Two days ago I had an eventful day. During the second walk I took that day (in the afternoon), there was a car that passed through the roundabout at a big speed, shortly after I crossed the road there. Then, at the park with the many cats in it, there was this woman who found a lost kitten. She held him in her hand and said he had many fleas. Nearby, there was also the corpse of a dead cat, which I had seen in earlier days, and we also discused it. This woman was not from the neighbourhood and was looking for the lady who was feeding the cats.

Anyway, there was little I could do and so I walked away, and on the way back, in a different park I saw a pretty girl walking in the opposite direction from me.

Later that day, I decided to go biking, and this time took my longer ride through "Park Hayarkon". There were many people on the streets which was expected of a holiday. When I passed through the southern end of Tel Aviv university, I saw the grey-and-white cat (which I told this blog about earlier) sitting on the fence, and stopped by. It was in a friendly mood and I was able to pet it, and it even rubbed my foot.

When I returned home, I bathed and ate and was in a good mood, then I decided to finally get to the task of forward-porting my Amarok per-song-volume script to Amarok 2.x. This took a lot of trial and error and took me the rest of the evening, but I now have it written and it works nicely. Hopefully, I'll tell more about it in my tech-blog.

Recently, a prominent use.perl.org blogger (and a Perl contributor) started posting many political posts to his blog, which I found annoying and disturbing. After commenting to him about it, it started a conversation and I ended up writing a comment about the importance of meeting your blog reader's expectations. I'd like to copy it here:

You say you only want to have one blog where you'll post about everything, including political posts. In that case, let me tell you a story from my own experience.

I used to have only one blog - first at Advogato and then at LiveJournal. I posted everything I wanted there whether technical or non-technical. At one point I received some important input in which that particular reader said that they were not interested in my technical posts (like vim tips, Linux bugs, etc.), and would rather have them separated. I commented (later in the link) that I agreed, and so started a separate blog for technical matters. I also mention (in the previous link) the fact that a blog I used to read and enjoy deteriorated after its owner became a mother, and started posting exclusively about her motherhood experiences. As a result, I unsubscribed from that blog's feed.

This separation of my blogs proved fruitful afterwards, because several planets have opted to syndicate only the technical blogs (or in the case of Perlsphere, only the Perl subset of them).

Moreover, when I discussed blogging with a certain famous blogger, he said that he reached the conclusion that specialisation of blogs was the key to success, and that people will only subscribe to blogs that concentrate on topics that interest them.

My point is that in blogging, you need to meet your readers' expectations. I am subscribed to the feed of all of use.perl.org's blog entries, because I'm interested in reading what Perl enthusiasts say. I don't mind the personal posts (or otherwise posts that are tangential to Perl) but I find political posts disturbing and annoying and would rather not read them.

So far your blog has received no special treatment as I read it along with all the rest of the posts. But if you don't guarantee that you're not going to post political posts here anymore, I will filter it out, and stop reading everything you have to say, including the Perl-related, and other non-political posts. So you'll lose me as a reader and possibly some other people who will opt not to read your blog.

It's your blog and you can post what you want to it, but I hope you understand that your subscribers may opt out of it, if they feel your blog no longer meets their expectations.

I received quite a lot of heat in that discussion, in what seemed to me like an innocent intention on my part to warn someone of an unpleasant trend in their blog, before I unsubscribe. Eventually, he didn't take my advice, and as a result, I wrote a script to filter posts from use.perl.org based on the author and am now filtering out his posts from the feed I'm reading.

I unsubscribed from some blogs that started not to meet my expectations before, but this was the first time I tried to warn the blog owner about a bad trend.

I should note that once, before blogs became popular, I was subscribed to a mailing list, where I've written many posts. At one point, I had written many posts of a similar theme, only to have learned later from someone else, that many people disliked them, and as a result decided to filter out all of my posts to the list, while receiving the posts of anyone else (using mail filters). I felt offended by this fact, and wished they would have told me (or the list in general) how they felt.

Unsubscribing from a blog is probably less of an issue due to the technological nature of web feeds, but I still think that if a blog that you used to like has deteriorated in some respect, you should let the blog owner know, and I hope to continue in doing this.

