Shlomi Fish's Homepage Old News Items
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
See comments and comment on this.
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.
See comments and comment on this.
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.
See comments and comment on this.
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.
See comments and comment on this.
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.
See comments and comment on this.
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!
See comments and comment on this.
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.).
See comments and comment on this.
24-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.
See comments and comment on this.
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.
See comments and comment on this.
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.
See comments and comment on this.
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.
See comments and comment on this.
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!
See comments and comment on this.
09-Feb-2008: New Humour Bits and New Links
Since the last update, the following changes took place:
-
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.
-
New fortunes were added to the "shlomif", "shlomif-fav" and "subversion" collections in the Fortune Cookies Files.
-
New links were added to the various Against-bad-software pages and to the links page.
-
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.
See comments and comment on this.
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 decomposition 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.
See comments and comment on this.
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!
See comments and comment on this.
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.
See comments and comment on this.
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 Resumés were updated with new information..
Enjoy!
See comments and comment on this.
16-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.
See comments and comment on this.
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' 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 several new articles:
-
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.
-
"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.
Some new fortune cookies were added.
See comments and comment on this.
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 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.
See comments and comment on this.
23-Feb-2007: Recent Updates to Shlomi Fish' Homepage
Welcome to another edition of the news weblog of Shlomi Fish' 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!
See comments and comment on this.
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.
See comments and comment on this.
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!
See comments and comment on this.
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.
See comments and comment on this.
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.
See comments and comment on this.
10-Sep-2006: Changes at Shlomi Fish Homesite
It's been about two weeks since my last update, and here's what's new:
-
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.
-
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.
-
My list of favourite open source software was updated, with many corrections, added programs and a new navigation menu.
-
My memoirs as a programmer from High School were heavily fixed and updated.
See comments and comment on this.
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?"
See comments and comment on this.
18-Aug-2006
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!
See comments and comment on this.
17-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!
See comments and comment on this.
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.
See comments and comment on this.
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.
See comments and comment on this.
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!
See comments and comment on this.
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.
-
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
See comments and comment on this.
08-Jul-2006
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.
See comments and comment on this.
29-Mar-2006
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.
See comments and comment on this.
18-Dec-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.
See comments and comment on this.
06-Nov-2005
Here are the new changes to Shlomi Fish' 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 the stories 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' resumés were heavily updated.
- Added my introduction of myself to the MIT Writers.
- Added a search box to the front page
See comments and comment on this.
28-Oct-2005
Since the last update to its changes log, Shlomi Fish' 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-organised 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 while 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!
See comments and comment on this.
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 "Stop Software Patents!" nag image to all my pages and a top frame to the front page.
- There's 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.
- I'm 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).
