'There is no IGLU Cabal' Fortunes

TINIC: Shlomi Fish's Patents

There is no IGLU Cabal. Shlomi Fish has obtained a patent on certain key technologies essential for existence of IGLU Cabals. He is available for license negotiations only on February 29th of odd-numbered years, between the hours 14:15:09-18:28:18.

People, who practice IGLU Cabalism without the appropriate patent licenses, risk teleportation into the interior of exploding supernovae.

Omer Zak in Hackers-IL message No. 1968
(Re: A TINIC Sequel)

TINIC: Patents

There is no IGLU Cabal!

Writing this sentence followed by an explanation has been patented by Omer Zak in US patent No. 10943307*2^66452-1. Commenting on Omer's comment has been patented by Shlomi Fish in US patent No. e^(i*pi). The sentence itself is a trademark of Moshe Zadka.

The existence of these patents is the only explanation one needs for this sentence.

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 1515

TINIC: Email from Hell

There is no IGLU Cabal. Some Politically-Correct ISPs block E-mail which comes from Hell. Unfortunately, some of the brightest minds needed for the IGLU Cabal languish in Hell.

Omer Zak in Hackers-IL message No. 2203
("Do you want to send E-mail from hell?")

TINIC: an RDBM Server in a Functional Programming Language

There is no IGLU Cabal! Its members spent a better time of their lives writing an RDBM server in a purely functional programming language. After having to deal with designing many FP-friendly algorithms, and dealing with ugly code that was made uglier due to FP, they found the task of maintaining the IGLU site too mundande and unchallenging.

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 1964

TINIC: MPPL

There is no IGLU Cabal. The former Cabalists have been swallowed by the black hole of MPPL (Most Powerful Programming Language) and find the mundane programming problems posed by Linux kernel and applications to be incredibly elementary, trivial and boring.

Omer Zak in Hackers-IL message No. 1302
("Most mind-expanding computer language?")

TINIC: Permutations

There is no IGLU Cabal! Its members can be arranged in N! orders to form N! different Cabals. The algorithm to find which order formulates the correct IGLU Cabal is NP-Complete.

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 2071

TINIC: The Problem Equivalence

There is no IGLU Cabal. The problem of founding an IGLU Cabal has been proven, in a surprise move, to be equivalent to the question of existence of God, fully-tolerant religions and NP-complete oracles.

Omer Zak in Hackers-IL message No. 2060

TINIC: Home-made Cabals

There is no IGLU Cabal! Home-made Cabals eventually superceded the power and influence of the original IGLU Cabal, which was considered a cutting edge development at its time.

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 2001
("Pentium 100 == Cray 1 (?)")

TINIC: There is an IGLU Cabal

There is an IGLU Cabal, but its only purpose is to deny the existence of an IGLU Cabal

Martha Greenberg in Hackers-IL message No. 2057

TINIC: Prove the Correctness

There is no IGLU cabal! The former cabalists are trying to prove the correctness of a program that proves the correctness of proofs of other programs.

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 2607
("Proving the Correctness of a Proof")

TINIC: Nameless API

There is no IGLU Cabal! They had to write a web application in an API (which chose to remain nameless) in which one has to call CreateFile with 6 or 7 arguments just to open a file. By the time they were finished, someone wrote a 30-line perl script that did exactly the same thing.

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 1871
("Perl vs. JavaScript ASP with IIS")

Linux-IL: The information is intended to be ignored

The information transmitted is intended to be ignored by the person or entity in front of whom it appeared and may contain useless and/or misleading material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other abuse of, or taking of any action of any kind because of this misinformation by persons, animals, aliens, or cosmic entities other than the unintended recipient is bad karma. If you received this error, please send your paycheck to the sender and delete everything on the hard drive of your computer.

Geoffrey S. Mendelson in Linux-IL message /02/09/msg00066.html

Linux-IL: GSM about Protexia

This sender of this e-mail is privileged and has protexia with people in high places. Don't ask, they are in high places. You could not have received it in error, we know what we are doing. If it has any scandal or gossip value please notify the newspapers, television and radio by e-mail and then delete everything from your system. Please copy it and use it for any purposes, and especially disclose its contents to the press: to do so would be exactly what we really wanted. This disclaimer is to cover our you-know-what if it ever got out that we sent it to you. Thank you for your co-operation. Please dial 911 if you need assistance.