Coldplay have a new record called "Left Right Left Right Left" available for download on their site only today. So head over, and download it. I'm not sure if this record is legally freely redistributable in the Creative Commons-sense.

I downloaded it and listened to it and like it very much. The "Viva La Vida" track is especially good.

First of all, happy Passover to everybody. If you're Jewish - have a happy Seder today.

We once showed writing in the Hebrew alphabet to an English IM-friend of ours, and she called it "Tetris". As a result, the nickname stuck and our circle of friends keeps referring to the Hebrew alphabet as "Tetris".

One day we were discussing Jackals, and someone linked to the page about them on the Tamil wikipedia. Then she said that Tamil "looked like a drunk spider walked across the page!". Then I asked her to nicname it in a similar manner to "Tetris" and she said she would call it "curly wurly".

And the obligatory media recommendations: I really enjoyed listening to Rob Costlow's "Woods of Chaos" album on Magnatune.com. Costlow plays the piano, and he has very moving and original melodies, with excellent quality. Magnatune is a music publisher that publishes freely distributable music, and you can listen to the album online.

And I also recently became addicted to this song by Rihanna (which isn't free), so you may enjoy it too.

Happy Passover!

Among my many sins, I am subscribed to "I Can Has Cheezburger?" (the Lolcats photo-blog), and noticed this photo. It featured a photo of a cat that someone I'm talking with on MSN Messenger sports as his user-pic.

I bookmarked it, and after I saw him on MSN, I gave him the link. However, he told me he cannot open the web-site. Now, he happens to live in mainland China, and I asked him if he suspected that it was the Great Firewall of China's doing and he suspected that that was indeed the case.

And indeed it is - the Chinese government has blocked access to the LOLcats site. How funny! (And sad.) Blocking Wikipedia was bad enough, but I don't know how the Chinese can survive without LOLCats.

I've been to an Israeli Python-Web meeting on Tuesday, and it took place in the Google Israel offices. They had a piano there, and I tried playing "I Will Follow Him", which I used to be able to play right-away on the electrical organ. However, no matter which tone-distances I tried, it did not sound exactly right. Maybe I've become rusty.

Today when I slept, I had a dream where I heard some wonderful pop/rock music to a melody I wasn't familiar with (at least not in the dream). Now I cannot remember what it was. Oh well.

My Internet friend referred me to Ronald Jenkees, who is an indie musician featured on YouTube, who plays on the electronic keyboard. He has recorded many melodies he composed and performed, and it's a great listening. Highly recommended.

Last time I blogged, I mentioned Kina Grannis, and after the post, I discovered her original sing and performance called "Gotta Digg" (about Digg.com) which I can also recommend.

In case, you've been wondering why I didn't update this blog much, then it is because I've been mostly updating my technical (= computers-related) blog. I didn't have many ideas for interesting non-technical entries, so I didn't blog here much.

BrainBashers.com is a great site I found with many addictive puzzle games. So far I liked tents, Fillomino, and Rectangles, and there are some puzzles there that I was already familiar with. One thing annoying about it is that the order of switching the states of a square in its Nurikabe puzzle is the opposite from Logic Games Online's. Is it time for another small Greasemonkey script to fix it? ;-)

And some YouTube links:

• Sweet Home Alabama vs. Country Grammar
• Nitzan444 singing "Different Person" (an Original song) - found it on the promoted videos
• Kina Grannis singing 1234 (One Two Three Four) (Feist Cover) - found it in a search I conducted for "one two".

I'm still unemployed, and lately I've been feeling like I don't want to do anything productive. So I spend most of my time chatting on IRC, browsing the web aimlessly, editing wikis, etc. I recall having such periods before, so I think it's just a mood.

I spent some time working on my "Optimising Code for Speed" article, and when I mentioned it to a MSN correspondent, he read what I have now, and keeps encouraging me to finish it. As a result, I've made even more progress.

I also had a long period where I felt shivers in the upper part of body. This made me unable to bike or jog, which may have made my lethargy worse.

