Apache Subversion version 1.7.x broke some backwards compatible and some stuff got broken, including hgsubversion, which provides a way to use subversion remotes with Mercurial.

In order to fix it, just install subvertpy, which provides alternative python bindings for subversion, which hgsubversion prefers by default, and with which it works fine under subversion-1.7.x.

I discovered all that after I attempted to fix it the hard way by installing subversion-1.6.x under /opt/svn-1.6.x, which required building an old version of SWIG, and then setting PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and PYTHONPATH and then having to remove the global python-svn bindings from under /usr/lib (as root!) because hgsubversion did not like them, a process which took me an entire evening and was frustrating and was ridden with a lot of trial and error, so I would not recommend it.

Hope it helps. Also see this hgsubversion bug report.

I noticed that if I say to myself “Now I’m self-aware.” a few times and try to follow this advice, I acheive a certain state of self-awareness. Eventually, I get distracted, but while I do, it’s interesting. Try it, if you didn’t already.

And for the music recommendations: Green Sun music is an Israeli producer and composer who produces nice chill-out, new age electronic music. The first three albums are available for free download, and I also bought the mp3 version of his Dream Elements album, and can recommend it.

After I bought it, I mentioned Green Sun to my friend (on IM), and he said that his friend had a band and that they released audio files on their site and eventually got a record deal. I asked him for their site and he referred me to Machinae Supremacy. My friend thought I wouldn’t like them, but apparently I did - it’s a Metalish-music mixing many genres, with a rich sound, which I found likable (even if sometimes it’s a bit weird.). There are many free downloads there, but the site does not look properly with JavaScript disabled.

This is a joke my father told us the other day:

A Rabbi lived in a remote shack, and the weather forecast said there will be a large flood. So two people arrived there in a Jeep and told the Rabbi: “Rabbi, there will be a flood, come with us so you'll be saved.” and the Rabbi said: “No, that's OK - God will save me.”.

And indeed it started to rain, and there was a lot of water, and so a boat arrived at the Rabbi's house and the people there told the Rabbi: “Rabbi, there's a flood, come with us and you'll be saved.” and the Rabbi told them: “No, that's OK - God will save me.” and he remained there.

And it continued to rain, and the water level went up and the Rabbi had to climb to the roof of his shack. A helicopter arrived at his shack, and the people inside told the Rabbi: “Rabbi, there's a big flood. Come with us to safety.”, and the Rabbi said: “No, that's OK - God will save me.”. And the Helicopter left.

The water levels rose even more, and the Rabbi drowned, and his soul went to heaven. There he confronted God and asked him: “Dear God, why didn't you save me?”, and God replied “Well, I tried. I sent you a Jeep, a boat - even a helicopter - but you wouldn't accept any of them. What more could I have done?”

---

The moral of this story is: God helps them that help God help them.

This Yom Kippur, I again went over my blogs from the last year. I mostly blogged in my technical blog about tips and events and stuff like that. I did not mention some of the significant good and bad things that happened to me on my blogs, but I guess I have a right for privacy and/or they were of no interest to the world at large.

The past year was good for me, but could have been better, and I drew some conclusions from looking back.

I've begun working on a JavaScript port of some algorithmic Perl code, to allow it to run inside a browser. As a result, I had to find a good JavaScript automated tests library to allow me to write automated tests for the code. I first looked at Test.More and Test.Harness from JSAN (the JavaScript Archive Network) but as it turned out, JSAN was defunct, and no one had time to mark it as such. Then I asked the “Test.Run” developer (another thing I had found on JSAN) to instruct me how to get it up and running, and he gave me a link to its archive, which was 1.5 MB compressed (!), and so was not acceptable.

I looked at the wikipedia list of unit testing frameworks, but there were too many. At least I understood that JSUnit was no longer actively maintained. I looked at Jasmine, which is a BDD framework for JS, but its syntax seemed too horrid and unnatural.

Eventually, I decided to ask for recommendation on Stack Overflow and, as after I wrote my title, I found a a previous question, where there was a recommendation of QUnit, which I noticed was developed by the jQuery people, and as I'm fond of jQuery, I decided to look deeper into it.