Geoffrey S. Mendelson in Linux-IL message 02/09/msg00090.html

Hackers-IL: Ally McBeal as a Software House

Ally McBeal as a Software House:

Richard Fish - the methodology gury, usually does not actually write code. But he does stress doing things the right way (not in PHB sense, but in hacker sense).

Ally McBeal - the brilliant female hacker. Her code is mixture of brilliancy - both in getting the job done, and in the quality of bugs which go into it.

"Biscuit" - would be the type who does not think twice of embedding a string representing a Scheme script into an assembly language device driver, and invoking Guile from it.

Other participants - left as homework.

Linux-IL: TLS

On Tue, Dec 16, 2003, Shaul Karl wrote about "Re: Various performance
problems":
> On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 11:42:49AM +0200, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> >
> >       I'm guessing that TLS (thread local storage, NOT transport layer
> > security)
>
>
>   Is there any work to remove this name clash?

Yes, the Thread-Local-Storage people were annoyed by this clash, and
decided to change their name. The new name they came up was "Storing
Stuff Locally", or SSL for short.

    Nadav Har'El on Linux-IL
    (http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il/msg31801.html)

TINIC: Question of Existence

NOTE: the question of existence of the IGLU Cabal is not on-topic anymore, as it was already discussed from all possible angles in Signature lines of few regular Hackers-IL participants. This is besides the fact that the IGLU Cabal Does Not Exist, and Hamakor officially denies any relationship with the IGLU Cabal.

Hackers-IL: What is on-topic?

[Hackers-IL discusses what is on-topic and off-topic there]

Hey Omer,

Pretty thorough list, but you forgot:

More typical subjects for Hackers-IL:

• Shlomi Fish
• Meta-discussions about Shlomi Fish
• Discussions about what is off-topic or not
• Meta-discussions about whether discussion about what is off-topic or
• not, is off-topic or not
• List of typical subjects for Hackers-IL
• Literal ways to make any discussion infinitely recursive

Hamakor Discussions: Mozilla 1.1

You can easily install the binary distribution of Mozilla (from mozilla.org) on a different prefix, possibly under your home directory. Please install it and use it instead of Mozilla 1.1, at least when verifying if problems indeed exist. I do not wish to tolerate any more reports of problems when using Mozilla 1.1, because I can't tell if it's a bug that was fixed by then, or if it's an actual issue with Mozilla.

On a slightly different note: my machine crashed the other day when using it with kernel 2.6.0. Can anyone help?

Shlomi Fish on discussions@hamakor.org.il

Hamakor Discussions: Commodore 64 - #1

> > On a slightly different note: my machine crashed the other day when
> > using it with kernel 2.6.0. Can anyone help?
>
> I do not wish to tolerate any reports of problems when using  kernel
> 2.6.0, because I can't tell if it's a bug that was fixed by then, or
> if it's an actual issue with the kernel.

My Commodore 64 is suffering from slowness and insufficiency of memory;
and its display device is grievously short of pixels.  Can anyone help?

	Shlomi Fish, Muli Ben Yehuda and Omer Zak on
	discussions@hamakor.org.il.

Hamakor Discussions: Commodore 64 - #2

> > My Commodore 64 is suffering from slowness and insufficiency of memory;
> > and its display device is grievously short of pixels.  Can anyone help?
>
> I can give you 64K of memory to make it a Commodore 128, it will be just
> like brand new. I'll throw in a disk drive so you can dump the
> cassettes, they are obsolete these days.

Leave your Commodore alone, this platform does not allow good scaling, even
doubling RAM amount... I think it's good time to upgrade to XT. You can even
install another 8088 instead of 8087 co-processor. Dual-CPU system would
allow greater throughput in multiuser enviroment. Yes, I know it demands
bigger initial investment, but the ROI is guaranteed in no more than 2
years.

	Omer Zak, Baruch Even and Alexey Maslennikov on
	discussions@hamakor.org.il

Linux-IL - Marc A. Volovic about Chicken

Dear Mz. Agmon,

What a horrid and nasty post you made. You absolutely lack ANY sense of humour, human and human feelings as well as even an inkling of the rediculous.