I released a new module on CPAN, which wasn't too much of a technical challenge, but still scratches an important personal itch, so I'm glad I completed it. The documentation is still very scarce. I also worked on Config-IniFiles, and closed many of its SourceForge.net bugs.

So that's it for now. Hope you are feeling better.

Here's another personal update. It's the Autumn Jewish holidays period now in Israel, we spent Rosh Hashanah in my Aunt's house in a Kibbutz near the Sea of Galillee. We had the holiday feast in the back yard, with the family, which was tasty and lovely. My aunt's daughter's son (my second nephew) was there, and he can already talk, and could tell us what each animal in his large collection of toy animals was (in Hebrew).

I initially feared that I won't have a lot to do there, so I brought a lot of puzzles from the newspapers to solve. But I found it, my aunt and her husband had an Interconnected computer, which I could use and so did a lot. It ran Windows XP, still had only Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (can you say no tabs?) and pressing the Windows Update menu-item did not appear to do anything. I guess it was likely already pwned by Malware, so I didn't use it to login into sites.

While I was there I discovered this Flash game called "Dig It", which I've been playing since, on and off. I think writing an LM-Solve backend for it wouldn't be too hard and will probably yield good results.

I've been biking lately, about once every two days, and been taking walks in the neighbourhood. I'd like to do some photo-taking-tours sometimes, and upload the photos to my Flickr account, but I keep forgetting to take a camera.

Otherwise, I discovered a bag of instant Majadra (a rice with lentils dish) in the closet, which was slightly overdue, so I decided to prepare it. Then when I tasted it, it had a strong leftover flavour, so I had to throw what I prepared away.

Now for some musical recommendations. In case you've missed it on my homesite's blog, I now have a free (and legal) musical downloads section in the links page of my homepage. It's still incomplete, but I intend to work on it.

Here are some YouTube videos I've liked recently:

1. My Boyfriend's Back from American Dreams
2. Ghostbusters' Theme Song
3. Neil Sedaka - Oh Carol!
4. Sean Kingston - Beautiful Girls
5. And the obligatory song from the Muppet Show: Hugga Wugga

This is this year's Yom Kippur summary. As has been the tradition for several years, on every Yom Kippur, I'm going over the blog entries from the previous year and try to draw some conclusions.

Well, I'm going to be brief today. This year, I quit a job that I didn't like (that had me writing email processing code in PHP with Sendmail and MySQL running on the computer), and worked for 4 months in another job, which I first liked, but then I found of its ugly side, which caused me to stress out completely. I eventually got fired from it.

The second part of the year starting from April was characterised by many periods of stress and anger. Part of it was due to me losing the job, part of it was due to me trying to get involved in the August Penguin conference, which was mis-managed, mis-organised, and where there was too little essential communication, and part of it was due to my decision to run to the Hamakor (the Israeli FOSS NPO) board (which I since cancelled).

This year, my Mandriva Linux Cooker system has caused me a lot of problems, with a lot of elements of my computer working-environment that used to work before, stopping to work for a time. I was able to fix most of them, but it still caused a lot of aggravations. I should note that Cooker is the Mandriva bleeding edge and is supposed to break. At the end of the year though I was able to fix many bugs: with fonts, with the broken router I had that blocked the Internet for my Linux machine, and now everything is mostly back to normal.

I continued to contribute to open-source software this year, including many things to scratch my itches, which I decided to release to the world. Often the programs caused problems, or the co-developers were not communicative, but as a general rule, I'm happy using Linux and other free software.

I worked on some stories and essays this year, which feels good.

So, that's it, I guess. Gmar Hatimah Tovah, everybody, and happy Sukkoth.

It's been a while since there was a soft song that I really liked, but now my wait is over. Having discovered it on last.fm, I fell in love with t.A.T.u's Gomenasai (link to YouTube clip). Gomenasai means "I'm sorry" in Japanese. Wikipedia has more information on this single.

I hope you'll find it as enjoyable as much as I do.

(in Hebrew, this time.)

בעברית הפעם - מה הפקאצה עושה באמת בצבא. שיחה ביני לבין שלומי ישראל:

שלומיף: אז מה אתה עושה בצבא? מיטל מאוד שומרת על סודיות לגבי מה שהיא עושה שם.

