source people were now converted to XML-Grammar-Screenplay and their source is available on the page.
The Software Contruction and Management Tools page was heavily updated.
New links have been added to the pages “Against Bad Software”.
New film recommendations have been added to the movie recommendations. Moreover, two new book reviews have been added: about “The Pragmatic Programmer” and about “Extreme Programming Explained”.
New links have been added to the links page.
New quotes have been added to the Fortune Cookie Collection. More information is in their web-feeds.
There were also internal improvements to the site’s build system making the building of the DocBook/XML documents and other resources less error-prone and more powerful and customisable.
22-Jul-2008: “We, the Living Dead” additions, and “The Perfect IT Workplace”
New text has been added to the screenplay Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead”:
[ There’s a cat lying on a table there content. He’s half-white and half-grey. ]
Katie: oh, look! A cat. [She approaches the cat and starts petting it.]
[ The cat purrs and then says: ]
George the Cat: oh, yeah!
Katie: [Startled] Bleh, you’re a talking cat.
George: yes, but why did you stop?
Katie: I’m not used to cats talking to me.
George: ah, well, yes, it takes some pre-vampires time to get used to that here.
Katie: I suppose you’re older than me.
George: most probably. I’m about 5 milliard years old.
Katie: bleh!! You’re older than my planet!
Two of my newest aphorisms were added to the Aphorism collection:
Two female dogs talking about modern-life:
Jasmine: It’s so cool! On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog!
Daisy: Yeah, but everyone can tell right away that you’re a bitch!
The first revision of a new essay - “The Perfect IT Workplace” was published. It was released pre-maturely due to someone redditing the article, but may still be of interest:
The Best Tools that Money Can Buy
This cannot stressed enough. As Joel Spolsky notes (based on Steve McConnell) in item No. 9 of the Joel Test, you need to “use the best tools that money can buy”.
If you buy old, broken and/or barely functioning hardware, you’ll spend a lot of time debugging the problems there, which will waste a lot of precious time. And you may lose a lot of reputation and customers due to down-time. Relying on reliable, high-end hardware is a much better idea.
I’ve been to two workplaces that gave me an old computer with a 40 GB hard-disk. It wasn’t enough at all. At one place, we’ve reached the limit of this hard-disk due to several large source code checkouts, and as a result needed a bigger hard-disk. And the only hard-disks the lab had were 80 GB ones, which were bought because they were the cheapest (per-disk, not per-capacity). Please, buy large enough hard-disks.
At the same workplace, I was given a computer with a read-only CD-ROM drive. It was not even a DVD reader. I brought a DVD of audio files from home, and could not read it. In this day and age, read/write DVD drives are the standard, and are ultra-cheap.
The interview with Adrian Ettlinger was converted into XML-Grammar-Screenplay in a true fashion of “Eating one’s own dog food”. The proto-HTML source will be placed online soon.
New links have been added to the Guide to Israeli Open-Source Resources.
New film recommendations have been added to the movie recommendations.
New quotes have been added to the Fortune Cookie Collection. Chronological updaets can now be found for them in their web-feeds.
19-Jun-2008: “Why Closed Books are So 19th Century?”
The highlight of today’s news item is that there’s a new essay titled “Why Closed Books are So 19th Century?”:
And despite all that, we can often see that books are getting published on paper, and either completely not available online, or their free re-distribution is restricted. They are often available on Peer-to-Peer networks or illegally, but their use is still restricted, and complicates things.
In this article, I’d like to note why non-open books (or at least books that are not available online) are as pointless as non-open-source software.
The other changes are more minor:
- Improvements to the Recommended music page.
- Added my Vim configuration files to the site.
- There’s a new fortune cookie.
Enjoy!
17-Jun-2008: Additions to “We, the Living Dead”, Vim Tips and Tricks, and Web Standards
Happy Firefox 3 Release Day everyone. Hope you enjoy the new browser, which I can highly recommend. Here’s a new edition of the “What’s new in Shlomi Fish’s home-site” log.
A new joke has been added to the aphorisms page: (by a friend of mine)
I often wonder why I hang out with so many people who are so pedantic. And then I remember - because they are so pedantic.
The Music Recommendations page was updated with more links (to the Wikipedia, etc.) and with a new CD (The Lion King). Moreover, The Non-fiction books’ recommendations page was updated with new books. And lastly, I began working on a page with recommendations of films.
More text has been added to Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead”:
[Jadzia is walking towards Quark’s bar and sees quark standing next to a terminal and mumbling.]
Dax: Hi Quark! Why are you so happy?
Quark: Remember the film I took? Rom helped me edit it, and I’ve been distributing and selling it online. I have made a fortune.
[Camera zooms to reveal Brunt in the background.]
Brunt: Brunt, FCA.
Quark: I made a fortune.
