Shlomi Fish's Journal

Blog Entry for my 36th Birthday

2013-05-05T11:15:36Z

Being born on 5 May 1977, I turn 36 (= thirty six) on 5 May 2013. 36 is a special number for me in part because it is the square of 6, but more importantly because it is two times of 18. The age of 18 is considered the start of maturity in Israel when Israeli boys and girls gain the right to vote, and are supposed to enroll into the Israeli military, and normally hit sexual maturity at that point. The time I was 18, 19, 20 in 1995-1997, was very influential for me, and now I feel that I have achieved a second maturity.

I feel I have finally reached peace of mind, am enjoying all the little things in life, and can honestly see reality as it is, and see through many lies. Part of my problem was that for a long time I was playing the “Invisible”, which is something I decided to avoid from now on and work on better publicity. A different issue was me thinking of myself as The Eternal Jew, i.e: a profile, or a “god” in the stock exchange of the gods, which was an unhealthy tendency that I finally put to rest in a scene of my screenplay, Selina Mandrake - The Slayer (thanks to the wonderful protagonist there). Finally, yet another problem was that I have not accepted who I am, which is also something that I decided to avoid from now.

If I were ever going to visit Fantastica, the land of imagination, I would need to be very careful from the wrath of the characters of my stories and screenplays, whom I have put to much suffering (but at least all of them, with an exception in The Enemy and How I Helped to Fight it, ended up alive at the end of the stories and happier than ever. However, all this suffering was secondary to my own which involved hypomanias, and even some Manias, which caused some deteriorated health, and unhappiness to my surrounding.

I have decided that from now on, I would like to socialise more. I was told and understood that the lack of socialisation was part of what is causing hypomanias, and the underlying reason behind Bipolar disorder. I have already attended one Science Fiction and Fantasy Conference in Tel Aviv, and it was a wonderful and colourful experience, and also proved a catalyst for coming up with the idea of a screenplay I have written. I want to do stuff like that more often which will hopefully mitigate my hypomanias problem.

On this occasion, I would like to thank the people who helped me and guided me throughout my journey to maturity: my psychotherapist (whom I won't mention by name, but who provided a lot of solid advice), and Dr. David Burns for his excellent book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy; my friends from the Technion, the Haifa Linux Club, and the Tel Aviv Open Source Club; my friends from the Internet, and my family members for being there when I needed them.

I would also like to thank my characters, who provided a window into my soul and my innermost desires:

The ex-Member of the Organisation from my first real novella The Enemy, who was full of mathematical logic and was practically inhuman.
The Friends in “The One with the Fountainhead” who were happy to play the characters from Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead while parodying and modernising it along the way. They signified what I was unhappy about the Fountainhead and also my growing interest in romantic relationships.
The Human Hacking Field Guide brings us Erisa→Eve, the sexy, mysterious, insurgent, and typical “bad girl” antagonist, who after becoming less of a rebel without a cause, and at the age of 18 felt like she can write her own replacement for In Search of Lost Time, and publish it, and it would be better than the original. Eve, I wish I knew I was reflecting on myself in this respect!
From Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead”, we find such characters as Q, my own Q2, Jadzia Dax, and my own Katie Jacobson, who face a mishmash of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Judaism, Julian Jaynes’ Bicameral Mind theory and other Near East history, open source hackerdom, and various Elders of Zion and Illuminati conspiracy theory, and survive to tell the tale, reflecting upon some of the farfetched stuff I thought to be true, during my “Great Mania”.
Finally, Selina from Selina Mandrake - The Slayer, handled the various vampires and demons she ran into in a graceful and natural way, and finally put my whole obsession with “The Eternal Jew”/“The Invisible”/“The Slayer”/ “The Dispeller”/“The Free”/etc. to rest. Selina, you are great - I love you!

During this period, I have also started writing Humanity - The Movie, which aims to be a parody of Humanity and modern life in particular, and which I originally imagined as being written and filmed by a Bajoran extraterrestrial who arrived at Earth, also during my “Great Mania”. I also began writing The Pope Died on Sunday, which tells the story of an atheist female graphic designer (and a software developer by training) in Milwaukee, during the summer of the year 2000, reflecting on an old mentality, and finally The Blue Rabbit Log, which is a Crazy Comedy parodying Role-Playing Games, and is based on an old idea of mine.