I wasn't disappointed by QUnit - it does what it does well, and I was able to write my test suite using it, so I can recommend it as well. It has primitives that are very similar to Perl's Test::More, and it can even assert that the number of assertions ran within a test are right (like Test::More can).

So here's a tip for it: if you're writing your testing code in a different file, and you wish to check that no compile-time or run-time exception was thrown (which will cause QUnit to report a success with zero assertions) you should wrap the testing code in a try { .. } catch block and in the catch block, run ok(false...).

Here's an example from my code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" 
                    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>ABCPath Test</title>
<script src="jquery-latest.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="qunit.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="qunit.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="joose.mini.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="abc-path.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="abc-path-test.js"></script>

  <script type="text/javascript">
      $(document).ready(function () { 
          try {
              test_abc_path();
          }
          catch (err) {
            module("Meta");
            test("global_failure", function() {
                ok (false, 'test_abc_path() has thrown an exception or is invalid.');
            });
          }
          // Hide passed tests by default.
          $('#qunit-tests').addClass('hidepass');
      });
  </script>
  
</head>
<body>
  <h1 id="qunit-header">QUnit example</h1>
 <h2 id="qunit-banner"></h2>
 <div id="qunit-testrunner-toolbar"></div>
 <h2 id="qunit-userAgent"></h2>
 <ol id="qunit-tests"></ol>
 <div id="qunit-fixture">test markup, will be hidden</div>
</body>
</html>

Enjoy.

I received the book Forrest Gump, as a present of gratitude after I tried to help someone with a problem he encountered with Freecell Solver. I finished reading it a while ago, and would like to review it here, as a token for being given it.

The book is great, and I liked it better than the film (which was based on it). In the film, it is implied that Forrest Gump is a retard, but in the book, he is an idiot-savant, who excels in mathematics, music, and some other mental activities. In the book, Forrest stumbles upon life, one weird happening after another, in a very lovable way, and the story is captivating, funny and entertaining.

I can recommend this book, and I also recommend its sequel, which I had read before reading the first book.

Humble Indie Bundle 3

I suggest you look at the Humble Indie Bundle 3, which allows you to pay how much you want for seven indie games, and split the proceeds between charity and the developers of the games. I've bought the bundle (as I did the previous one) and am now enjoying the game Crayon Physics Deluxe, which is great.

Personal Log

I've felt under the weather a while ago, but hopefully, this is mostly behind me. In the past few days, I've kept myself busy by studying Group theory, watching episodes of The Muppet Show, translating some code from Perl to JavaScript (which has given me a lot of fodder for my JavaScript page), and playing various games.

I've been feeling guilty about not having been following my RSS feeds for a long while. I've started to become not very fond of Akregator (the KDE feeds' aggregator), due to its lack of RSS service support, and I feel that the developers' plan to port it to Akonadi will make it even worse. I've found two other feeds' aggregators (one for Firefox and the other one for GNOME/gtk+) either slow or annoying, and so am left without an aggregator.

I'm taking a break from the usual political and philosophical posts in this blog and posting a review of a film I recently saw and enjoyed.

Just Go With It is a Hollywood film starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. I give this film a rating of 9/10, and can highly recommend it.

General Impression from the Movie

The movie is very funny, insightful, entertaining, and in general - highly recommended. The acting is great, there are many beautiful scenes in the movie (of Hawaii, etc.), there are many sexy elements to the film, and it is a very fun and thought-provoking movie. I'll discuss the various messages of the movie, and the mental and emotional experience it has given me, only after I discuss its bad aspects. This is done in order to get them out of the way.

The Bad Aspects of the Movie

The first bad aspect of the movie is that the plot is very shopworn and expected. I could figure out most of what will happen throughout the movie till its end after reading the beginning of the wikipedia summary of the plot. Despite all that, there are still many unexpected elements and plot devices and many funny moments.