Dax: You had made a fortune.
Quark: Yep.
The quotations in the fortune cookies collection were greatly enhanced: new quotes were added, the plaintext files are now synchronised from the new XML sources, and more meta-data and styles have been added.
Added the summary page of the recent Tel Aviv Linux club Vim Tips+Tricks meeting.
I placed the Hebrew translation I prepared of Mashhoor Al Dubayan’s “10 Reasons for Companies to Consider Web Standards” on my homepage.
The specification for the old “Rindolf - a Perl Dialect” was integrated into the flow of the site.
I made sure the Hebrew on the pages will be recognised as Hebrew by Firefox and other browsers (added the lang attribute, etc.).
25-May-2008: Fortune Cookies Revamp and “High-Quality Software”-r2
The fortune cookies collection was completely revamped: the fortunes were converted to a richer XML grammar, and I added a lot of formatting and meta-information to them. They can now be individually linked to. Right now, there is no converter from the XML grammar back to plaintext (only to XHTML), so the plaintext versions are less up-to-date.
There’s now a second revision of the essay “What Makes Software High-Quality?” with many corrections and additions:
Why is high quality in software important? Low-quality software applications will require the users or end-developers to work around their bugs and limitations, write a lot of extra functionality themselves, and as a result, duplicate a lot of effort and cause a lot of frustration and unhappiness. This is assuming they don’t give up on it soon or right away, and end up looking for something else.
New text has been added to the work-in-progress screenplay Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead”:
Worf: so Mr. Abramovich... I mean, Prof. Abramovich... I mean - Your Majesty!
Shlomo: Mister, Doctor, Professor, General, Admiral, Duke, Baron, Count, Earl...
Mosheh: Fellow of the Royal Society!
Shlomo: indeed. Nasi, Rabbi, Rav, Emir... you name it - I had it. Just call me Shlomo.
Worf: I see. Mr. Shlomo.
Dvorah: men, I tell you - overachievers, and always need to travel. I stayed most of the time here.
Added Digg and Reddit buttons to the top of all the pages, to facilitate submitting and ranking using them.
The individual HTMLs generated from DocBook/XML are now styled better and link to the main site. Furthermore, the DocBook/XML .xml sources now have a CSS stylesheet attached to them to enhance viewing them directly. (Thanks to the docbook-css project.)
A question to the FAQ about why I’m using XHTML 1.1 has been added.
Some links have been added to the “Anti-MySQL” page.
10-May-2008: “High-Quality in Software” and “Star Trek: We, the Living Dead”
The first revision of a new essay, “What Makes Software High-Quality?” (with a focus on open-source software) was added to the essays section:
The Program is Available for Downloading or Buying
That may seem like a silly thing to say, but you’ll be surprised how many times people get it wrong. How many times have you seen web-sites of software that claim that the new version of the software (or even the first) is currently under work, will change the world, but is not available yet? How many times have you heard of web-sites that are not live yet, and refuse to tell people exactly what they are about?
More text has been added to the screenplay Star Trek: “We the Living Dead”:
Katie: Professor Shlomo Abramovich? You’re King Solomo... Errr... I’m not talking with you again. [Goes to sit on the Swing, frustrated.]
Shlomo: Mosheh, remember I told you about Katie?
Mosheh: oh yeah! She looks cute when she’s angry.
Katie: Moses, right?
Mosheh: that’s right.
Katie: well, in case you’ve had any interest in me, I should note that I have a policy against getting involved with people who are 4 times my senior or more.
Mosheh: relax! I have married girls who were 15 times my junior or more and my own descendants, and retrospectively I can tell that many of them were more mature and rational than I was in most respects.
a new question and answer has been added to the FAQ about why I don’t obscure my email address.
Added a note about the site’s hosting provider, and a link to this page from the front page.
Added a “Slashdot this” badge to the bottom of the text of all the pages, next to the “Bookmark This” button.
I’d like to thank Alan Haggai (alanhaggai@gmail.com) for finding a problem in the site, which allowed me to correct it.
25-Apr-2008: Park, Hebrew drugs-related essay, and more
The documentation for the Park Lisp dialect has been added into the open-source section:
Why am I doing it? For several reasons:
- Because it’s fun. This is by itself a good reason.
- Because I found that designing your own language is one of the best ways to learn more about the original languages it is based on. When I designed the Perl dialect “Rindolf”, I learned that some features I suggested for it were already doable in Perl 5.
Added the Hebrew translation of the “Case for Drug Legalisation” essay:
מכיוון שהסמים אינם חוקיים, הם מופצים על-ידי עוברי-חוק, שדורשים מחיר מופקע תמורתם. מחיר מופקע בהרבה מזה שדרוש לגדל, לזקק ולהפיץ אותם. כתוצאה מכך, יש שוק שחור גדול להפצה של סמים והמשתמשים בסמים נאלצים לבסוף לבצע פשעים כמו גניבה או שוד כדי לממן את הרגלי הסמים שלהם.