Anyway, right now, I feel like I have reached some greater and greater enlightenment and am more capable of handling life’s problems as I run into them. I have been realised more that the gods help them that help themselves, that I should be happy of what I am and proud of it, and that the people around me can often be dicks. I also realise now that my relentless policy for honesty and sincerity got me in a lot of trouble, because people don't want to face the Elephants in the room, but that I should still try to be more tactful in the future I also realised many people can often be jerks, and try to hurt you on purpose.

Cheers, and have a great 5 May day.

About Female Action Heroes

2013-03-18T14:39:18Z

(Note: this was originally written as a comment for a post on the excellent Action Flick Chick blog by Katrina Hill, but was eaten by the WordPress.org instance there, so I decided to publish it here, after a lot of editing and enhancements.)

Excellent feature! I greatly enjoyed it (just note that I'm a guy) - thanks for sharing and I hope the panel was nice. I hope to see and welcome many talented and resourceful female writers and authors of sci-fi and action, who will collaborate to create part of the next generation of female heroines who are intelligent, resourceful, competent, and talented, yet still sexy, and feminine. Naturally, as a male writer (see the stories and screenplays section of my homepage), I am not going to stand idle and let my peers, whether male or female, surpass me easily, but I suppose that there's always a place for more people competing for that.

Buffy Summers was an awesome character, and I was totally into her and Sarah Michelle Gellar, who was the superb actress and martial artist, who played her, back in the wild wild Web 1.0 days and the first seasons of Buffy (before Buffy graduated from high school and when Faith was still around). That was shortly after I graduated from high school, had lots of raging hormones, and worked in several workplaces as a programmer, and was about to start my college degree. I think Buffy was the “perfection achieved” (or epitome or whatever it is called) version of the fighting lady, whom girls could relate to, look up to as a role model, and found it easy to feel empathy for, and that not only were guys not intimidated by her, but found her extremely attractive.

Anyway, Buffy and other shows I watched in this period such as Friends and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, provided a lot of inspiration and fodder for my stories and screenplays, and I have also created a world titled the Selinaverse that crosses many such influences (what can I say - bipolar disorder / manic-depresssive disorder can be fun sometimes… ;-)) along with other things. Even my most normal story yet - The Human Hacking Field Guide, which tells the story of several high school teenagers in 2005 Los Angeles, who deal extensively in working on open source software (and to a lesser extent free/open “content”), drew inspiration from the characters of Buffy and Faith for the protagonist (Jennifer Raymond) and the antagonist (Eve “Erisa” Siegel) respectively.

I think part of the problem with the realisation of female heroines and even female authors, was the traditional Judeo-Christian Ethics value system which limited the amount of activities women were able to do to exclude philosophy, most important artworks, writing, poetry and being a scholar, the performing arts, and naturally - fighting. Furthermore, the names of most of the most important action heroines in the Bible were deemed inauspicious in the Jewish tradition (the Halakhah), only to become popular among Jews after the Zionist revolution. An action hero or a “hacker” (see the essay titled The Word “Hacker” by Paul Graham) is someone who bends the rules, makes up his or her own rules, takes decisive actions, and controls his or her own destiny, even if they are completely not violent. See what I have written about the David who fought Goliath. This is while a tragic hero accepts his own fate, is bound by many invisible rules, and does not take decisive action - the exact opposite of an action hero. (That put aside, I feel that in art, action heroes and heroines often also initially have hubris (= excessive human pride) and undergo a sort of Catharsis (= a humbling process), although it is a more subtle than the one experienced by tragic heroes in tragedies.)

In any case, I think there's some bitter justice in the fact that there have been several important Jewesses who championed the break from the Judeo-Christian ethical system:

Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Alisa Rosenbaum → Ayn Rand, who despite her many faults in personality and in her philosophical work, and the fact that she often fell victim to the falsehoods and moral fashions of her time, greatly helped lay the ground for the move away from the traditional Judeo-Christian ethics (and not just the sexual/romantic ones).

I was told that Ayn Rand’s philosophy was criticised for being not very “original”, but this kind of “originality” in copyright, having original ideas, patents, and even trade secrets (and what open source/open content/etc. like to call being “proprietary”), was a 20th century fad, and Rand still deserves credit for having a retro, but right-in-the-spotlight philosophy. I am well aware that Rand kinda professed to have supported this “originality/anti-open” philosophy in her works, but in her deeds, she was almost always “if you do not publish - you perish”, in the sense of making her opinions and thoughts known and given to the public consumption, even if she was criticised for them.
Marta Kauffman, who co-created the Television show Friends, which despite superficial appearances to the contrary, took a large part in championing an Aristotelian society, a positive sense-of-life, resourcefulness, passion for life, gender equality, and critical thought - including of many modernist and post-modern scientific beliefs.

