Recent blog entries for shlomif

Israeli Independence Day Special: Enough with the Obsession With National Security! (English Transla

Note: this is an English translation of a previous entry which was written in Hebrew especially for the Israeli Independence Day.

Happy Independence Day Everybody! I decided to write this entry for the Israeli Independence Day, but it is probable some of you will be pleased by it. The entry is written in Hebrew, due to patriotic feelings, but I'll probably translate it into English later and post it as a separate entry.

The story went like this: I talked with Peteris Krumins on Freenode, and he told me that he is about to graduate with his Bachelor Degree in Physics. (Good Luck and Mazal Tov!) In any case, we discussed graduation ceremonies in Israel and Latvia (which is Peteris's home-land), and he referred me to a few photos of a graduation ceremony in Latvia.

The first picture that caught my eye was this picture of several girls who were apparently about to receive their diploma. As one can see they are incredibly cute, but I found their costumes very funny in comparison to what I am familiar with. Peteris told me that these are standard formal costumes of girls there, and he asked me if I could find him photos of Israeli females in formal dresses.

So I went to Flickr and searched for "israeli girls", and what do I find? Uniforms upon uniforms. My eyes became black from all the Khaki. High-quality photos of good-looking female soldiers, but that's it - only soldiers. Peteris told me that these photos were a hit on Digg, Reddit and the rest of the social bookmarking sites, which may be the reason why Flickr ranks them so highly.

OK, a female solider in uniform (or a male soldier in uniform) is not such an uncommon sight in Israel, given that most girls serve in the military for two years starting from the age 18, and some of them also choose to become officers or serve permanently. But most of the women we see in Israel are not wearing uniforms. So this search in Flickr gives a false and political impression.

The search "israeli woman" does not display only soldiers, but it too has a very political orientation.

Now here's the substance of my complaint: I think Israel is perceived as a hyper-political and hyper-security-obsessed country, both by the citizens of the world and by its own. I'll give a few examples:

1. When I studied civics in the 11th grade, the Civics teacher (whom I remember quite fondly) asked the class to which committee of the Knesseth, the prime minister was obliged to be summoned, and the students said "The Committee of External Affairs and National Security". But, the correct committee was "The Committee for the Critique of the State", and the teacher noted that it was an indication that we perceive the national security as too important (and she noted that beforehand as well).

2. In this essay Paul Graham proved "scientifically" that it would be a pointless mission to establish a "Silicon Valley" (i.e: a hub of startups) in Israel. He probably didn't hear of companies such as Mirabilis, Check Point, Zend and many other examples of numerous, high-quality former Israeli startups. Most of the companies I have worked for as a programmer in Israel have been startups. There isn't a shortage of them, and there were many like that even during the recession.

3. When I wrote the entry "A Brief History of Linux in Israel" on the Hackers-IL wiki, I originally wrote that Israel had many problems including "heavy taxation, irrational and abundant regulations, quite a lot of terrorist activity, etc.". Someone (who I think was an Israeli) deleted what I wrote and left only the "large amount of terrorist activity".

   With all due respect, the terrorist activity is not the worst problem that hurts Israel. More Israelis have died from road accidents and from smoking than from terrorist activity. And, as I noted, the high tax liability harms Israel much worse than the terrorist activity, and Israel won't lose anything (and will even greatly benefit) the more it will lower it.

   Thus, the editing was misleading.

4. Too many foreign people I have talked with from outside Israel in Internet chats have asked me if Israel was safe. Apparently, their impression is that there is shooting in the streets, missiles falling everywhere and that Israel is not safe. But the reality is that most Israeli residents feel perfectly safe.

Naturally, I, too, am not a Tallith that's entirely azure. My first serious story was based on the political situation on the Israeli-Lebanese border, although in my defense I must say that it has a much more universal message. I have also written some essays about politics as well as many political posts on my blog, albeit not all of them are about the political-defensive state of Israel.