אחוז הפשיעה בארצות-הברית גדל פי שניים בשל האיסור על האלכוהול (“חוק היובש”). כאשר האיסור הוסר, הוא קטן חזרה למצבו המקורי. צפוי שפשעים הנובעים מסמים גורמים לריבוי דומה, בשל האופי הדומה של האיסור
The second revision of “Thoughts about the Best Introductory Language” is now available with many corrections and clarifications.
A Linux Kernel Patch to enhance the search dialog of the GUI configuration applet is now available there, as it has not been integrated into the mainline yet.
New fortune cookies have been added.
Added a note to the linking policy about requesting to remove mis-appropriate links.
KFlickr and the Firefox Uppity extension were added to the favourite open software page.
A “Bookmark me” button was added to the bottom of the main text of all the pages to facilitate bookmarking using online bookmarking and news services. Below it there are now some more text ads, which shouldn’t be too intrusive. Finally, a JavaScript script that adds self-referential links to headings with anchors was added, which makes use of the jQuery library.
29-Mar-2008: A Guide to Israeli FOSS Resources and Other Improvements
A guide to Israeli Free and Open Source Software Resources on the Internet was added to the site. Please let me know if you have any additions to it.
New fortune cookies have been added to the “shlomif”, “shlomif-fav” and “joel-on-software” collections:
I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true - I no longer know how to use my telephone.
Bjarne Stroustrup quoted in http://xrl.us/bgzi4
New affiliations have been added to my contact page.
The HTML markup of some of the pages was cleaned up, and several bandwidth optimisations were made, so it should load a little faster.
New links were added to many pages.
The breadcrumbs trails in several pages were fixed.
01-Mar-2008: Homesite News for 1 March
Two new bits were added to the humour collection:
What do you mean by “WDYM”?
A list of Israeli open-source projects has been resurrected from a wiki that went offline. Since it was set up, several new projects have been added there.
My essay, “The Case for Drug Legalisation” has been updated with new sections and some typos were corrected.
New fortune cookies have been added to the shlomif collection, the Joel on Software collection, and the shlomif-fav (Shlomi Fish Favourties) collection,
New links were added to the against Apple page, the links against MySQL page, the page with links against Windows Vista, the Stop Using Internet Explorer page, and to the “Case for File Swapping” page.
Happy Reading!
09-Feb-2008: New Humour Bits and New Links
Since the last update, the following changes took place:
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Three small-scale humorous creations of mine are now available on the site: “The GPL is not Compatible with Itself” (formerly published on iglu.org.il), “Introducing RMS-Lint” (also formerly published there), and the new “Cracka’s Paradise”:
A recent press conference of the Free Software Foundation confirmed the rumours that the GNU General Public License was found to be incompatible with itself. This newly discovered fact may actually cause a lot of disorder in the free software world in which most programs and libraries are licensed under this licence.
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New fortunes were added to the “shlomif”, “shlomif-fav” and “subversion” collections in the Fortune Cookies Files.
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New links were added to the various Against-bad-software pages and to the links page.
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There were several underlying changes to the content managemeng system and build system of the site. In many pages, breadcrumbs’ trails are now better and more encompassing, and more pages were added to the section navigation menus.
26-Jan-2008: Decomposition into Square Waves Software and Other Stuff
Welcome to another edition of the Shlomi Fish’s homepage news.
I added another question and answer to my FAQ, this time about my IRC parting message.
A funny Technion-originated and related bit (not by me and in Hebrew) was added to the humour section.
There are new fortune cookies in the fortune collection.
Two programs to perform a decomomposition of a sine wave into square waves are now available in the open-source bits-and-bobs section.
New links have been added to the against Bad software pages, and the Stop Using Internet Explorer page was especially revamped:
Internet Explorer does not have a public, accessible bug tracker, similar to Mozilla’s Bugzilla or what other similar browsers have. This makes bugs harder to report, reproduce, check and track and undermines the users and web developers.
There’s a new page containing links to interviews with me and the weblogs page was updated.
22-Dec-2007: 22 December Update
Here’s what is new on www.shlomifish.org since the last update.
Two new bits were added to the humour collection:
We don’t know his cellphone number, and even if we did, we would tell you that we didn’t know it.
Moreover and not-unusually, some new fortune cookies were added to the fortune cookies collection.
The new yjobs.co.il workaround for Mozilla-based browsers (such as Firefox) workaround may be of interest to Israeli-based job seekers.
Also on the software front, the XChat /nowplay script was updated to have Amarok support.
The anti-bad-software pages were updated with new links and with other updates.
There are new links in the links page.