שיג'פ: אני עושה דברים בכל אופן... מצטער... אני כמו מיטל פה... בשאלות כאלה.

שלומיף: אה.

שיג'פ: רק שמיטל סתם משקרת. התפקיד שלה זה מש"קית ורוד. היא אחראית על הצבע הורוד בצבא.

שלומיף: הא. הא. לא משקית פקציות? אז איך המדים שלה אינם ורודים?

שיג'פ: לא, בשביל זה צריך להיות קצינה. היא תקבל דרגות ורודות.

This entry is dedicated to peachuk and to the memory of her late husband - John Stephen Hearn, who passed away recently. Thanks to Altreus from IRC who copy-edited this entry.

Before I start with the regular entry, I'd like to note that I went biking through Park Hayarkon (a variation on my usual ride) recently, took many photos and Flickr'ed the good ones. They are all Public Domain, but if you like them or use them, then an attribution or a donation would be appreciated. Well, on we go.

This time in "A Moment of Hebrew" I will cover the various words used to describe people (= men and women) in Hebrew. I decided that from now on, I will also link to the English Wiktionary entries of the words I'm discussing and possibly create an entry or complement the existing one.

I should note that as opposed to English, Hebrew is fully gender-aware: all nouns, including objects are either male or female, whether in singular or in plural. So let's go.

Male - Zakhar (זכר) and Female - Neqevah (נקבה)

Zakhar and Neqevah are the names of the genders. So we can say that a "Hatulah hi Hatul mimin neqevah" which means that "A Catess (;-)) is a cat of the gender 'female'". Some animals are actually primarily female like "Anafah" (= Heron), or "Dayah" (= Milvus), in which case you need "Anafah mimin Zakhar" (= a male Heron).

"Zakhar" comes from "Remembered", which may be because the ancient Semites recalled who their male ancestors were (as is apparent in the "X Begot Y" sections of the Old Testament), and didn't care too much about most of their female ancestors. I was told "Neqevah" comes from "Niqbah" which means a "hole", a "cave" or a "shaft" in Hebrew. (Why it is the case, is left as an exercise to the reader.)

Note that the semantics and connotations of "male" and "female" are very different from English. In "Scent of a Woman" the boy describes a beautiful young woman sitting by (played by Gabrielle Anwar) as "a female". Al Pacino understands that he used it on purpose instead of saying "a girl" or "a woman". However, if you call a girl a "neqevah" in Hebrew, she will be heavily it's offended. It's something like "doll" in English, or even more offensive. It's something Israelis of low culture use to describe women, while knowing it is derogatory.

I didn't hear the word "Zakhar" used for "a man" in a similar fashion to the English "a male".

Ish (איש) - Man/Person, Ishah (אישה) - Woman, Gever (גבר) - Man

"Ish" means more like Person, and Gever is more like man as in manly or male-like. Like "Akhlah Gever" - "one hell of of a man". Or "Eizeh Gever!" - "What a man!". Ishah means "a woman", but again, it may be a bit derogatory in certain contexts. Once on a scouting group tour, a kid who joined us called one of my female peers an "Ishah" and she said that while she technically was one, it was still derogatory to call her that. A male teenager will also object to being called "Ish" or "Gever".

Son, Boy, Guy - Ben - (בן) and Daughter, Girl, Gal - Bath (בת)

While Ben and Bath essentially mean "Son" and "Daughter", they have become to also mean "Boy" (as in Boyfriend, "or I'm going to the beach to catch some boys".) and "Girl" as in "The girls went to work." - "Habanoth [= the girls] halkho la3avodah" (where the "3" is an Ayin). The meaning is a bit derogatory, but not enough for it to matter in everyday speech.

Note that there's a slang term for "Banoth" (= girls) called "Bananoth" which means "Bananas" in Hebrew. My female cousin once used "Bananim" (a play on "Banim") too. This is considered rather old-fashioned in Hebrew, but may become retro.

