Shlomi Fish's Homepage

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, 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.

See comments and comment on this.

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).

See comments and comment on this.

20-Mar-2010: 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.

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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 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.

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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 maintaining libtap again. I also added a Ruby script for setting the names (and number) of XFCE's workspaces/virtual desktops.

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

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

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

Update: I wrote a comment on how to perform the DocBook/XSL customisation to get rid of the text-on-hover / title="" attribute.

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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