Many non-validating pages (according to the W3C standards) were made to validate, and so most of the site should now be fully valid.
Have fun, everybody, and in case it’s relevant - happy holidays!
02-Oct-2007: New Pages Against Bad Software, and Slidy-Shlomif
Here are the new additions on Shlomi Fish’s homesite since the last update.
Three new pages enumerating problems with bad software are now live:
I’ll appreciate any new additions to these pages.
New links have been added to the links page, and there are also new fortune cookies.
Finally, the “Slidy-Shlomif” JavaScript helper script has been added to the bits-and-bobs page.
20-Aug-2007: “Spam for Everyone”, “Case for File Swapping rev. 3” and Other New Writings
It’s been several months since the last update, and there are some new or updated resources on my homepage.
There’s a new funny bit - “‘Spam for Everyone’ - The International Campaign for Accessible Spam”:
Mike “The Mouse” House (a.k.a “D.J. Sallinger”) was a minor rap artist, and a computer geek when he decided to start selling CDs of open-source software. He turned to spamming to publicise his business, but found out that the spam he sent was trapped by most spam traps. He decided to use the notorious obscured image spam, but since he had a few blind friends, decided to also include an audio recording of a rap song with the spam message.
House received a few offers from his spam campaign, but his real break came when a few enthusiasts of the spam song shared it on the Internet, where it became an instant hit. The song eventually hit the charts and MTV, and made D.J. Sallinger famous, who quickly released his first successful album called “Rap to the spam, Man!”, with such highly acclaimed hits as “Rap to not get trapped” and “He ain’t Nigerian. He’s a Spammer!”.
The Ongoing text of the “Humanity” screenplay, is now online in HTML format.
There’s some new text in my Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead” work.
There’s a new joke on the Aphorisms’ page, and new fortune cookies on the Fortune Cookies page.
I also started a new sub-section of my Humour section where I collect humorous creations which disappeared from the Net. Currently available are GNU Visual Basic and Everybody’s Free (to Ping Timeout) by Darien.
There are new links on the links page
There are a few new questions and answers in my Frequently Asked Questions list.
The Third revision of my essay “The Case for File Swapping” is now available.
I’ve also started an essays by other people section, with currently one restored essay - “Completely Overrated” by James Carr.
My Résumés were updated with new information..
Enjoy!
17-May-2007: Updates as of 2007-May-17
The fourth revision of the story “The Enemy and How I Helped to Fight it” is now available in both Hebrew and English:
“Yes, but as they say: when it rains it pours. Well, just sign here and I’ll take care of all the other paperwork.”
After I started filling it, I said to him: “about the salary you gave me...”
“Forget it!” the commander said and continued “during your service in the Organisation, you’ve done a great service to your people and your country. You’ve earned your pay, even if not honestly, and we thank you that you’ve joined our ranks at all in the first place. I just hope that during your civil life, you’ll continue to maintain the spirit of the organisation and its philosophy.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.” I told him with a snap while I signed it. Then I rose up and we shook hands. I thought a little about what the commander just said, and then recalled something and sat down. “Look, it may no longer be so relevant”, I said to him “but I’ve been a member of the Organisation for two years and nobody ever told me what the philosophy of the Organisation was. What is it, really?”
The screenplay Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead” now has an ongoing HTML display of the screenplay.
There’s a new essay titled “Dispelling Some Myths about Israel”:
Israel is not all Desert
While the southern part of Israel (the Negev) is a desert, most of the northern part has growth, and supports a lot of trees, bushes, shrubs and fauna. There are many pictures over at the Israel Images site.
The recommendations’ pages now have more comprehensive tables-of-contents.
The Weblogs’ Page was revamped with a table of contents and more aggregated feeds.
03-May-2007: Several New Essays, Update to “We, the Living Dead“, and More
Welcome to a new edition of the news feed of Shlomi Fish’s Homepage. In this edition, there are some new essays, a couple of updates on stories and aphorisms, and a new “anti-bad-software” page. Read below for the details.
There are now several new articles:
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Furthermore, actual code writing is not the most productive activity, as surprising as it sounds. That’s because if one writes code exclusively for too long, his mind will run in circles and he’ll lose his edge. And there’s something that is even more productive than actually producing output.
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“Thoughts about the Best Introductory (Programming) Language”:
I talked with a few people on the IRC about it and some of them told me something along the lines of “What makes you think that you know better than all the universities and colleges (and other schools) that are now teaching Java?”. Well, this is the “majority must be right” fallacy:
- Everybody thinks that the Earth is flat (or the Sun revolves around it) so it must be true
- Homepage vs. Blog: about the difference between a homepage and a blog, and why my homesite is not a blog.
More aphorisms were added to the Aphorisms Collection:
It does not mean what I think it means but it means what you think it means.
