Shlomi Fish's Homepage

News

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.

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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.

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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.

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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The build instructions for the main www.shlomifish.org site are now operational again after a long time when they were out-of-date. Part of the reason why they were not kept out of date was that the public sources of the site have grown out-of-date from those stored in my local copy.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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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