But I think that as a people, we Israelis are too obsessed with the military and the national security of Israel. If you ask me, the main reason our security status is so terrible is the fact that Israel has constitutional discrimination. Until we completely eliminate it, it will beget institutionalized and private discrimination and racism, as well as non-supportive treatment from even amongst the most liberal of the Arabs and the rest of the world's citizenry. And I'm saying this as a Jewish Israeli. If I may contort what Yoda said: "Do or do not. But don't do for a Jew and don't do for a Gentile, or vice versa."

As Israelis in Independence Day, we should remember that the IDF and the National Security are a means, not an end. The end is that the citizens of Israel would be able to live good, peaceful, happy and prosperous lives. Happy Independence Day to all Israeli Residents!

Syndicated 2008-05-11 16:03:08 from shlomif

"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.

Syndicated 2008-05-10 18:47:52 from shlomif

רשומה לכבוד יום העצמאות: מספיק עם ההתעסקות בבטחון!

Syndicated 2008-05-07 19:36:35 from shlomif

Perl Must Decentralize, Diversify and Colonize

Andy Lester has written a great article about some of the social and philosophical problems with the Perl world. He says that while Perl 5 is a great technology, has a very comprensive collection of reusable, open-source code called "CPAN", and has a lot to show for, it has suffered from concentration of effort and other such problems.

This, in turn, contributed to the fact that many programmers concluded it was "dead", "dying", "not good enough", or other such negative hype and negative myths. While Lester's article suffers from some problems, it still makes a good read even if you're not an avid Perler.

Syndicated 2008-05-07 05:50:46 from shlomif

Today is my Birthday

I was born on 5 May, 1977, so today is my 31st Birthday. peachuk has already congratulated me on her blog (with a nice cartoon), and other people have already congratulated me on IRC and IM. Someone I know also wrote me something on Facebook, which I tend to dislike. Next time, an Email or an IM will do, but thanks.

I felt a bit depressed towards my birthday, but today I'm feeling great. Today was productive for me as I worked on an XML grammar for Unix-like fortune cookies. I learned RELAX NG in the process (and can recommend it) and made some progress, but it's still not ready for prime time.

I also chatted on the IRC a lot, and spent a lot of time explaining the essence of Perl 5's references to someone who only knew Unix Shell and very minimal Python. I remember I had problems with C pointers back after I learnt BASIC, which didn't really have them, and still remember that I only truly understood references in Perl after learning some Java (and possibly also after reading SICP).

So I geeked out today. :-) For other events that had occured today see the Wikipedia.

Cheers! -- the 31-years old, Shlomi.

Syndicated 2008-05-05 15:23:41 from shlomif

What Motivates People and How?

I feel obliged to write a special entry for the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day which is today, so hopefully this will serve as such. However, it's probably not going to be what you expect.

My first question is the one in the title: what motivates people? Why do people do what they do? One of the most common myths about it is what I call "pseudo-Darwinism" - the belief that people ultimately do everything to have sex, or even to procreate. This was started by Sigmund Freud, and also popularised by the book The Selfish Gene (which I haven't read but seems very interesting). However, this makes many explanations for human behaviour very contrived ("You chat on instant messaging because you hope that one of the people in the conversation will give you a lead for a date with an attractive woman/man...") which don't make much sense. It also fails to explain why many people and even many mammals who were castarated or otherwise incapable of bringing offspring do not commit suicide and otherwise seem to lead a happier life. It also doesn't explain why many people marry and lead happy lives, but don't want to have children. (And sometimes also have abortions.) Or why some people become monks or nuns, or other clergymen who are forbidden from having sex.

Plus, many people who have been virgins for a long time, or alternatively have wonderful significant-others (and sex partners) whom they'll never wish to hurt, are still chatting on the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and other IM services.

So it's not a very satisfying answer. But there's a more sensical explanation, and it actually heavily predates Darwin. In the first book of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that we perform certain actions for certain ends, and that these ends are also sometimes means to an end. But there must be an ultimate end, because otherwise everything will be meaningless.

He then claims that "happiness" is the ultimate end for most humans. Happiness can also be interpreted, or subtituted for "self-esteem", "pleasure", "joy", etc. depending on how you see it.