The work-in-progress Star Trek: “We the Living Dead” was updated with new text and links:
Q: in any case, there was this relatively mature man in our time called Noahh who had three sons.
Katie: Shem, Hham and Yepheth? [in Modern Hebrew pronouncation]
Q: you guessed it. He was a quirky, paranoid fellow. At one paint he sensed a storm coming, and believed that the world was coming to an end. So he, his wife, his sons, and all of his livestock travelled up a nearby mountain, and waited for the storm to end.
When the storm ended, he went down to the nearby village, and saw that while there was a lot of damage, it was perfectly fine. However, he claimed that it was high time to put an end to such problems, to end having to depend on natural whims, that our society will flourish.
I was there: my name was indeed “Que” and I was considered a strange nomad, who just happened to be there. I decided to take upon myself the establishment of the [in Énglish] “civilisation” instead of the many different [in Énglish] “cultures”.
The HTML versions of The Enemy and How I Helped to Fight it were heavily simplified, reformatted; plus, a table of contents was added to them.
The Fluttering Flag SDL demo was added to the open-source “Bits and Bobs” page.
There’s a new page against Apple Inc., its products and its practices.
09-Apr-2007: New Story and Essays
I’ve started writing a new story titled Star Trek: “We the Living Dead”. It is a Star Trek fan fiction with an all original dialogues and plots, but with many characters and concepts from Star Trek and elsewhere. There’s little to see there at the moment, but I have most of the plot in my head.
There’s a new essay titled “The Linus Torvalds Bus Factor” available. It is based on a short email exchange I had on the Linux kernel mailing list, but is more general in its theme.
Another essay is “My Opinion on Electrical Engineering studies in the Technion”, and a shorter one is this “Use qmail instead” one.
Also added was a “May I Email You about Foo?” FAQ question to my FAQ, to help prevent people sending me emails I’m not interested in.
23-Feb-2007: Recent Updates to Shlomi Fish’s Homepage
Welcome to another edition of the news weblog of Shlomi Fish’s home-site. There is no spam this time, but a lot of changes that are worth noting.
- The aphorisms collection was enhanced to have a title and an anchor for every funny bit and it now has a table-of-contents.
- Several new contributions I made were added to the contributions to external open-source projects page.
- The LinkVisitor Mozilla Firefox extension was updated.
- Added the QClam-Shlomif page to the software. Note that all the changes I made there have already been incorporated into the mainline QClam.
- Some new links to useful software were added to my Favourite software page.
- Added the Plagger on Mandriva page. (Also see this journal entry).
- the Software Construction and Management Tools page was enhanced.
- Added a presentation about the Joel Test. The other presentation pages were enhanced considerably.
- As usual new entries were added to the fortune cookies page and to the links page.
- A review of the book Perl Hacks was added to the books recommendations page.
Happy reading!
17-Jan-2007: www.shlomifish.org had been Link Spammed
Instead of the usual update on what’s new on the site, this entry has some news to convey. As it turns out, many of the pages on http://www.shlomifish.org/ were spammed with link spam to medications’ sites. This is especially troubling because the pages in question were static HTML pages, that were served unmodified by the server from hard disk directory. This indicates that the server was maliciously intruded and the files were modified. I encountered link spam before in wikis, weblogs and news sites, but this is the first time that I witnessed a static HTML site getting spammed, and by cracking it.
The files’s timestamps indicate that most files were changed on the 1-December-2006 (probably by a script), but some files were modified as early as 23-December-2006, albeit in a slightly different way. The files were left spammed, because many resources on the site are not updated by the normal site update, and the links were kept hidden from visible eyes. It is still unclear how the intruder gained access to run the script on the server.
The site was restored to its unaffected state, and preventive measures were taken to mitigate the problem: passwords and keys were changed, and the site now has a unified build system to the site that uploads all the relevant resources from my home workstation to the server.
I also hope that next time this happens (if it does), my hosting and I have the appropriate measures in place to find out how it was done.
Now I can continue working on my home site and on my other projects.
Regards, Shlomi Fish.
05-Jan-2007: Recent Changes to www.shlomifish.org
Here are the new changes in my homesite since the last update:
- Added a new aphorism to the Humour collection.
- Added a new what-is-this-sequence riddle to the Math-Ventures section.
- There’s a new version of my Patch to the Gringotts Secure Note Manager, which fixes a crash in the preferences dialog.
- The “Stop Using Internet Explorer!” page was updated with a new link to the number of days IE was vulnerable in 2006.
- Corrections, deductions and final solutions were added to the “On the Tip of the Sword” logic puzzle, the “Between the Screws” puzzle and the “Ravensborg Guild” puzzle
- Several new fortune cookies were added to the Fortune Cookies collection. Others were corrected.
