Advogato blog for shlomif

Summary of the Firefox-IL Meeting (from my POV)

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:11:27 GMT

This is the summary of the Firefox users' meeting that took place today at Park Hayarkon in Tel Aviv. I slept well today starting from 1 AM so was annoyed by the 8 PM clock. (I still felt energetic throughout the day.) After waking up and buying Bourekas (not enough time for breakfast - didn't even shave), I tried to find a bus station with the bus going there, but couldn't. So I took a cab.

The cab driver was very friendly. He didn't have a computer at home, but I was able to explain to him about software and open-source. One of his daugthers had studied Maths+CS+EE in Bar-Ilan and the other one is a lawyer. We did not talk about Computers exclusively, of course. I directed him to the Paz gas station and we ended up at a different one, and had to do a detour. Oh well.

After I got there, I took a detour and slipped on some mud approaching the Firefoxers. But I was ok (I suppose the grass was being sprinkled with water shortly beforehand.). There were already a few people there, and we started chatting. This was an anti-conference, and so we didn't eventually hold any formal thing like presentations/talks or introductions, but rather chatted, drank, ate and were happy. We also got some Firefox swag, but pitchefkes (= the Yiddish word for "small stuff") are not really an obsession of mine.

We had some beers there, and we had water and sodas, and we had some Croissants. I didn't eat anything, but I drank some water and 7'up. Lots of fun was had.

Here are some highlights from the conversations:

We discussed the super-domains: "http://beauty/" which L'oreal wants and why people are less likely to want "ugly". But then I said "http://paris.hilton.is.ugly/" would be cool. Then we discussed "http://hilton/" and "http://ibm/".
We discussed the fact that Israel had 100,000 downloads of Firefox so far, and that Iran is one of the top-10 countries there. BTW, I've been talking with a few Iranians on IRC and they've been very friendly to me in spite of knowing I'm an Israeli. I suppose most of the people in Iran are not the problem, but rather the regime.

On the ride back (with Ori), I said that I felt that the Israeli politicians are a joke and do not actually run Israel. Who does is a good question, but it's possible that Israel just runs itself, with some entities, like the Military having more influence.

Looking back, I can say, that the Israeli Law still has many bad elements, and should be changed because it's causing a lot of damage.
We discussed the "israeli girls" search on Flickr and how it is dominated by female soldiers. People told me it was Digg'ed too. I said that Flickr's diversification algorithm was probably not as good as Google's, if there is one at all.
A bit less political and off-topic, I had a long conversation with a bio-informatician from Ben-Gurion University. He is using Perl and "R" (because they are free-as-in-speech and do what he need.) He said their budget is pretty big and they have a program running on the server with Java and Oracle and stuff. Then he said that he bought guitars instead of going on trips abroad and so, like me, remained in Israel most of the time. He seemed nice, and said he remembers my name and will MSN me.

We discussed some machine-learning algorithms. How he has to optimise over 500 parameters and decide which to include and which not. Naturally the sets of all subsets for 500 paramaters is huge, and so cannot be done by brute force. I told him about my greedy algorithm for finding a meta-scan in Freecell Solver (hi Muli!).
I said that I think that non-x86 (= non-Pentium etc.) architectures are going to make a comeback in servers, and that we'll see more peopple increasingly buy machines running UltraSPARC, PowerPC, and other non-x86 CPUs. (More about that later). Tomer noted that he does PHP software development at work and that such architectures were where all the big money was made. He said some companies have ancient IBM PowerPC-based setups which they don't upgrade.
There were quite a few girls there: the Pink Fakatsa, ailaG, and two new girls I didn't recognise. I also met Kobi Zamir, who is known as the libhocr guy, and he was very nice. He is tall and slender, and I told him most Kobis I know had a bigger build, and he said that he felt so too but said he was an exception. We discussed people with similar names.

Israelis have many common private names, but many names are very common. The situation is much worse in Russian, where they have less than 20 common masculine private names.
I met Meni whom I didn't see for a long time in Telux and other FOSS meetings. He said that he's now working in a different place, which is harder to come to Telux from, and that he now has a car, which he didn't need when he worked in Hertzeliyah Pituakh. We discussed the fate of Atelis, where he and other three esteemed developers worked, and now has been split into pieces, due to bad investors.

I'll probably write some further stuff in comments, but I'm just doing my duty to people who did not attend. In short - a fun meeting. About 20 people came and left, and a lot of fun was had. Next time, I suggest doing it on a weekday during the evening or afternoon, and optionally not at the summer. A more formal schedule and place would be good too, and I suppose I can make some arrangements at Tel Aviv University.

I returned home with Ori, and we discussed some stuff, including Shania Twain. I thought I'd upload some of her songs online, but that's what YouTube is for, no? Knock yourself out with Shania goodness! (or Shania Badness if you happen to think so.

Stay on fire (foxes)!

"Why Closed Books are So 19th Century?"

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:06:45 GMT

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!

Inflation of Singers from Reality Shows

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:06:49 GMT

As you may know, many countries hold reality shows / talent shows like American Idol or Fame Academy, in which singers compete to win a contract, and the top selections usually release singles or albums or otherwise become famous.

As a result there's now a huge inflation of such singers. For example, I have the following photo of Katharine McPhee, who was the runner-up on the fifth season of American Idol on virtual desktop #1. Moreover, I once asked Last.fm to play me one of her songs, and it wasn't too bad.