P.S: you should watch the three episodes of the Parody: A Love Story (Twilight, Harry Potter, Karate Kid, and Buffy parody) video on YouTube, which sports a chubby girl, who seems unattractive at first, but ends up learning and doing some mean Karate in a typical Buffy-like hotness.

Anyway, thanks for the excellent write up and sorry for getting carried away.

Best regards,

— Mr. Shlomi Fish (a.k.a “Rindolf”) of Tel Aviv, Israel.

Book Report: Catch 22

2012-10-15T10:55:16Z

The book Catch-22 by Joseph Heller has a reputation as one of the greatest books of the 20th century. One of my family members bought it, and I recently finished reading it, and would like to state my opinion.

While the book is well-written, I didn't really find it enjoyable. On the other hand, there wasn't any particular obstacle to stop me from finishing to read it (unlike some books I recently tried to read by Tom Wolfe), so I guess it could have been worse. The humour in the book is sarcastic and dry, and I usually did not find it funny.

At least now I can boast that I have read Catch-22, and other people may find it more enjoyable. Bye for now.

“Like A Bad White Guy Party Gangnam Style” Mirrored

2012-10-04T08:03:08Z

The YouTube video “Like A Bad White Guy Party Gangnam Style - PSY, LMFAO, Dev, Offspring, Bloodhound Gang (Mashup)”, which I have been greatly enjoying has now been mirrored on my personal web site. Follow the link to download it and view it.

The YouTube original is no longer available due to a copyright claim by YG Entertainment Inc. (whoever they may be). I wish all copyright cartels will be banished to the tenth level of hell (which was created especially for them because the first nine levels were too mild).

For related reading, see:

Remix by Lawrence Lessig
My own “The Case for File Swapping”

Yom Kippur 2012 Summary

2012-09-26T16:59:05Z

This Yom Kippur, I again went over my blogs from the last year, and tried to draw some conclusions. Most of my blog posts were in my technical blogs: shlomif-tech, and my blogs.perl.org blog. Nevertheless, I did not blog too much. Instead, I worked a lot on code, wrote E-mails, chatted on IRC, and helped maintain such projects as the Mageia Linux distribution. So I guess it's not so bad, because writing and publishing essays has a tendency to make me nervous.

I was employed for about 7 months this year in a part-time job, which I expected to be more permanent and turned out to be more temporary. I also did not have substantial hypomanias, though I had some periods of stress or anger, and annoyingly, I got into a short period of hypomania yesterday, but luckily was quickly able to recover from it.

I still maintained some sites such as my home-site or the Perl Beginners’s site, and it often kept me busy.

So overall a good year.

Cheers!

Getting Your Job Ad Replied To

2012-08-11T11:26:00Z

Joel Spolsky had published an essay titled “Getting Your Résumé Read” on his Joel on Software site, which gives very good advice for job candidates who want to apply for work. Today, I am going to cover the opposite direction: give some advice for employers who publish job ads in hopes of finding employees. I have seen my share of bad practises among the many job ads I have read, and can tell which ones make me more willing to apply.

Before I start, I am going to share a small item, which I originally planned to publish as is, and later decided to expand into this post, which I have titled “The Worst Job Offer Ever”. After I wrote it, I thought that posting something like that on my blog will make no one want to hire me ever again, so don’t take it too seriously. I am not singling any particular “wanted” adverts.

From: lamejob@gmail.com
To: programmersforum@yahoogroups.com
Subject: BEST JOB!!!

A promising startup with a young, dynamic, environment is looking for a
talented software developer with the following skills:

* Team-player.
* Independent.
* Detail-oriented.
* Considers the big picture.
* Ability to work under pressure.
* Willing to work for stock options.
* B.Sc./B.A. in Computer Science/Software Engineering or equivalent from a
prestigious university with an average of 93.1415% or above.
** M.Sc. an advantage.
* 10 years of experience in JAVA.
* 25 years of experience in php/Mysql.
* 1-3 years of experience in PERL, PYTHON, ror - an advantage.
* 10 years of OOP/OOD experience in C++ and COBOL - a must.
* windows/unix/LINUX sys admin experience (3-5 years).