- Some new links were added to the Humour section of the links page.
Happy New 2007!
25-Nov-2006: Changes since September
It’s been 2 months since the last update. I haven’t been working on the homesite as much as I used to, but still there are some updates worthy of mention.
In the UNIX fortunes front, I added the nyh-sigs file to the collection, which includes a collection of quotes from the email signatures of Nadav Har’El. This waranted a new second digit of the fortunes-shlomif collection - and it’s now version 0.8.0. Moreover, several new entries were added to the bottom of the shlomif, tinic, and shlomif-fav collections .
The puzzle section now features the “Book under a Rock” situation puzzle as well as the Lotg code.
Two new “Bits and Bobs programs” were added: A KAddressBook porting script, and an Amarok script for recording per-song volumes.
Several new CD recommendations were added to the Music recommandations. Furthermore, the Non-fiction Books’ Recommendations Page was heavily revamped.
My contributions to Error.pm are now mentioned in the Open Source Contributions Page.
Finally, the entire site (including many obscure pages) was made to validate and many broken links were fixed.
24-Sep-2006: New Additions to the Site
Exactly two weeks passed since the last update and many things have been added or improved. Read below for what’s new.
Two of the pages in the MathVentures section were converted to use embedded MathML. This should make viewing them with MathML-compliant browsers easier. The old ASCII-art based pages are still available.
The ideas Tucan and Unixdoc were added to the Random Ideas page.
I’ve placed some of my old DOS-era programs online for your amusement.
I added a question about the site history to the FAQ.
More CDs were added to the Music Recommendations.
There’s a new Joke in the Humour archive.
10-Sep-2006: Changes at Shlomi Fish Homesite
It’s been about two weeks since my last update, and here’s what’s new:
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A currently partial list of my favourite compact discs is now live. Creating this list involved a large amount of DTD, XSLT, Perl, and CSS hacking on the XML-Grammar-ProductsSyndication framework, that was written from scratch to facilitate making construction of such lists possible by and others.
I will add the missing CDs as time goes by, and will also later on add lists for fiction books and for movies, as well as convert the existing non-fiction books recommendations into the new framework.
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More pages on the site were made to validate according to the World-wide-web consortium standards, and some ancient leftovers that were no longer important were removed.
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My list of favourite open source software was updated, with many corrections, added programs and a new navigation menu.
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My memoirs as a programmer from High School were heavily fixed and updated.
26-Aug-2006: “Case for File Swapping”, “Fortunes Mania” + Site Building Instructions
There’s a new revision of “The Case for File Swapping”. Moreover, I wrote a page with my idea for “Fortunes Mania” - a community site for managing fortunes cookies and quotes.
There are now comprehensive instructions for building the site. If you have some spare time, please try to run them to see if you are successful in building it.
Finally, I added two new FAQ questions: “Did you serve in the Israeli Military?” and “What is your Favourite Music?”
18-Aug-2006: My Memoirs at Elpas
I have added a page with my memoirs from working as a programmer for Elpas to the site. I’ve been intending to publish it for some time now after having worked on it for a few days, and now it’s live. Enjoy!
16-Aug-2006: “Define ‘Zionism’!” + New Revision of “FOSS & Other Beasts”
I added a new Essay Define “Zionism”! about some ambigious terms relating to the Jewish nature of Israel.
A second revision of “Open Source, Free Software and Other Beasts” is available.
As usual, there are also the regular slew of fixes, and additions (including new links). I’d like to thank “acid burn” for pointing out a few typos, which have been fixed.
10-Aug-2006: Backup Site
I set up a backup site for this site over at TextDrive.com, which would be used for emergencies and for redundancy.
Please don’t use it unless this site is down.
01-Aug-2006: Bio now also Available in Hebrew + Update to “Which Wiki”
Another day, another update:
I added a translation of my Bio to Hebrew and in the process updated the English original.
I wrote an update to the “Which Open Source Wiki Works for You” article.
Finally, I’d like to thank “zero cool” for pointing out a small typo in this blog which was also placed on the front-page. Thanks!
28-Jul-2006: Recent Site Updates
First I’d like to note that from now on, I’d like to update this website’s blog more often upon every new addition. Hopefully, I can persist with it. In any case, here are the changes to the site since the last update:
- My still-incomplete Frequently Asked Questions List was added to the site.
- The site look and feel were improved to make it more usable and attractive to first time visitors. There are now some new navigation arrows prepared with the GIMP. Plus, some new section menus were added to the sections.
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New Essays:
- Corrolories to “To err is human” were added to the humour page
- The Open Source Software Section was heavily revamped to make it more usable and generally better.
- Added a “How to help this site” page.
- The humorous geek song “I Like Job Control” is now part of the site.
- Many new fortune cookies were added to the fortune cookies’ collection.