So what does it mean? We do what makes us feel good about ourselves. However, different people, and people at different times, have different actions that they deem as making them happier. This is often perfectly natural. I can sit at the computer most of the time, while just writing, chatting, or writing software. Other people don't seem to like it enough to do it all the time. Often, what makes us happy or our tastes is not a moral decision but an ammoral one (i.e: something that's neither moral nor immoral.).

As software developers, our job is to make sure people encounter as few frustrations as they can with our software. This means that the software will have good usability, that it will "just work", that it won't have bugs, and that if such problems are encountered they can easily be reported and dealt with.

If a software works according to our expectations, and does what we want - we'll feel happy. If it is too difficult to operate, lacks necessary features, has obscure and unhelpful documentation, or doesn't behave acccording to our expectations - we'll feel unhappy and helpless. As an example, I was searching CPAN for an IMAP module so I can get a list of all the From: addresses in my work's inbox. The first hits seemed overly complicated and required too much research. Then I found Email-Folder-IMAP whose synopsis had done something very similar to what I wanted. After pasting the code, changing it a bit and running it, I had got a list of all the from addresses. That has made me happy, and I was determined to use Email-Folder-IMAP from then on.

Back to the main subject - the main problem in the world is that some people derive pleasure from causing damage. For example, Genghis Khan has killed millions of people in his irrational and pointless conquests, just so he can feel good about himself. Adolf Hitler was similar too. The reason he decided to set the blame on the Jews and to kill over 20 million people in World-War-II was so he can feel good about himself. Also notice how he constantly shifted the blame to his and his people's problems from himself to members of other people, especially the Jews. Constantly blaming others or the world at large for one's own problems is a vestige of what Neo-Tech calls "The Criminal Mind".

Of course, even the Nazis were angels in comparison to 20th-century Communistic regimes who had been responsible for killing 100 million of the citizens of their own countries. Why? Because the leaders felt that they were conspiring against them, and that these victims prevent "future growth", but in fact because they felt pleasure of doing this.

No reason for any human-induced mass-destruction have ever existed except for the fact that the Charismatic leader was a destructive and evil person (a "mystic" in Neo-Tech terminology) who wanted to feel good about himself.

But naturally saying "Would you kill a million people so I can feel good" would not motivate anybody, they needed a "higher cause": "God", "the Aryan Race", "the nation", "justice" (not real Justice - more like an a collectivist revenge), "the Proletariat", etc. (And more recently "the Environment", "our security", "fighting the drug abusers" and other causes like that). But these causes are unnatural because there is no good reason to follow them.

Ayn Rand has identified that any aim to an unnatural altruistic cause, instead of the real cause which is the well-being, freedom and prosperity of the conscious individual, is in fact a recipe for disaster. By altruism she didn't mean willingly and rationally contributing to the well-being of another individual (or group of individuals) you care about, but rather claiming that one's life is worthless without contributing or even sacrificing to an external cause, be it "The poor", "the weak", "the nation", "the faith" or whatever.

As we remember the victims of the Nazis we should realise two things:

1. If the Germans would have cared about their own well-being, been logical and considered Hitler a stupid and irrational pip-squeak and nothing more, then World-War-II would not have happpened.

2. If the Jews (and other Nazi-opposers) realised they were in danger, and would have marched into Germany and kill everyone that looked like a Nazi, aiming to eventually kill Hitler himself, the War would have turned out much differently.

   While I am a peaceful man, I am not a pacifist. I believe that when someone is in danger, they are allowed to exercise force against their oppressors. And sometimes it is necesary.

The issue is not the "strong-vs-the-weak" - it is the "noble-vs-the-evil", and ironically some of the causes that seem the most noble to us are in fact very harmful.

Now it is your mission to try to apply what I said here. Act for your own well-being and happiness. Oppose those people who tell you you should dedicate your life to them. Ridicule them. Insult them. Fight them. Laugh them out of existence.