ילד - Yeled - a male child and ילדה - Yaldah - a female child

Here we start deviating from English. In Hebrew, "boy"/"guy" and "girl" have many different translations. Yeled means a male child or a boy, and Yaldah means a female child. Note that children and adolscents up to high school still call their peers like this. If a 16-18 years-old will say "Pagashti Bahurah Babar" (= I met a "bahurah" (see below), a female guy in the Bar) he is likely to be boasting to his fellows about meeting an older woman. (Similarly, when swapping genders.) On the other hand saying "Pagashti Yaldah Babar" - I met a girl in the Bar would imply he met someone of his age.

נער - Na3ar and נערה - Na3arah

This also means boy and girl but this time older, normally an adolescent or teenager. Note that adolescents are likely to refer to themselves and their peers as "Yeled" and "Yaldah". It also means a young lover (male or female), or a young underling (for the masculine form) or a maid (for the feminine form). In 2nd Samuel 2, they say "Yaqumo Na Ha'ne3arim we'Yesahaqu Lefaneino", which means "May the boys rise and play (= fight games) in front of us". This is like a corporate manager, or an army officer is likely to refer to his underlings as "my boys", or like in the movie Speed, where the Lutenant refers to one of his officers as "my boy, Jack".

עלם - 3elem - "he-damsel" and עלמה - 3almah - damsel

3elem (with an Ayin) means a young man in Hebrew, and 3almah (which is its feminine form) means a young woman - a damsel, a maiden, etc. I'm not aware of a good English translation to 3elem, which is unique in Hebrew.

In modern Hebrew these words are considered a little high, but still OK for most everyday use. An 3elem or 3almah are somewhat older than a Na3ar or Na3arah, already mature, but stil young. Some anecdotes:

• The Hebrew translation for "Miss Smith" is "Ha'3almah Smith" = "the Damsel Smith". It's not often used in Israel, but you can see it in translations from European languages.

• In Isiah 7, 14 Isiah says, "And here the '3almah' get pregnant and bears a son and you shall name him '3immanu'el' [= god is with us]". Now, until a few decades ago, the Catholic Church's Latin translation of it read "And here the (female) virgin gets preganant and bears a child", instead of "And here the damsel gets pregnant and bears a child".

  This was mis-translated to correspond to the reports in the New Testament that Jesus was conceived in the womb of a virgin woman. It was recently corrected in the official translation.

• There used to be (maybe there still is) a publication for teenage-oriented Romantic novels called "3almah".

בחור - Bahur - "guy" and בחורה - Bahurah - "girl" or "gal"

בחור originally meant a Yeshivah student (comes from "chosen" or "selected"), but it came to mean a "guy" in more recent Hebrew. Like "Bahur ehad me'ha'avudah sheli" - "this guy from (my) work.". "Behurah" is its feminine form ("girl", "gal", "bird", etc.), and as opposed to the English "girl", which may be considered derogatory (at least according to some Feminazis) - it's not derogatory in Hebrew.

Like I said previously, it's a term mostly used by people above high-school. Note that in Hebrew in order to say "my co-worker told me about her parents", you'll often say "Mishehi me'havodah sheli sipra li al Hahorim shelah", which means "someone from Work told me about her parents.". Or "A Bahorah from work". That's because saying "Haverthi la'3avodah"/"Haveri La'3avodah" (my co-worker) is more unweildy and less natural for a Hebrew speaker.

Conclusion

I think the entry is getting very long as it is, and I've covered most of the important words. As can be seen, there are many words to describe people in Hebrew, and to me it seems it is much more rich in this regard than English is.

P.S: some more photos, this time from two days ago - not all of them have been uploaded yet.

Well, it's a common belief that comebacks in technology don't happen often, but this time I predict three comebacks. I cannot recommend that you base your decisions (much less investment plans) based on it, but here they are.

Comeback #1: Non-x86 Machines

Once upon a time, companies spent a fortune on costy UNIX servers or even IBM mainframes, just to be able to run their operation. Since then, x86-based computers have become faster and more capable, enough to make people be able to run Microsoft Windows NT or Unix-based Operating systems on them. This is now the most popular setup on the Internet for servers (much less clients and workstations).