- As usual there are many new links in the links page
08-Jul-2006: Web-site Changes
Well, there were a few new additions to my home site since the last update, but not enough to warrant a new update. However, I’d like to take this stage to announce a URL transition and some other meta-changes
Some of the pages of the site that used to live under http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ are now living directly under http://www.shlomifish.org/. This change was done due to the constant downtime of vipe.technion.ac.il. The server itself is usually up and running and responsive, but the connection to it gets down. Other benefits of this are the fact that everything would be on one host, which would make mirroring, backup and maintenance easier, and that there would be less need for absolute links.
The pages temporarily moved to http://www.shlomifish.org/Vipe/, but later were moved to the main site and integrated there. Some things may still be broken so please report any problems to me.
The two host scheme stemmed from the early history of the site (when I still had a relatively limited quota on the Technion’s students’ servers), and ended up influencing the design and feature-set of some of the projects to support this site (like Latemp and HTML-Widgets-NavMenu).
Other meta-changes include:
- The removal of the PayPal donate button and replacement with a much less bloated (markup-wise) link to the new “How to Help” site.
- The Google search box is now placed in the navigation bar on every page of the site, rather than just the front page. I hope people will find it more convenient to search the site using it.
- I should also note that I added a note to the beginning of my “Create a Great Personal Homesite” article addressing some “The Disqualifier Disqualifies on his own fault” criticisms of my home site, by some people whom I referred to the article.
I’d like to make another post to this feed soon, this time more interactive and asking for some advice regarding the current form of the site. So stay tuned.
29-Mar-2006: New Additions to Shlomi Fish’s Home Site
Here are the new changes to the home site of Shlomi Fish since the last update.
- The Full Text of a new essay: “Create a Great Personal Homesite” is now available online.
- Several new Lightning Talks were added.
- Several new book recommendations were added to the book recommendations page.
- Added pages for the site’s linking policy, and the site’s copyrights’ terms.
- A version of the LinkVisitor plugin for Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.x was made available on the open source “Bits and Bobs page”.
- A new version of the “Eliminate Access Keys” Greasemonkey script is available with some bug fixes.
- Several new versions of the Gringotts-Shlomif Patch were released.
- Several new links were added to the links page.
18-Dec-2005: New Changes for 18-December-2005
Here are the new changes to the home site of Shlomi Fish since the last update. This entry will be divided into two: first the content additions, and then the presentation changes and other corrections.
Content Additions
- I published an essay titled “Advice for the Young” (or the Young at heart) continuing the trend of people giving advice to programming wannabes.
- A Page about “The Better SCM” Logo was added to the Art section.
- A Page with some photographs I took of cats in my neigbourhood was also added to the art section.
- A New Puzzles Section was set up featuring the old Math-Ventures page and some new Logic puzzles.
- The Software Construction and Management links page was moved to a new location, and heavily updated.
- I now have a “Hire Me!” page about the various ways one can employ me.
- A new essay - “Reflections on Online Communities” is now in the process of being written. An older incranation of it is available, but it only serves as comments to the original essay by Joel Spolsky.
- A new section with some information about the site itself was added to the site.
- Several new funny bits were added to the Humour collection.
Site Presentation Changes
- The Links Page now has a table of contents.
- The Presentations’ Sub-Categories were populated and are now more usable. Plus, some of the presentations’ front pages are more usable now.
- I’ve set up Google Ads for the pages of the site, and also added a donation button. If you like the site, please consider donating.
06-Nov-2005: New Changes for 06-November-2005
Here are the new changes to Shlomi Fish’s personal site since the last update
- Many grammatical, spelling and syntactical errors were corrected, and more pages were made to validate.
- A New Section which will host pages against bad software that should be avoided was created featuring a new page against qmail. The anti-MSIE page is now part of it.
- The links in thestories page were fixed.
- a new E-mail with a correspondant was added to the “Case for File Swapping Page”. The essay itself was expanded with two new sections.
- A Guide to the online Neo-Tech resources was added.
- Shlomi Fish’s resumés were heavily updated.
- Added my introduction of myself to the MIT Writers.
- Added a search box to the front page
28-Oct-2005: New Changes for 28-October-2005
Since the last update to its changes log, Shlomi Fish’s personal site has seen a great deal of changes. Here is a list of the most major ones:
- The Bio Page was sectioned into several headings, and more links and material were added.
- The old “Wonderous are the Ways of Microsoft” humorous (but real) bit was integrated into the common look and feel of the site, and re-linked from there.
- An index page was created for the stories as part of the global humour section.
- The Links Page was heavily re-organized and expanded. Now, each one of its section has an anchor for easy linking to that part of the page.
- A New Essay - “The GPL, the BSD License and Being a Sucker” was added. It aims to dispel the common belief that one is being a sucker by releasing open source software under non-GPL licenses.