Don't blame other people or the world at large for your own problems. Challenge every assumption. Make sure you have no prejudice or dogma. Understand that some people know more than you in some respects, and that even the most wise men can (and often do) learn from fools. Be fanatical for proper use of logic, which is the only valid tool that we have for judging what's correct and right and what's wrong and bad.

Don't be a slave to your emotions and feelings. A person who's behaving rationally will be happier in the long run than a person who's behaving irrationally, and will experience more feelings of joy, happiness and love. Your feelings are not facts and only reflect our thoughts, and general condition. While we want to be happy, we shouldn't make pleasure our master, but rather our servant in the ends for a better life.

Regards -- Shlomi Fish, The Eternal Jew.

Syndicated 2008-05-01 15:44:31 from shlomif

Unattainable Goals that are Still Worth Pursuing

One thought that occurred to me lately was the fact that there are some goals in life that can never be fully attained, but are nevertheless worth pursuing and getting nearer and nearer to them. Like an asymptotic function in mathematics if you may.

One example that I thought for it is the case of objectivity. Human beings are subjective by nature and so can never be completely objective. However, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to be as objective as possible, or completely give up on being objective. (And by being objective I don't mean having a neutral Point-of-View). Other people can disagree with me that objectivity is a virtue but it's besides the point.

Now a co-worker of mine is a Hasidic Jew, and when I told him that I'm an Objectivist, he said that one cannot be completely Objective. He then gave the fact that the Bible says that God brought the great drought because "Yetzer Lev ha'adam Ra' Mine'urav" (= the desire of the Human's heart is bad from his youth.), and later on decided not to do it again for a similar reason. He brought that as an indication that the Bible indicated that a man is not Objective by nature.

I thought about it for a moment and understood that the same can be said about honesty (or "righteousness" in a more religious language). We can never be completely honest and never lie or do the right thing everytime. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't constantly try to be as honest as possible, or worse succumb to complete dishonesty.

(I was told Immanuel Kant said something along the lines that if one wished, for example, to be sincere, he must not lie even if threatened by death. However, this is silly, because ethical and moral ideals are supposed to help you lead a happier life (as identified by Aristotle in the first book of "Nicomachean Ethics"), not to terminate them prematurely under someone who employs force or threat of force against you, when you otherwise did not do anything wrong.)

After I told it to my co-worker in an MSN Messenger conversation he agreed with me that I was right on both the honesty aspect and, in accordance with the principle, also the Objectivity one.

This concept can be applied to many other values or capabilities we desire. For example, one can always improve as a programmer, which is evident by the fact that most good programmers who take a look at their old code are unhappy with it. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to always improve as programmers.

Likewise, if a particular computing technology is large (e.g: Perl, Java, PHP, .NET) and also has possibly spanned a large number of halo technologies (e.g: CPAN, Apache Jakarta, etc.), then mastering the core language would be hard, and time consuming. In the Perl world we constantly say that "no one knows all of Perl, not even Larry Wall". But it doesn't mean you shouldn't do your best to master as much as you can out of it, or need to.

One example that I'm especially sensitive about is politics in a software project (possibly an open-source one ). Obviously, there can never be zero politics, but the project leaders and members should always try to reduce its amount, because not keeping it at bay is a recipe for disaster. I constantly hear about important features that are not implemented or even bugs that are left unfixed in open-source projects due to political reasons.

I can give Subversion and to a lesser extent the perl5-core development tools as good examples of projects with very little politics and a value-maximising attitude.

One can think of many other examples.

My point is that while it is true that we are humans and can never be perfect, we should always aim for perfection in some aspects. And given enough willingness and by learning from our mistakes, we can remain close to perfection in those respects all the time.

Syndicated 2008-04-28 07:46:54 from shlomif

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:

1. Because it's fun. This is by itself a good reason.
2. 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</a>.

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.

Syndicated 2008-04-25 04:37:10 from shlomif

jQuery Tip: Adding Self-Links to Headings

On my homepage, I have many <h2>, <h3>, etc. tags with id attributes in them so one can link directly to the middle of the page. I have written a Website Meta Language API that allows one to generate a table of contents for the page based on them. However, recently I also looked for a way to have a link to their anchors somewhere close to them.