However, these x86 machines are not as integrated as their non-x86 equivalents (UltraSPARC, PowerPC, etc.), are still much slower (due to the limitations of the x86 architecture vs. the superior RISC family of architectures). This costs in a lot of time of maintenance, many hardware failures, and sub-optimal lifetime. It is well-known that there are some PC XT machines which are still running. However, finding a low-end desktop Pentium I machine that's still OK is an exercise in futility. And even the high-end x86 servers suffer from many problems.

Human time is much more costy than shelling some money for getting a good RISC machine. And with the portability and stability of the GNU system, and portable and free operating systems such as Linux, or the BSDs, you can easily run a server there at ease.

So what can Sun and IBM (and friends) do about it?. They should phase out their own OSes in favour of Linux, as people have grown to dislike Solaris (to say nothing of AIX, HP-UX, or greater brain-damages). Don't get me wrong - Solaris has its place and I'm sure is a fine piece of engineering. But GNU/Linux is better for trying to promote the hardware.

Sun should also make the OpenSolaris licence GPLv2 and GPLv3 compatible, to allow it to borrow code from Linux and other GPLed-products (and vice versa). And they should also start supporting Perl, PHP, CPython, CRuby, Mono etc. etc. instead of just Java or whatever has been hyped. (Similar to what Microsoft have been doing recently for its MS-Windows OSes).

All of this will allow selling more hardware, getting more support and ergo - more profits. I think the transition to non-x86 machines will happen anyhow, but that will make it faster, and much more profitable for them.

Note that it is not the end of either Intel or much less the end of Microsoft. I still see workstations dominated by x86 in the near future, and both MS and Intel are insanely profitable and have enough time to re-invent themselves. But I think (and hope) we'll be seeing more and more non-x86 servers and to a lesser extent workstations.

Comeback #2 : Mandriva

Once upon a time, the Mandriva Linux distribution (formerly Mandrake) was the de-facto standard for home Linux desktops. Then vocal Debian people started spreading a lot of pro-Debian and anti-everything-else FUD, and Ubuntu also became the over-hyped distribution-of-the-moment. Meanwhile, naturally, Mandriva suffered from lack of popularity and negative FUD, but also still continued to improve.

Right now, as Ubuntu Hardy (which I nicknamed "Hardly") tends to hang up or worse so often, and Ubuntu as a general rule seems to be infested with red-tape, it seems that there's an opening for Mandriva and distributions that are very good, but were not as hyped as Ubuntu.

Here are some Israelis who converted away from Ubuntu lately:

• ik_5 has converted to Mandriva after using Ubuntu for a long time
• Diego converted to Mandriva as well
• Meital has many problems with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) and wishes to switch back to Debian
• Nadavvin has spent the weekend installing Fedora instead of Ubuntu which kept getting hanged up

These are all Linux experts and FOSS contributors. It's harder to tell what the common joe who wants to install Linux at home will choose. But I think that they will tend to hear a recommendation from the experts, too.

Will Mandriva become the hottest distribution? Maybe not. But it doesn't matter - Mandriva was never about hype. Naturally, Mandriva has had and still have its share of bugs and problems (mostly non-critical). But so do most other distributions, including such whose users were spreading anti-hype against it.

Writing this from a Cooker (which is the Mandriva equivalent of something like Debian Testing or Unstable) system.

Comeback #3: Perl

And now we come to the third and final comeback - Perl. You can often here that "Perl is dead", or that "Perl is dying", etc. It's a matter of image, more than technology or mindshare. Many people would blame it on the anti-Perl FUD we can hear from various sources. But I believe the problem has lied in the Perl world itself. To quote an email I sent:

The Perl technology is in an excellent shape. It's fast, feature-rich, powerful, easy to use and learn, under active development, relatively bug-free, with many automated tests, and with many 1st party, 2nd party and 3rd party enhancements (re CPAN).

However, the Perl community is sick. Not dying - but sick.

