New Music CDs

Today I decided to buy two Music CDs: "Elephunk" by the Black Eyed Peas, and "Obscured by Clouds" of Pink Floyd. I wanted to buy "Elephunk" because I liked many of the tracks from it and wanted to get the rest, and I wantd to buy "Obscured by Clouds" because someone on IRC let me download the song "Childhood's End" from it, which I liked and because I also listened to it during the Perl hackathon at gaal's apartment, and liked what I heard.

So I took some money and went to the local shopping center. Try as I find, I could not find a music store there. I ended up asking my barber about it, and he said that there isn't one anymore. So I decided to go to Dyonon at Tel Aviv University instead. I bought a bottle of mineral water at McDonalds, and walked all the way there. When I got there I looked for the CDs, but none of them was available.

The Ramat Aviv Mall is close to Dyonon, so I walked there by foot, and looked for the Music CD. I went upstairs, and then asked directions from people at a café, which pointed me at the records store. There, with the help of a salesperson, I was able to find both CDs. Each one costed 60 NIS (about 12 USD) , which was much less than I expected to spend on them. I bought them both, and then walked all the way back home.

At home, I ripped Elephunk into 96 Kbps oggs using grip. It required some experimentation, but I was finally able to. I prefixed the filenames with the track number, so I can listen to them in order. Many of the songs there, which were previously unfamiliar to me are very nice, and I also found some new arrangements of the mp3's I do have. Highly recommended.

I didn't get to rip and listen to Pink Floyd's album yet, but I'm going to.

New BitKeeper Essay

I wrote a New BitKeeper Essay titled "The BitKeeper Ghost" over at the Better-SCM Site. It discusses the side-effects of BitKeeper and BitMover concerning the recent departure of Bryan O'Sullivan from the Mercurial development team.

Another New Essay

I translated to English the essay titled "The GPL, The BSD License and Being a Sucker". It aims to dispel the common belief, especially prevalent among Israelis, that people who write code under BSD license are "suckers" (or "Frayerim" in Hebrew) because they permit incorporating their work into proprietary software.

New Community for my Home-Site

Instead of manually including my home-site news on the HTML of my sites' front page, and later on the old news page, I decided to create community for it on LiveJournal, and just place the feed as new entries on my site. This will also allow people to comment on it, and for me to receive more feedback. At the moment, anyone can post there, but I need to approve the posts. Comments are unmoderated.

New Essay: The Case for File Swapping

There's a new essay on my web-site titled "The Case for File Swapping". It explains why file swapping is ethical and moral, and why it should be legal, and also discusses some related arguments and refutes some common arguments against making file swapping legal. Comments and corrections are welcome.

Language Wars

publius_ovidius has written a great entry about Language Wars.

Diet

I've lost some weight lately. Right now, a pair of pants that used to barely fit me, now fits much more easily. What's my secret? First of all, I exercise quite a lot. I bike for over one hour everyday, and I also take one or more walks during the day. Aside from that, I'm taking Maimonides' advice and I'm eating according to the stomach and not according to the eyes. I.e: I stop eating once I feel that I'm full.

So far I've been waking up quite early and go to bed late, and yet feel very energetic and focused during the day. I feel great. Hopefully, this situation will last, but I wouldn't mind returning to my stay-in-bed-until-late-in-the-morning situation again.

Aside from that I'm still naturally refraining from consuming overly-sugary-foods, Caffeine and Alcohol, and of course don't smoke or do drugs. I'm talking to other people who claim they cannot function without their morning coffee or who drink a lot, and I must say that I don't have these problems, and yet am very productive. I recommend that anyone will quit doing all these aphrodites, as they have negative short-term and long-term effects.

Subversion News

Ben Collins-Sussman now has a blog and is starting to work for Google. He will be the third Subversion Developer to work there after Greg Stein, and Brian Fitzpatrick.

That put aside, I always knew Ben Collins-Sussman was Jewish, but now it turns out Karl Fogel, who used to work in the same office as he is, is also Jewish. I felt a bit embarrassed when I leared that.

Shell Readline Goodies

Check this post in Linux-IL about various shell tips and tricks that I collected by going over the Bash man page.

See this item in the shlomif_hsite (= Shlomi Fish' Home Site) community for information about what's new on my homesite from 15-October till today.

Please join the shlomif_hsite community if you are interested in my site and you hadn't done so already.

Joke - GNU Visual Basic

The following joke about GNU Visual Basic was once published on Freshmeat.net, but has since been misplaced. A Freshmeat editor I contacted sent me the text of it (without the comments) and I've placed it on my site. Enjoy!

Movie Recommendation: "Eight Days a Week"

I don't watch Television regularly, but sometimes I see something that makes me watch it till the end. This time it was Eight Days a Week which I saw on the cables' "Hot Fun" channel, which is dedicated to comedy movies. This is a teen comedy sort of, about sex and love and stuff. It's very funny and entertaining. It stars Keri Russel and Joshua Schaefer, which strangely enough hasn't acted since, and there's little information about him on IMDB.

Updates to Perl for Perl Newbies

I went over the Perl for Perl Newbies series and updated it. What I've done so far is made the entire slides validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict, fixed many problems in the text (typos, spelling, grammatical or syntactical), and also fixed the wrong or misleading content. My understanding of Perl was not as good when I wrote the slides as it is today, and so I had to fix quite a lot of inaccuracies.

There are still some things that I want to change there, but as a general rule, everything is much better now.

New Release of Freecell Solver

When I went over the entire comments in the OSNews coverage of "When C is the Best", I read this comment. It mentioned two bugs in Freecell Solver, which I fixed by releasing Freecell Solver 2.8.11. I would have missed them if I didn't go over all the comments.

Apparently Mac OS X does not have a malloc.h header file. OS X never ceases to surprise me.

Joel's Back!

After a small lull, Joel Spolsky is back with a very nice article and some very insightful and amusing weblog entries. I hope this trend goes on.

Testing a Two-Domain Website

See this post I made to PerlMonks about how to test the local copy of my two domains' (www.shlomifish.org and vipe.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/) web-site on my local machine.

Configuring Xkb to have a Compose Key and Hebrew Keyboard

I wanted to have a compose key so I can have them Über-cool accénts. But naturally, I still needed the Hebrew keyboard. After playing a bit with Xkb, I got to the following configuration:

    Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
    Option "XkbLayout" "us,il"
    Option "XkbCompat" ""
    Option "XkbOptions" "compose:rwin,grp:switch,grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll"
    Option "XkbVariant" "lyx"

Énjoy!