I eventually decided to try doing it using JavaScript and jQuery. It took me a bit of documentation lookup, trial and error and consulting people on IRC, but I ended up with:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
$("h1[id],h2[id],h3[id],h4[id],h5[id],h6[id]").each(
function(i){
$(this).append( ' <span class="selfl">[<a href="#' + 
this.id + '">link</a>]</span>' )
})
-->
</script>

Now for some explanations:

1. The $("h1[id]...") construct selects all the headings with id's. There may be a shorter way to do it (comments are welcome).
2. The each method iterates over all of them and calls the closure inside. The closure sets the "this" variable to the current element, and accepts its index there (the "i" variable). In our case, we're not making use of the index.
3. $(this) constructs a jQuery object from "this".
4. .append() appends an expression to the inner HTML of the element. I add a little HTML there. this.id may result in an XSS attack if you have a really funky (and probably invalid) ID, but since I have control over my ID's it's OK.

You can see the result, in the headings of the presentations' page (for example), as long as you don't have JavaScript turned off. jQuery seems very nice, and I'm looking forward to making even more use of it where appropriate.

Syndicated 2008-04-24 16:36:14 from shlomif

"Free" and "Freedom" in Hebrew (and English)

By inspiration from Passover, which celebrates the end of the Egyptian Jewish slavery, and by some inspiration from what David A. Wheeler wrote about the meanings of free in English, I present to you some non-professional philological study of the meanings of "Free" and "Freedom" in Hebrew and English.

First of all, there are two ways to say "freedom" in Hebrew: "Hhofesh" (חופש) and "Hherouth" (חרות). The double-h is my way of indicating a "Hheth", which is similar to the "kh" in "Khan" or the Spanish "j", but even more throaty when pronounced correctly.

Now, "Hhofesh" means Freedom, while "Hherouth" is even stronger, and means something closer to "liberty" in English, but probably not exactly the same. A free person (or a thing) is "Hhofshi" (in Singular Masculine form, other forms differ slightly), while I didn't hear the word "Herouthi" used often. Instead one can say that someone is a "Ben-Horin" (i.e: "son [or belongs to a people of] of free people."), which is probably the etymology for "Ben-Hur".

While "Herouth" is mostly limited to the liberty of a people or inidividuals, and is considered high language, "Hhofshi" is more disputed. It can naturally mean "libre" or free-from-oppression. But "Hhofesh" or "Hhufshah" also means vacation in Hebrew (like "Hahhofesh hagadol" (the big "Hhofseh") - which is the Hebrew name for the Summer vacation.) And so Hhofshi is sometimes applied to a person who is relieved of work, education or other responsibilities (such as that of a spouse), even though it is understood that it is not an exact meaning.

More recently, "Hhofshi" also started to be applied to "gratis", "costless" or "on-the-house" commodities similar to the "free-as-in-free-beer" distinction. For example, in Falafel stands, one often hears that the extras are "Hhufshi" meaning one can take as much as they want to put in his Pitah-bread. This may have been an influence from English, but as I noted, "Hhofesh" in Hebrew has not been restricted to mean freedom from oppression ("free-as-in-free-speech") either.

One doesn't often hear people using "Hhofshi" for "lacking" as in "Caffeine-free", although that may also have become a bit more common lately. "Caffeine-free" is "Netol-caffeine" ("נטול-קפאין") in Hebrew, and one can also say "lelo kaffeine" ("ללא קפאין" without Caffeine) or "She'eyn bo kaffeine" ("שאין בו קפאין" "which doesn't have Caffeine" more or else) in certain contexts.

And I'd also like to stress the fact that "free" in English even in its more "libre" meaning, can be used either for freedom-from-oppression or freedom-from-responsibilities. If you value liberalism, you should try to use it only in the freedom-from-oppression sense.

Happy Passover (a.k.a the Festival of Liberty in Hebrew) everyone!

Syndicated 2008-04-21 19:36:15 from shlomif