And finally, a Dutch friend of mine recommended this song called "Silencio" by David Bisbal, who was the finalist on the Operación Triunfo reality show, and went on a solo career. And it's a really good song.

Talking with a friend about the fact that Last.fm played me some Paris Hilton songs, of which I was fond of a few, he told me that he read somewhere that such celebrities-turned-singers have become the last amateurs because all the people from the reality shows have a lot of experience on their record after they become famous.

Oh well.

Additions to "We, the Living Dead", Vim Tips and Tricks, and Web Standards

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:04:03 GMT

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.).

Firefox 3 Slogan

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:07:38 GMT

I said it on IRC and on IM several times, but here it is on the Web for the upcoming release of Firefox 3:

Firefox 3 Runs Like a Fox on Fire.

It really does. And it leaks less memory and is very stable. Thanks to the Mozilla and Firefox developers for all the work they've placed there.

(This time I think the term "a fox on fire", may be inspired by the tale of Samson and foxes in the Old Testament, but who knows.)

Linux Computer Was Dead

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:07:38 GMT

In case you're wondering what happened to me the past few days (since about Thursday), I have the following news. The Power Supply and some of the ventilators of My Linux computer died, rendering it inoperational. So this heavily disrupted my work.

Today my father and I replaced the dysfunctional parts, and restored the computer. After we were able to turn it on, the network card was not recognised, but moving it to another slot got it working again. No damage was done to the hard-disks or any of the data.

That's all I wanted to say. Now, I have my Linux system back, and can work in comfort again.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapists' Summary

Sun, 8 Jun 2008 10:12:49 GMT

I previously wrote to Linux-IL about me seeking a Cognitive-Behavioural Therpist in the Tel-Aviv area. I received several replies in private. Here is a summary of them:

I was referred to Mekhon Psagot, which has a clinique in Tel-Aviv, in the Rabin Square area. I went to a meeting with a therapist there on Thursday, and it went very well. Note that it was an ad-hoc meeting, until my usual therapist returns from abroad, and not the beginning of a permanent commitment.
Someone referred me to Mifne which are located in Haifa, so it was a bit too far.
Someone thanked me for my contributions to FOSS, and said he wished I'd be well. Such encouragement is always appreciated. Thanks.
I got some other emails.

Thanks to all the people who replied!

Ubuntu is Dead

Fri, 6 Jun 2008 11:06:48 GMT

As illustrated by this bug (which got closed as "invalid"), the Ubuntu world has become infested with red tape, abuse, unfriendliness and hubris. So my suggestion is to stay a clear mile away of anything Ubuntu and to switch to Debian, Mandriva, Archlinux, FreeBSD, Fedora, CentOS or any of the other fine distributions with much healthier communities. Which one you choose depends on your needs and the situation.

This is especially in consideration of all the horror stories I heard of Ubuntu Hardy getting hang-up. I have spoken against Ubuntu before, but I may have missed the point, and it's possible the problems I've discovered recently are more recent.

The bug in question was closed because it wasn't a software bug, but that is also the case for the infamous bug #1.

In short, Ubuntu is dying now, but with enough determination on the part of its leaders, it can be resurrected. But this will require a huge inside motivation, and a lot of serious soul-searching. In the meanwhile, don't get near Ubuntu.

Mozilla/Firefox Tip: Getting xml:lang to Work

Wed, 4 Jun 2008 21:07:16 GMT

XHTML 1.1 has deprecated the lang="" HTML attribute in favour of the more standard xml:lang. I like to use XHTML 1.1 because I find the extra strictness (like no <a name="...">) useful, but in order to not completely alienate Microsoft Internet Explorer users, I'm serving it with a Content-Type of text/html.

However, it seems that Firefox as of v2 or v3 completely ignores "xml:lang" when the XHTML is being served as "text/html". It took me a long time to figure out a way to solve it, but here's what I did:

Loaded jQuery:

<script type="text/javascript" src="../../js/jq.js"></script>

Added onload="lang_load()" to the opening "<body>" tag.
Linked to a short jQuery-based script that implements lang_load(), which I've written.

What the script is doing is go over all elements and if the "xml:lang" attribute is set, then set "lang" to its value. It's a kludge, but it works. You can see the results on my homesite.

The Grammar Nazis Conspiracy

Wed, 4 Jun 2008 10:19:07 GMT

Back in 2005, I wrote a message in Hebrew to the Hamakor discussions, noting that illegal copying of software, as undesirable as it may be, is not "stealing" or "theft". I signed my message "(The Semantics Nazi)" (in English).

Someone was offended, and after a brief discussion decided to publish this article on the front page of linmagazine.co.il (=an Israeli Linux news, blogs and forums site). The discussion is very amusing. Someone asks "What does it have to do with anything? Did Hitler use Linux?". Another one has misapplied Psalms 34, there, while I had to correct him. In any case, I haven't stopped calling myself and others "nazis".

Now it seems that Millie is a "Grammar nazi" and proud of it:

Since I am often correcting people's grammar, syntax, etc. (mostly in Hebrew), I also consider myself a Grammar nazi. So I've decided to form a conspiracy of:

Spelling nazis
Grammar nazis
Syntax nazis
Punctuation nazis
Idiomatic talk nazis
Semantics nazis
Netiquette nazis
Applied logic nazis (e.g: logical fallacies)

And may all "Anti-'nazi' nazis" be damned!

Here's for a better, clearer, and more correct human-to-human communication (in all languages). Note that I always appreciate reports on errors in my own text, which is especially problematic in English.