Another bad aspect is that the film gets unrealistic very quickly as the characters build more and more absurd lies, and the character of Palmer (played by Brooklyn Decker), continues to believe them, while it is obvious that any woman of her intelligence and general ability to sense when someone is lying (or much below that), would have become extremely suspicious, if not completely emotional about it, a short time into the movie. In addition, I think that the screenplay writer went to too great lengths to make us believe that Palmer was indeed more stupid and immature than she actually first appeared to be (like the fact that Seventeen was her favourite magazine, or that she was permanently scarred from the fact that 'N Sync broke up). I believe that the film could have given a more well-rounded message if it still presented her as an intelligent and well-rounded woman.

We are also required to suspend disbelief for Adam Sandler's character of a Don Juan, who uses a wedding ring to lie to women and get them into bed. A real life character of such would have become impotent a long time ago, but I suppose it is a necessary plot device and is one of the film's "known bugs".

Moreover, the film consciously sports many common myths, fashions and hyperboles in 90s or sometimes even more modern American culture, up to the extent of nausea. These stereotypes add to the spice of the movie, and are done with good humour, but they may be a little too much.

As a result, I've been feeling that this film may be too polished and a prime example of the Hollywood successful film assembly line, which has become a bit too overdone lately. I really think the film's script writers and director, could have used less of such stereotypes, while still experiencing the emotional and intellectual process that the film-makers wanted us to go through.

Insights from the Movie

Decker's character is initially portrayed as intelligent and sexy, both physically and verbally, and a worthy competition to Jennifer Aniston. As the movie progresses we think of her more as naïve, good-hearted and childish, which causes the audience to more pity her than be attracted to her, so the movie makers were successful.

On the other hand, Jennifer Aniston convincingly portrays the single-parent mother, who is surprised to discover she can still be very chic, intelligent, inventive, and most importantly - sexy, until the audience is genuinely more attracted to her instead of her younger and extremely physically attractive competition.

Adam Sandler is very convincing as a modern day pygmalion who gradually turns his unattractive underling (Aniston), whom he believes is not his type, into a woman whom he finds extremely attractive up to falling in love with.

I think one of the main hidden messages of the movie, despite a common belief to the contrary, was that sexy women (and men, naturally) are not incompetent, and "sleazy", but quite the opposite - that their sexiness is indicative of a great competency and confidence and maybe even being a noble and honest person.

Naturally, the movie calls upon women in their 30s and 40s (or even older), including those that have children from prior marriages, to acknowledge the fact that they still have sex appeal, and that they can compete for the attention of attractive men.

One thing I'm ambivalent about the film is its implication that it is hard to bridge the gap between the members of Generation X and younger people. While being born in 1977 (and have turned 34 in 2011), which may be the edge-of-generation-X, and that I feel a lot of cultural dissonance between people of younger age (who mostly have not watched The Princess Bride, care little about such popular 90's T.V. shows as Friends, Star Trek: The Next Generation (and "Deep Space Nine"), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and are not excited about many hits of the late 80s and 90s), I still feel that we can find a common ground. I also don't rule out that mature men who are romantically involved with much younger women (or vice versa), expect them to behave in an immature way, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Meaning, older women are not necessarily more mature, but when in a relationship with them, they are expected to behave more maturely, due to the Halo effect.

Jennifer Aniston

I was out of touch with gossip about Jennifer Aniston for a while (though I have naturally heard about Brad Pitt breaking up with her), so I was pleasantly surprised to read on her wikipedia page that after her breakout role in the Television show Friends, she ended up becoming a very successful Film and Television actress, breaking the "Friends" curse. However, while in the film in question, she portrays a middle-aged woman, who has two children whom she cares about a lot and ends up at a dead end career, in real life, Aniston had a successful career, and a string of bad relationships (although she is the godmother of her associate and friend's Courtney Cox-Arquette daughter). It's hard to know whether Aniston wanted to have children within a steady relationship, or that she put her career first, but it's still highly probable that making Just Go With It was painful for her.

After talking about that with my mother, we agreed that there are many factors that inhibit a successful Hollywood actress from raising a family (among them needing to travel a lot on demand, the prying eyes of the media, including a lot of jealousy and envy, and an otherwise very busy schedule), so naturally a decision not to have children is a valid approach.