Please send your CVs in MS Word format to lamejob-jobs@gmail.com .
--
Sent from my iPhone.

I hope you agree that it is pretty bad. Now for the rest of the advice:

The first thing you should do is to spell the requirements precisely. What does the candidate must know for the job? Please consider avoiding giving a number of years of experience because this is annoying. “1-3 years of Java experience” — are people with 4 years of Java experience underqualified?
You should also give a precise description of the job: something like “Ruby-on-Rails expert”, “Perl expert”, “UNIX Systems Administrator”, “PHP expert” etc. That way people who do not match this description will know better than to apply.
You should also use proper spelling, grammar, and syntax. Perl is not spelled “PERL”, Python is not spelled “PYTHON”, and it's MySQL - not “MYSQL”, “Mysql” or “mySQL”. It's also “PHP” - not “Php” or “php”.
If you have a successful business or planning on having one, then you should get your own DNS domain such as mycompany.com, set up E-mail hosting for it, and send the job posts from there. Sending from a Webmail provider such as “@gmail.com”, “@hotmail.com” or “@yahoo.com” will make a bad impression, and indicate lack of professionalism.
You should also use a standard desktop, or a comfortable laptop computer to type and phrase the message - not a mobile device which results in more error-prone and less Netiquette -conforming messages. Make sure that your E-mail lacks any of the branding or advertising signatures such as “Sent from my iPhone”.
Specify the formats in which it is possible to send the résumé, for example Microsoft Word, OpenDocument Text, XHTML or PDF. This way the candidates will know which formats they should send and you will have less problems reading their E-mails. That is one thing the worst job advert I gave did right, but naturally many people will appreciate the ability to send in different formats to the proprietary Microsoft Word format.

Also specify whether it would be possible to send a link to an online version of the résumé for easy viewing using your favourite browser, and avoid the hassles of opening attachments and their myriad formats.
Please don't require an “ability to work under pressure”. Most developers are naturally going to perform worse under pressure, and you should make sure you avoid pressuring them as much as possible. In order to attract developers, it is a good idea to advertise that your company normally operates on no more than 40 hours of work in a week — see what Evan Robinson has written about it in “Why Crunch Modes Doesn’t Work: Six Lessons”.

If you do have a pressured environment (which is unfortunate but a fact of life), say “We have a pressured environment.” instead.
Another good idea is to encourage candidates to show off their open-source projects and web-presence (home sites, blogs, etc.). However, “show me your GitHub page” may work for some people, but will leave a bad taste in the mouth, and will offend some other people, because some people prefer some of its alternatives (include me).
You should spell the location of your offices (at least roughly) and specify how much one can telecommute, if at all.
Whatever you do, please don’t post the job ad to the same forum more than once every few months. Posting the exact same position several times will make people annoyed and they may complain, filter your messages, or request that you get banned from posting on the forum.
It is a good idea to mention some of the software management practices your company employs, such as using version control, writing automated tests, performing code reviews, refactoring, or pair programming.

Finally, as Joel mentions in the original essay, you should make your ad stand out. One good example was once posted to the Israeli Ruby developers mailing list:

Subject: Developers Developers Developers

Looking for developers who:

* want a full time, salaried position
* want to work in a fun, young workplace
* want to work in an environment that allows them to use (just about)
whatever tools they wish to get the job done
* know and love ruby
* ideally have experience with php and python
* want to work on large scale rails/merb projects that have nothing to
do with "the social web"
* want to drown a puppy every time they hear phrases like "the social
web"

This job ad (and especially the two last items) makes a stance, and makes the readers feel empathic towards it.

Good luck!

Copyright and Licence

This document is Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2012, and is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0 Unported (or at your option any later version).

For securing additional rights, please contact Shlomi Fish and see the explicit requirements that are being spelt from abiding by that licence.

Tech Tip: Getting hgsubversion to Work with subversion-1.7.x

2012-03-09T19:04:46Z

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.

Interesting Thought + Music Recommendation

2011-11-24T10:41:26Z

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.

Joke: The Believer Rabbi

2011-11-06T18:53:41Z

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.

Yom Kippur 2011 Summary

2011-10-10T15:39:56Z

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.

Recommendation and Tip: The QUnit JavaScript Automated Tests Library

2011-08-11T16:33:14Z

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.

Review of the Book Forrest Gump

2011-08-07T16:35:11Z

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.