This sickness was not caused by external attacks. Instead it was created from within the Perl community. By a leadership/intelligencia who were more keen on writing and selling closed books (see my essay about it) than on promoting the core Perl technology, documentation and community. It was caused by an "official" IRC network (which is still the first hit on a Google search for "irc perl") which is full of ego, abuse and hostility - where kicking, bannings (and seemingly K-lines) are not only common, but tolerated and seem desirable. It was caused by administrators and leaders who became too "busy" (and as a result heavily unproductive) to have time for Perl, which is what have been placing food on their table. It was caused by central sites whose source code and data were hidden from the public due to a lot of unknown bad reasons, and for absolutely no good ones. (We advocate openness after all).

But most of all it was caused by the many competent and active Perl contributors who did not take the initiative to replace the existing and sick infrastructure by a more independent and decentralised effort.

(I had written something relatively similar in the pre-Web-2.0 era as part of my "Usability of the Perl World for Newcomers Essay". Nevertheless perlbuzz.com deserves credit for presenting it better, making it public knowledge, and making it more obvious.)

But the situation is now getting better. There are more independent developers who have started to set up sites and help resources of their own. More people blog about their Perl experiences. I'm also going to continue giving my share of the contribution by setting up Perl-Speak (Please don't register yet - the E-mail does not work yet due to problems with my hosting), by contributing to the FAQs, documentation and wikis, and by helping with coding. People like me would also like to complement the inadequate, "official", and completely non-open *.perl.org infrastructure, which has been suffering from bitrot and neglect.

Lately, I've had the pleasure of talking to many people on IRC who have decided to learn Perl for various reasons, and some of them are young or even underage. Along with CPAN and perl5, Perl offers some clear advantages that no language has.

Again, Perl is also not about hype. Some people have privately raved about Perl and recommended it to their friends, but otherwise Perl was promoted quietly, bottom-up and mostly by word-of-mouth. It's hard to know if Perl will become the "hottest" language again. But I believe it will still become more popular, even among new programmers.

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.

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.

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:

1. 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.

2. Someone referred me to Mifne which are located in Haifa, so it was a bit too far.

3. Someone thanked me for my contributions to FOSS, and said he wished I'd be well. Such encouragement is always appreciated. Thanks.

4. I got some other emails.

Thanks to all the people who replied!

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 asked "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:

1. Spelling nazis
2. Grammar nazis
3. Syntax nazis
4. Punctuation nazis
5. Idiomatic talk nazis
6. Semantics nazis
7. Netiquette nazis
8. 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.

IRC Conversation: "Bunny" (Maybe Somewhat Offensive)

This conversation took place on Freenode's #perl the other day. It's funny, so I wanted to share it here. Note that it may be somewhat offensive to some sensitive females (or sensitive males), but I think it's pretty harmless

-->	B-rabbit has joined #perl
  <rindolf>  B-rabbit? I know a B-rat on #linguistics.
 <B-rabbit>  rindolf, cool =]
  <rindolf>  B-rabbit: ok.
 <B-rabbit>  my full name is bunny rabbit bt w :)
 <B-rabbit>  hehe
  <rindolf>  B-rabbit: ah.
  <rindolf>  B-rabbit: "bunny" is a female name.
 <B-rabbit>  lol
  <pippijn>  rindolf: correct
  <pippijn>  I know a bunny
  <rindolf>  Or a Playboy bunny.
       <ik>  rindolf: bunny is a stripper name
  <pippijn>  friends call her bun
       <ik>  pippijn: is she a stripper?
 <B-rabbit>  rindolf, i am a male lol x sorry to disappoint u
  <rindolf>  "IRC: Where men are men, women are men, and the kids are
             FBI agents."
  <rindolf>  B-rabbit: ok, no problem.
       <ik>  pippijn: she should change her name
  <pippijn>  ik: it doesn't hurt her
       <ik>  pippijn: right, but she's violating a fundamental law
       <ik>  pippijn: she either needs to change her name or become a
             stripper
  <rindolf>  ik: I think the other option is better.
  <pippijn>  ik: she'd probably become a stripper rather than changing
             her name
  <rindolf>  pippijn: LOL.
       <ik>  rindolf: yeah, but you're creepy
  <rindolf>  I think I'll make a fortune out of it.

Cheers!