Can you not get it in your head that Shlomi, is promoting the cause of free-range chickens, defending their poor brethren rights, protesting their distreatment with the heANDS OF NASTI AND HORRIBLE PEOPL WHO RAIZE CHIKINS IN REAL SMALL CAGES WHERE MY FATHER WHO WAS THE MINISTER OF OIL PRODUCTION IN OUR GLORIOUS CUNTRY WAS MURDERED BY THE DEPRAVED MERCERNAIES IMPORETED FROM IZREAL BY THE FASCUITIC PRES. SESESCLUCK. HOW EVER MY FATHER HAS SEKVESTRED $16,750,962.23 (SIXTEEN MILLION, SEVEN HUNDRT, NEIN HUNDRED AND SIXTY TWO US DOLARS AND TWENTY-THREE CENTS) IN AN UNNUMBERED ACCOUNT IN THE BANK OF OUR CUNTRY.

I LIKE TO SHARE THA STASH WITH YOU IF YOU ONLY SEND ME A BIG BOX MADE OF EGG CONTAINERS AND A SMALL TICKET TO BORA-BORA, BUISNES CLASS, PLEZ.

Linux-IL: Marc A. Volovic about Clients' Demands

Hello, mein kinder.

While both Gilad and yours truly are indubitably and inalienably right, it is often that clients in their infinite (the hands - they have a life of their own and will not type "wisdom") perversity will ask for such wonderful contraptions as RTAI kernel running in RedHat 7.2 distribution with Mozilla 1.5 backported into it, the whole thing shouldred a-la the Tokya Underground at 7am into a 16MB NAND flash running with a proprietary driver (Gilad - we know the culprits, do we not?)...

What should the indie, the consultant, the Gitche Manitou of the right solution, do in such a case? Shove the right thing down the client's gullet (I did that, it is very trying to shove a 48-node cluster down ANYONE's gullet and, truth be told, not very hygienic)? Let the client blithfully trundle towards his/her/its doom? Lie outright, say you do this, do the other? What?

Jonathan? Gilad? Gil? Shahar? Oron? Danny? Lior?

Python-IL: Python Trainer

> I am looking for a Python trainer so we can start offering
> Python training to our customers.

Must... Resist... Oh what the heck.

(read with a heavy southern India accent)

Hello, my name is Ashish Khare, I've been a python trainer for fourteen years under the great Ranjan of Pushkar, I would love to train any python that you have, I also do cobra and rattle snakes. I am highly experienced and my pythons have only bitten 3 people so far, one of them tried to actually grab it by the teeth, imagine that. No fatalities so far. I have my own basket and flute and willing to relocate.

Please call Ashish +91 (98) 1137-7803 for more details.

Hacky New Year

Let the next version be good and full of eye-candy.
Let the FUD spreaders begone and vanish.
Let us be CAR and not CDR.
Let our features outweigh our bugs.
Let our patches be approved and committed.
Let our code spread in torrents.

Hacky New Year :-)

Linux-IL: Sun and Weblogic

Since you are running a proprietary closed source system like Weblogics and Solaris, I suggest you call their customer support.

Sun and Weblogics both told me that their customer support is their key differentiator and competitive advantage over Open Source in the telecom service provider market in order to ensure high availability of mission critical systems.

God - I love the way those buzz-words just roll off my keyboard.....

Best regards and good luck - this is a Linux/FOSS forum....sorry if you think I'm a snob but I had a similar problem with the Sun Java application server a few years ago and it took Sun 3 months to admit they didn't know the answer....

Linux-IL: Linux for One's Mother

I installed Linux (first Red Hat, then Mandrake) for my mom a few years ago. The reason: her TV card refused to work properly in Windows no matter what we tried. So she was extremely happy with Linux and hardly bugged me at all. And believe me, she's rather clueless on the computer (she does stuff like opening a doc file in word and choosing "save as.." in order to rename a file :).

Anyways, she was using linux happily, w/ a dual boot to Windows which she hardly used, and then my brother convinced her to let him install Windows instead.