- A New Essay - “The Case for File Swapping” was added. This essay touches upon the many points of the Internet sharing and downloading of files (including media files such as music files or video), and dispels most of the myths about why it’s illegal or immoral.
I still have several new essays in the pipe, and I also need to do some cleanups to the site. One enhancement will also involve tweaking the site flow engine that is used by the site.
But until then - enjoy!
15-Oct-2005
The past few days have seen the move to a new hosting provider with much better bandwidth to outside Israel. It should be much more faster and responsive to most people. Other than that, the web-site has seen many style and content changes:
- A computer music file that I created when I was in high school, with my friend, was added to the art section.
- New section navigation menus were added to the Essays and Articles section, the Software section, and the Lectures section. They will allow the main navigation menu to be less crowded, and will give way for a faster update of the site.
- Many typos were corrected in the DeCSS page.
- The Links Page was updated.
- Several new essays and articles are now part of the Philosophy section. Especially note the “When C is the Best” essay which started an active discussion in OSNews.
- I now have a list of recommended books.
There’s still some more ground to cover on my part, but the homepage should still be much better than it was 10 days ago.
5-Oct-2005
Added the “When C is the Best” essay. Also now that the software patents threat in Europe has been eliminated, I have removed the notice box, and replaced my top-left icon with a personal logo based on EvilPHish from UserFriendly.
Finally, several fortunes were added to the fortune cookies collection and it now also contains a collection of quotes by Paul Graham.
26-Jun-2005
Several new additions were added to the site. The art section now contains two new pieces. I also added a new script to the Open Source Bits and Bobs section. Several new programs were added to my favourite free software. Some new languages were added to the “Ways to do it” according to the programming languages of the World page.
Some of my newer projects are now mentioned in my resumés. I added a link to a presentation about Web Publishing using LAMP. Finally, the Objectivism and Open Source essay was expanded with two new chapters.
22-May-2005
I now have a personal ad. I’m looking for a girlfriend who lives in Central Israel.
19-May-2005
The full but incomplete text of The Human Hacking Field Guide is now available online for your reading pleasure.
22-Mar-2005
I added a section to my links collection with links to my favourite collections of pictures and wallpapers. Otherwise, I now cross-post my weblog in LiveJournal.com and you can use its commenting system to post comments to its entries.
MikMod for Java has moved to a new homepage at Berlios where I hope other people would be able to contribute to it more efficiently than before. The Gimp Automated Testing Framework is a new project of mine. Check it out if you’re interested.
30-Oct-2004
Added the Open-Source Bits and Bobs page. Added the material summary for the Thermodynamics course I took in the Technion.
12-Oct-2004
The site has a new URL, which should cause less name-service resolution problems. The new domain is http://www.shlomifish.org/. The old domain will redirect to the new one.
23-Sep-2004
The site has seen a major revamp in the last couple of days. Here is a list of the most important changes and news:
- I added the âStop Software Patents!â nag image to all my pages and a top frame to the front page.
- Thereâs a new code for the navigation menu. The old code was an unholy mess, and the new code is a pure Perl one, which makes the nav-menu much easier to maintain.
- Thanks to the new navigation menu code, there are now Mozilla/Firefox navigation links, that allow traversing the site page by page. For those who are unfortunate enough not to use these browsers, some rudimentary arrows were added above the navigation menu.
- I now have an Uber-kitchy leading path of the page sections and sub-sections at the top.
- Iâm now giving private lessons in high-school subjects and computer-related topics.
10-Aug-2004
My Advogato Diary is back online, with several new entries posted since Advogato was restored. I also conducted an interview with Ben Collins-Sussman.
17-Feb-2004
The URL of my homepage has changed. The new URL is http://shlomif.il.eu.org/. The old URLs will work for the near future, but not permanently. Read more about it.
26-Jun-2003
Added my favourite online comic strips to the links section.
19-Jun-2003
Added the favourite open source software list. Added the Meta-Data Database Access lecture to the lectures collection.
26-Oct-2002
Added the software tools directory.
7-Aug-2002
Added Ways to do it according to the Programming Languages of the World to the Humour section. Enjoy!
18-May-2002
I have placed the fortune files I am maintaining online here.
26-Jun-2003
Added my favourite online comic strips to the links section.
19-Jun-2003
Added the favourite open source software list. Added the Meta-Data Database Access lecture to the lectures collection.
26-Oct-2002
Added the software tools directory.
7-Aug-2002
Added Ways to do it according to the Programming Languages of the World to the Humour section. Enjoy!
18-May-2002
I have placed the fortune files I am maintaining online here.
15-May-2002
I set up a mailing-list for discussing my stories on Yahoo-Groups. Feel free to join it or post messages there. (one does not need to be a subscriber to post).