שבוע הספר האלטרנטיבי באוניברסיטת תל-אביב

2011-05-28T21:03:30Z

באוניברסיטת תל אביב הולך להתקיים ביום שלישי, ה-31 במאי (השבוע) שבוע הספר האלטרנטיבי (ראו את הדף של האירוע בפייסבוק ) באוניברסיטת תל אביב, ממול לבניין גילמן, הפקולטה למדעי הרוח, בין השעות 09:30 בבוקר ל-16:30 אחה"צ.

אם לקרוא מהתיאור:

ביום שלישי ה31/5 אנחנו עורכים יום אלטרנטיבי לקראת שבוע הספר בשיתוף האגודה והחוג לספרות באוניברסיטה מ10:00 בוקר ועד אחר הצהריים יוצבו דוכני ספרים של יוצרים עצמאים ויוצרים חדשים, "ספר תמורת ספר" הביאו ספר שעשה את שלו והחליפו אותו באחר או לחלופין לתרומה על הדשא מול גילמן תעמוד במה פתוחה לקריאת שירה ופרוזה קצרה שתפעל בהפסקות הלימודים בואו לקרוא ולהקריא, לשמוע ולהשמיע, לדפדף וליהנות מחווית ספרות שלא תמצאו בדוכני שבוע ספר רגילים ותהיה בירה בזול

רשימה חלקית של משתתפות ומשתתפים: כתב העת מעין, מתי שמואלוף, בסטרבות, כתב העת אלת המסטיק, סמטאות ספרים, המשורר עידו הראל, כתב העת אלמנך, מגזין איי-5, אביגיל פקלמן, גולדמונד ספרים.

מבטיחים הפתעות נוספות!

גם אני מתכוון לבוא לשם כדי להקריא מהסיפורים שלי (ובכללם נובילות, תסריטים, אמרות שפר, ומובאות), שחלקם התחלתי לתרגם לעברית לקראת האירוע. אני מקווה לראות גם אתכם שם.

קריאה נעימה!

Film Review of Just Go with It

2011-05-09T17:22:02Z

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.

New and Improved Stories, Screenplays, Aphorisms and Bits

2011-04-05T19:06:34Z

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.

One Thing You Cannot Say in the United States

2011-04-01T10:49:58Z

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.

משל יותם ו"היפה והחנון"

2011-02-26T08:31:56Z

כבר הציעו לי מספר פעמים להשתתף ב"היפה והחנון" וסרבתי. למי ששכח, זה מה שנאמר בתנ"ך במשל יותם:

וַיַּגִּדוּ לְיוֹתָם, וַיֵּלֶךְ וַיַּעֲמֹד בְּרֹאשׁ הַר־גְּרִזִים, וַיִּשָּׂא קוֹלוֹ וַיִּקְרָא;
וַיֹּאמֶר לָהֶם - שִׁמְעוּ אֵלַי בַּעֲלֵי שְׁכֶם, וְיִשְׁמַע אֲלֵיכֶם אֱלֹהִים:

הָלוֹךְ הָלְכוּ הָעֵצִים, לִמְשֹׁחַ עֲלֵיהֶם מֶלֶךְ.
וַיֹּאמְרוּ לַזַּיִת: מָלְכָה עָלֵינוּ!
וַיֹּאמֶר לָהֶם הַזַּיִת: הֶחֳדַלְתִּי אֶת־דִּשְׁנִי, אֲשֶׁר־בִּי יְכַבְּדוּ אֱלֹהִים וַאֲנָשִׁים -
וְהָלַכְתִּי לָנוּעַ עַל־הָעֵצִים?!
וַיֹּאמְרוּ הָעֵצִים לַתְּאֵנָה: לְכִי־אַתְּ מָלְכִי עָלֵינוּ!
וַתֹּאמֶר לָהֶם הַתְּאֵנָה: הֶחֳדַלְתִּי אֶת־מָתְקִי, וְאֶת־תְּנוּבָתִי הַטּוֹבָה -
וְהָלַכְתִּי לָנוּעַ עַל־הָעֵצִים?!
וַיֹּאמְרוּ הָעֵצִים לַגָּפֶן: לְכִי־אַתְּ מָלְכִי עָלֵינוּ!
וַתֹּאמֶר לָהֶם הַגֶּפֶן: הֶחֳדַלְתִּי אֶת־תִּירוֹשִׁי, הַמְשַׂמֵּחַ אֱלֹהִים וַאֲנָשִׁים -
וְהָלַכְתִּי לָנוּעַ עַל־הָעֵצִים?!
וַיֹּאמְרוּ כָל־הָעֵצִים אֶל־הָאָטָד: לֵךְ אַתָּה מְלָךְ־עָלֵינוּ!
וַיֹּאמֶר הָאָטָד אֶל־הָעֵצִים: אִם בֶּאֱמֶת אַתֶּם מֹשְׁחִים אֹתִי לְמֶלֶךְ עֲלֵיכֶם - בֹּאוּ חֲסוּ בְצִלִּי;
וְאִם־אַיִן - תֵּצֵא אֵשׁ מִן־הָאָטָד, וְתֹאכַל אֶת־אַרְזֵי הַלְּבָנוֹן!