Now, she keeps calling everyone every week or two with problems in her Windows and she really misses her Linux... (she misses the uptime, the multiple desktops, the fact that things didn't suddenly break and stop working for no reason, her games - Aisleriot, PySol, LBreakOut 2, and other things I can't think of right now.)

Oh, and about the command line, back then when she tried to shut down her linux, sometimes some process needed manual killing, so I gave her the set of commands she needed to type in the command line and she had no problem doing that. In fact, she preferred doing that than, say, dragging some file in Windows, because for her it's easier to give the computer some commands she doesn't really understand than to start trying to figure out "intuitive" GUI...

Linux-IL: Asterisk Weekend of Code

Quoting Nir Simionovich, from the post of Mon, 02 Apr:
> Hi All,
>
> I'm trying to arrange an Asterisk weekend of code, with the purpose of

I see this as a direct attack on datyim, people with children, people who work during the week and want to rest on the weekend but don't have children, people who like to go diving on weekends in Eilat, soldiers on weekend duty (without children), people who don't know Hebrew, and worst of all: the vast majority of people who don't want Hebrew in the Asterisk tools and DO have children but are not datiyim!

When will the biggotry end?

Linux-IL: Which Substances Russians Use for Drinks

Well, no. Russians do not use everything for drinks. It has been empirically proved that some substances - e.g. slag - cannot be used to make drinks.

Worse, some substances - e.g. slag - cannot be even used for the after-drink zakuska.

Yet even worse than that, some substances - e.g. slag - are not even useful for bottling drinks.

The silver lining on the rain cloud, however, is that there are precious few such substances. Namely, one - slag.

Slainte!

Hackers-IL: Shelf vs. Skycraper

> My personal advice and preferences:
> Don't bother with advice about understanding 50-line code blocks.
> Advise how to make 10,000,000 line code base easier to understand.

Your advice is similar to going to a guy explaining home-improvement on TV and showing how to build a shelf (or whatever) well, and telling him: "don't bother with advice about building a shelf - advise how to build a 150 story sky-scraper!". True, if a someone is about to build a sky-scraper, they should not bother with the details on how to make a shelf (they'll hire someone to do that), but most people will never need to build a sky-scraper in their lives, while building shelves is a useful skill.

Similarly, most hobbyist (or even most professional) programmers will benefit more from advice on writing 10,000 line programs than from advice on how to write 10,000,000 lines.

Hackers-IL: CS in Real Life - #1

I have much more books than I can put on my night-stand. Books that are on my night-stand are quickly accessible (when I'm in bed, that is), and books on the shelf are not (I hate getting up from the cozy, warm, bed). So, when I suddenly feel like reading a book that is not on the night- stand, I have no choice but to go to sleep. In the morning, I wake up and always find the book I wanted next to the bed! As it turns out, when I was asleep, another process, known as "sleepwalkd" got me the book I wanted. Also, when my nightstand already has too many books on it, The sleepwalk process moves one of the books - the one I'm least likely to want to read next - back to the shelf.

Last month, four Europeans with weird names decided to mess around with my book-reading system. One called Alan decided that in some cases I should move *all* my books to the shelf, go to bed without any books the same night, and instead fill the nightstand with crap. And if somehow all my shelves are full I should just burn one at random (if it burns the whole shelf, or the wrong shelf, who cares).
Another one, called Andrea, decided that I should redesign my whole sleepwalking routine according to his master-plan. However, this made my sleepwalking become so strange, that people were hesitant to call me "stable" any more. Alan thought my new sleepwalking was a sure sign of be not being stable.
But then a third European, Linus, finally made a judgment-call, and decided that I was stable, even with Andrea's new sleepwalking routine. He then told yet another European, Marcello, that from now he's resposible for keeping me stable. I thought it was my shrink's resposibility, but Marcello said no, that now that he finally has some responsibility he's not going to just give it up.

Hackers-IL: CS in Real Life - #2

2. Journaling filesystems:

Imagine writing stuff on a lot of different notes and pieces of papers, etc., and then suddenly getting hit in the head and forgetting everything (call this rebooting). You suddenly don't know which was the note you were in the middle of writing, and you may end up finding a note saying "kill <name>" not knowing you really meant to write "kill <name>'s jobs on the department's workstation, because they are hogging all resources" before you got hit on the head. That's why you should have a journal. Write everything that you do in there, one entry after another, and only when you complete a whole note, cut it out of the journal and keep it.

