Shlomi Fish's Homepage

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 mainteance into the future.

See comments and comment on this.

14-Dec-2009: New Text for "the Blue Rabbit's Log", The Parable of the Elephant in the Circus, Directory of Numeri

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 "Contributions Made to External Open-Source Projects" page.

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 the 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

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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.

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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.

See comments and comment on this.

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!

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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.

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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.

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