Adam Sandler

I don't recall seeing any previous films with Sandler in them, but he appears to be a fine comedian and a drama actor, and I'd like to catch up with some of his previous motion pictures, when I have some spare time.

Brooklyn Decker

This is Decker's first appearance in a film, and she was obviously chosen for it, because of her good looks and her youth. Nevertheless, she appears to play very well, within the purposely unrealistic behavioural constraints that her character exhibits in the plot. As a model, with some natural aspirations for becoming an actress, Decker could have done much worse than this film, and I'm looking forward to see her in future films.

The Children

The Child actors who were picked up for playing the two children in the film give a convincing and funny performance.

Verdict

I enjoyed watching Just Go With It, and it apparently has many deeper meanings, both positive and negative. You should probably watch it.

Here are the recent updates to Shlomi Fish's Homepage since the last update. A long time has passed and there are many big and small changes, and I hope this summary will compensate for it.

There are new English and Hebrew versions of my story, The Enemy and How I Helped to Fight it, and some text was added to the front page. An even better version is currently being worked on in the Mercurial repository of the story.

There's new text in the screenplay Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead”, in both parts of “The One with the Fountainhead” and in the Hebrew story “The Pope died on Sunday”:

[ Cut. End Credits. Phoebe is sitting on the coach reading the Fountainhead. ]

Phoebe: wow, I forgot how great the Fountainhead was. So what did Rand do afterwards?

Ross: well, she wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation of the Book that starred Gary Copper…

Phoebe: oooh, yummy…

Ross: yes, well, and then she worked on Atlas Shrugged.

Phoebe: [in a lyrical fashion] “Atlas shrugged from side to side. ‘Alas, my end is near!’ the lady cried.”

Monica: ehmm… Pheebs? That's "The mirror crack'd from side to side".

Phoebe: oh! Ayn Rand wrote "The Mirror Crack'd" too?

Ross: no, Phoebe. That was Agatha Christie.

Phoebe: Oh! Everybody knows that Ayn Rand wrote all of Agatha Christie's stories.

Chandler: [tongue-in-cheek]I can totally believe that, Pheebs.

After an almost complete lack of inspiration since its inception, there are now new Larry Wall Factoids:

Larry Wall does know all of Perl. However, he pretends to be wrong or misinformed, so people will think he's not as awesome as he really is.

And as usual, there are also some new Chuck Norris Facts:

Chuck Norris once wrote a 10 million lines C++ program in Microsoft Notepad without having to use the backspace key. And it compiled without errors or warnings, and was 100% bug-free.

There's now a script for displaying an individual quote of the UNIX-like fortune cookies with a random feature.

Speaking of fortune cookies, there are some new fortune cookies, and many of them have fixed typos:

Real programmers use a nice editor and a nice programming language and get it done in less than O(N!).

(Vanguard in Freenode's ##programming)

Some of the aphorisms now have Hebrew translations:

אלהים נתן לנו שתי עיניים ועשר אצבעות, כדי שנקליד פי חמש יותר ממה שאנו קוראים.

Likewise, there's now a hebrew translation of "Ways to do it according to the programming languages of the world":

• Perl - יש יותר מדרך אחת לעשות זאת.
• C++‎ - ישנן חמש דרכים לעשות זאת. שלוש מתוכן לא אמורות לעבוד.
• Visual Basic - הדרך היחידה לעשות זאת היא להשתמש ברכיב צד שלישי.
• ANSI C - יש, בדרך כלל, דרך אחת לעשות זאת, אבל יש יותר מדרך אחת לבצע אופטימיזציה.
• Java - יש בקושי דרך אחת לעשות זאת. (אבל בניגוד ל-C++‎, היא בטוח תעבוד.)
• Python - יש דרך אחת לעשות זאת. הדרך האחת האמיתית לעשות זאת. וישנן גם דרכים אחרות.