Also, when you go to the bathroom, don't forget to write down in the journal about whether you're already done with #1, #2, or #3 (don't ask what #3 is...). That way, if you suddenly get hit on the head (say, the nice fake plant over the toilet falls on you) you won't get embaraced, asking yourself questions like "Oops, I don't remember if I did #2 or not, so should I reach for some toilet paper or not?" If you had a journal, everything would have been much simpler. Just look in there, and see what you've been up to.

Hackers-IL: CS in Real Life - #3

3. Blue Screen of Death:

Some people, after a bit of strenuous activity, or simply a couple of days of normal life, suddenly go blue and freeze up. Some people call it the blues, others just call it death, but in OS lingo it's simply the Blue Screen of Death. When that happens to a you, somebody passing by then needs to hit you on the head (this is called a "reboot", after the footwear usually worn while kicking someone's head). After a minute, you wake up, forgetting everything you didn't write down before the event, but functioning much better than you did before (at least for the first hour).

Hackers-IL: CS in Real Life - #4

4. User Friendliness and Graphical User Interface:

Most people are not very user-friendly. Try talking to a person (especially of the opposite sex) and trying to guess what you're supposed to do now, what the other person wants from you, what would happen if you did this, and what would happen if you did that, and how the heck to you get the other person to do what you really want. No more of that! People should get a graphical user interface. Why talk to the other person in that complex command line language we call "Hebrew", when you can just look at the menu, see the options "Leave me alone" and "Let's have sex" and just chose the one you want! Better yet, why not have a toolbar, with nice little icons?

Hackers-IL: CS in Real Life - #5

5. Authentication:

In the simple old days, to recognize someone you'd just look at his face and try to remember who it is (if you didn't forget it in one of the Blue Screen of Death episodes). But there's a much better way, which is more mathematically-sound: RSA! Why try to remember a (many times ugly) face, when instead you can remember a person's 1024 bit RSA key? (remembering 1024 ones and zeros is a lot of fun! try it!) Then, when you meet the other person, and you want to be sure it is *really* that guy, not some Hannibal Lektor who pealed his face off and wore it, all you need to do is to make up a random number (try not to choose 7, because that is too easily guessable!), do some fun arithmetic with 1024 digit numbers, and then tell the other person the result (hoping that the other guy doesn't get bored by you reading out aloud the digits "one" and "zero" a thousand times) and ask him to try to guess the random number from it. If he succeeds, he's not Hannibal Lektor - but he's probably mad anyway.

Linux-IL - Real Windows Sysadmins

4. One of my friends works in a software development house who has an NT server farm that needs to have close to 100% uptime and operationality. Needless to say, they have top-of-the-class admins, and also make use of scripting, the command line, command automation, etc. a lot. Most NT sys admins don't know anything about the NT command line, much less about scripting and automation.

Welcome to the real world with *real* MS sysadmins. Those who script, automate, write code, know a thing or two about security and the underlying technology. You know... professionals.

Please, please, do not tag those other "MCSE wannabes" with "Systems Administrator" title. People that hardly know how to administer couple servers and dozen workstations in my world are hardly called "operators" (and the same stands in Linux world)

"operators". It's been a long time since I saw this word used anywhere. In fact, I think the first and only time I saw it so far was in the story "The Bastard Operator from Hell". (which is a highly recommended read).

But we need a common word for both sys-admins and "operators".

TINIC: IGLU Cabal Paradigm

There is no IGLU Cabal! They set out to write the "IGLU Cabal Paradigm", which aimed to be the ultimate programming paradigm ever created or ever to be created. Then they became frustrated that some programming newbies who fully read "The IGLU Cabal Paradigm Bible" still produced very bad code.

"If a Website crashes…"

Question: if a website crashes in the middle of the night and there are no support people to roll in the crash cart, will anyone hear it play C:\WINNT\Media\Windows 2003 Critical Stop.wav to call the nurse, or does it wait till morning for the doctors' rounds?