אף על פי מה שנאמר שם, לי בתור אדם יצרני, אין מניעה להתנדב מלשאת במשרה ציבורית. אם יציעו לי להיות ראש ממשלה, הרי שאשמח. אבל אין לי כוונה בתור בחור גיקי שמכבד את עצמו לעשות מעצמי צחוק בתוכנית ריאליטי כמו "היפה והחנון", רק כדי להשיג את מה שאריק ריימונד מתאר כ"פרסום זול" וכ"אנשי פרצופים", שמפורסמים רק בשל היותם מפורסמים ופעמים רבות אין איש מאחורי הפרצוף. אם וכאשר אתפרסם, הרי שזה יהיה בשל פועלי ויכולותיי, לא בגלל שהופעתי בעוד סידרת ריאליטי דבילית שמהווה אופיום רע ביותר להמונים. אני בטוח שגם הבחורות המושכות שיש להן קצת אופי וחוכמה, מספיק משכילות מכדי לגשת למבחני הקבלה של "היפה והחנון" מראש.

אז בבקשה אל תטרידו אותי עם זה יותר, ואם כן אנא חפשו באינטרנט את "שלומי פיש והיפה והחנון ומיצאו רשומה זאת.". יש לי הרבה פחות בעייה עם סדרות ריאליטי כדוגמת "כוכב נולד" (בארץ ובעולם) שם המתמודדים מתחרים על כישוריהם כזמרים, וזה מהנה לראות את זה (אם כי אני בחרתי שלא לצפות בתוכניות אלה באופן עקבי.). ראו גם מה שכתבתי על האינפלציה בזמרים מתוכניות ריאליטי בעבר.

Please Help Copy Edit a Hebrew Version of "The Enemy"

2011-02-24T07:46:56Z

This is a call for people to help copy edit the Hebrew draft of the 6th Hebrew revision of my story "The Enemy and How I Helped to Fight it" which one can find on a temporary location on my homepage. The .xhtml is viewable in a web-browser (not Internet Explorer by default, though because it does not support .xhtml files then - you can use Firefox, Google Chromium/Chrome, Opera, Safari and most other standard-compliant browsers), while the file ending with ".fiction-text.txt" is a well-formed plain-text based source file that is ultimately used to generate it. As a result, if one sends UNIX-style patches, they should be for that version.

Here is the abstract for the story, taken from my homepage:

A member of the terrorist organisation "The Organisation" gets up in the morning, goes to his post and quits. But before he leaves he makes a suggestion that causes his former comrades to fight each other to the death. Join the now ex-Member of the Organisation as he embarks on an ego-trip, where he tries to prove that A can in fact be non-A, regardless of what Aristotle could differ.

It's a political satire, but one that is universal in its message, and touches on many aspects of politics, logic and Objectivist philosophy.

The story is made available under the Creative Commons CC-by-sa open content licence and I automatically assume that all the fixes to the story will be licenced the same, while assigning me as the copyright (though naturally you may request that I credit you on the cover page of the story, with which I'll be happy to comply. If you're unhappy with that, feel free to "fork" the story (in the open-source sense - not the Github sense).

I've also set up a MediaWiki page for the story on a wiki on Wikia which you can edit directly inside the browser, and I will integrate the stuff from it there (if you wish to be credited there, please leave a comment on the talk page.)

I hope you'll enjoy reading the Hebrew version (or the English one on my homepage if you can't read Hebrew) even if you don't detect any problems. I apologise that this entry is not in Hebrew, but I did not want the non-Hebrew readers of this blog to feel left out.