The funny bit “The S Stands for Simple” (about SOAP) is now mirrored on the site. I have also placed the stories by a writer by the name of Oded C. that he had sent me in the past (in Hebrew) on the site, and converted them to OpenDocument Text and to HTML using OpenOffice.org.

The Copyrights Page now spells out my interpretation of the various Creative Commons licences that I'm using:

The Public Domain / CC-Zero

If the work is marked as public domain, then you can freely redistribute it, modify it or build upon it, even without giving me credit. If you wish you may consider the work as licensed under the MIT/X11 licence, the CC-by licence (see below), or any other licence. What you cannot do is claim that you originated the original version, or sue me for any damages caused by using or misusing the information.

All of that put aside, if you find works under this licence useful, you are encouraged to credit me; share them under similar liberal licences; make a small donation, either in money for me and/or for a good cause, or by buying me interesting books, cool T-shirts, or alternatively audio or video files (only as digital files, for I lack the energy for pesky circular physical media), and naturally by sending me an appreciation note that you enjoyed them or found them of value. But I'm not forcing you to.

I'm using this licence for most of my photos (but not all of them), for some of my presentation material, and for some of my old code, or code that I find useful to dual-licence under it and the MIT/X11 licence.

The solver for the game ABC Path (by Otto Janko) is now available in the software section.

The XML-Grammar-Fiction homepage was improved with new content and some links to the similar efforts of Celtx and AsciiDoc.

There's a new FAQ about the "EvilPHish" emblem in the top-left corner of this screen.

The technical talk "There are Too Many Ways to Do it" now contains notes in Hebrew which have been prepared in advance when giving it to the Tel Aviv Perl Mongers.

The main navigation menu on the left was revamped and converted to use JavaScript (which is not required to operate it). I'm planning to do further work on tweaking it in the near future. Moreover, there's now a language switching widget on such pages as the “Ways to do it According to the Programming Languages of the World”.

Finally, I added some description of my psycho-medical condition to my Bio.

Hopefully, you enjoy these changes. More are upcoming.

In the essay What you can't say, Paul Graham said that there are many things one cannot say in modern societies, and that saying them will likely get you in trouble (sued against, fired from your job or even get killed), despite the existence and general acceptance of the Freedom of speech. I felt Mr. Graham was right, but had a problem coming up with such an example, and felt that "The Matrix had me." and I could not think outside the box.

However, I recently came up with an example, and it was right below my nose, and I'd like to share it with you. If you ask someone about his cultural, religious, ideological, ethnic, etc. background while interviewing a candidate for a job, you are likely going to be fired, press charges against, or worse, due to the so-called American "anti-discrimination" laws, which have taken precedence over the First Amendment, which among other things secures the freedom of speech. If you don't believe me read what Joel Spolsky wrote about it in his (otherwise excellent article) "The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing":

First of all, avoid the illegal questions. Anything related to race, religion, gender, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, sexual orientation, or physical handicap is just illegal. If their resume says they were in the Army in 1990, don't ask them, even to make pleasant conversation, if they were in the Gulf war. It's against the law. If their resume says that they attended the Technion in Haifa, don't ask them, even conversationally, if they are Israeli. It's against the law. There's a pretty good discussion of what's illegal here. (But the rest of the interview questions at that site are pretty stupid).

There are similar things about giving "insider information" about your company is doing (a complete non-crime), and about the post-Rabin- assassination Israel of saying that "I'd like to kill the Israeli prime minister". Note: I'm not serious about saying that Mr. Netanyahu, the current Israeli Prime Minister should be killed, as much as I distaste him. To quote the film "The Princess Bride" "I want him to live a long life alone with his cowardice". All I'm trying to convey is that saying something like that will likely get you in trouble.

I can rant a lot about how anti-discrimination laws are not a good idea, and how an employer can often discriminate against a job candidate, and how the fact that you can only discriminate contracts based on money have made sites such as "rentacoder" and "getafreelancer" into a joke, but I think I'll stop.

This was not an April Fools' Day joke (but see the freshly announced Webscale™ version of Freecell Solver™ ), but it does seem appropriate. Comments are welcome.