New Essay: "Dealing with Hypomanias"

2010-12-20T18:08:48Z

Recently, I've published a new essay I've written titled "Dealing with Hypomanias" on my homepage. I've been suffering from periods of bad pyschological moods since I was 14 years old, including clinical depressions, clincial anxities, hypomanias (= "below-manias") and even some manias. As a result, I believe I have Bipolar disorder, but the psychotherapist I go to said he didn't diagnose me as such, because doing so will have no implication on my therapy.

Lately, I've mostly only had hypomanias, and this essay gives some advice from my experience on how to effectively handle them. I'd appreciate any feedback.

Web Comics I Discovered

2010-10-23T19:56:41Z

Today was an active day for me: I took two walks in the neighbourhood, sorted the dishwasher, announced a new version of XML-Grammar-Fortune on Freshmeat.net, revisited my patchset to mozbot, the Mozilla IRC bot, washed my hair, and worked on my home-site. So what better way to continue this trend than to blog here on my non-tech blog, which I wanted to do in my Yom Kippur resolutions?

The topic for today is some web-comics I discovered recently and would like to recommend. The first one is A Softer World, which combines some atmospheric pictures with words of funny dialogues. I don't usually remember the contents afterwards and sometimes have trouble understanding them, but it's still amusing.

The second one is "Spiked Math" which is about mathematics, and very geeky. Here's a sample comic:

For more about Chuck Norris see my Chuck Norris facts page.

Another fine web comics, that I have less trouble understanding, is Calamities of Nature. It combines dialogues of cartoon characters (very nicely drawn) with philosophical thoughts. Here is a sample comic:

Here's the transcript:

[[ Harold and Aaron sitting at a table, each reading a newspaper. ]] 

Harold: California will be voting on a measure to legalize and tax marijuana 
this fall. 

Aaron: It's about time.

Aaron: Legalization will result in a major reduction of law enforcement costs,
open up space in overcrowded prisons, and raise billions of dollars for a fiscally
crippled state.

Harold: But what about the moral decay of society? 

Aaron: Don't worry, we still have alcohol for that.

For more about drug legalisation see my essay "The Case for Drug Legalisation" and its referenced pages.

Another comic that I've come to enjoy recently is "Just 1 Random Guy". It combines the cartoon boxes drawn with crude computer graphics with text. Here is a sample:

Here's the transcript:

It seems that staring at the comptuer
all day may be a bit less healthy than
previously assumed.

(1 Random Guy saying it with bleeding eyes.)

(I can related to that, because lately I've been having some headaches which we suspect is due to heavy computer use.)

The final comic I'm going to recommend is Geek Hero Comic, which appears to have been discontinued about a year ago, but seems to have been pretty entertaining. Here is a sample:

Here's the transcript:

A: Alright Now that we know where they are, we have to get there!

B: Wo-wo-wou hold it! Perhaps you mean we've got to reroute our packets?

A: No, I mean we've got to physically go there.

B: Like, change the physical address of our network cards?

A: No! Get out-side, get on a bus and go there!

B: A serial bus or a parallel one?

A: God, you go out even less than I do!

B: I Rent a little studio in this building…

Happy web-comicsing!

Yom Kippur Summary - 2010

2010-09-22T17:31:25Z

As has been the tradition on this blog for a few years already, I'm going over my blog posts for the past year, and writing a summary of what the past year has been for me. This is since last year's summary. I should note that I have indeed gone over the blogs on Yom Kippur, but did not get to write this summary until today which is Erev Sukkoth.

Well, the trend of neglecting the non-technical blog continued, and on the other hand I wrote many posts to my technical blog, including essays, tips, thoughts, invitations to open source software-related events, reports on them and rants. Nevertheless, I worked on my homepage quite a bit, although possibly also with a technical focus.

Another somewhat worrying trend was the fact that I neglected to post a lot of photos to my Flickr account. I hope to grab a camera and take more photos soon, but I keep forgetting that.

Some of the posts to my technical blog have caused me a little grief this year, but I've dealt with them pretty well. Starting from somewhere in July, I started working for a Tel Aviv-based start-up, and so far it's been going pretty well, despite some obvious technical difficulties. I also did two projects for an American start-up for a payment.

There weren't too many severe stressful periods, but on the other hand, I've been neglecting doing my Cognitive therapy exercises lately, so I'd like to get back to them.

I've continued to work on open-source projects this year, especially on Freecell Solver, on the Black Hole Solitaire Solver, on various Perl 5 CPAN modules, and on KDE. I've also probably spent too much time on IRC for my own good.

This year I discovered a lot of great music on Jamendo, the MOD archive and YouTube.

So, to sum up, a good year for me. Next year, I hope to write more stuff on the non-technical blog, work on some essays and stories, and hopefully to contribute to some open-source projects with many participants such as GIMP which I've been missing lately.

So long everyone, and happy Sukkoth.

No one knows about Persian Cats

2010-07-01T10:41:42Z

This post originated from a mailing list post by Chris Green to the writers-at-MIT.edu mailing list.

No-one knows about Persian Cats.

Filmed in Iran, the recently released film No-one Knows About Persian Cats, now doing the film festival circuit, tells the story of a group of young, underground musicians who want to do nothing more than play music.

In Iran there's a situation reminiscent of the sign posted above the door of The Parliament Of Owls, featured either in The Once And Future King, or at least in The Book of Merlin, which was deleted from the first title because its satirical attitude was frowned upon during the Cold War.

The sign says something to the effect of “Everything Which Isn't Banned is Mandatory.”

In Iran, a musician either plays Iranian Classical music, or they don't play at all.

At least not publicly… :-)

The young musicians in the film want to play contemporary pop, heavy metal, or World Music, and even jazz. To play any of this in such a way that it comes to the attention of the authorities is quite dangerous, and so clubs and recording studios are underground and hidden away.

My understanding is that in a country where more than 50% of the people are under 30, there are a lot of clubs like this. Some people have filmed sets in these clubs and put videos up on YouTube, and elsewhere, where I have seen them over the years.

There are some hot musicians over there, but I don't know any of their names, except for one band which has relocated to the UK, one named Radio Tehran. There are other expatriate Iranian bands and performers, and there now is at least one record label (in the UK) set up by some of the musicians to record and distribute their music.

While writing this, I realized the excellent word play in the title, No-one Knows About Persian Cats.... musicians used to call themselves cats, especially the hep jazz and rockabilly cats... so, no-one knows (much) about the Persian cats, daddy-o, and the hep music they play...

Also, cats are banned in Iran, formerly called Persia.

I noticed many years back that the young people who have access to the internet, cds, and old-fashioned cassette tapes, want to experience and enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that their counterparts have elsewhere.

The underground in Iran is something of a pressure cooker, and one of these days the older generation ( the ones behind the Iranian revolution) and oppressive elements will start to lose control of the oppressive political and social powers they currently have.

Things will boil over. Again.

The younger generations will want to have control over their own future, as will the Cubans when things start to change there: in both instances, the direction of the 'further revolution' (to coin a term) will (hopefully) be dictated by the people who participate in it.

They want to change their societies and the lives they live, but on their own terms: this is as it should be.

The best thing for outsiders to do is to not interfere (actively), other than to occasionally offer encouragement and support, but to generally stay out of their way.

Here's the Wikipedia page about this film.

Cheers,

Chris Green

Purim Special: The Ultimate Conspiracy Theory Behind the Story of the Scroll of Esther

2010-02-27T17:12:14Z

It's Purim today, and here is my own conspiracy theory for the events detailed in the Scroll of Esther on which the holiday is based.

In my conspiracy theory, Mordechai was very interested in the politics of the Persian empire, and sought ways to influence it. He got in contact with Haman, a close childhood friend of the King, and gave him a lot of advice for how to run the empire, which Haman delivered to the king by proxy. The king was so impressed by Haman's good advice that he appointed him as prime minister (or in Hebrew "second/vice to the king."). Mordechai also had proposed his cousin, Hadasah (afterwards renamed Esther) as the wife of the king as a way to further influence the king (or it is possible that Esther delivered Mordechai's advice to Haman).

However, Mordechai, Esther and Haman got tired of all the proxying and so sought a way to make Mordechai second to the king instead of Haman. So they staged the rest of what happened. Then, after the night the king could not sleep and requested that the royal records be read to him and then told Haman that Mordechai should be honoured, was indicative that he also came to understand what was going on and agreed to play along.

Meir Shalev in תנ"ך עכשיו (= "the Bible Now" in Hebrew) presents Mordechai as the master mind behind the scenes of the plot, but acknowledged that there are many remaining co-incidences. On the other hand, I go a step further, and make Esther and Haman his co-conspirators, and so get rid of most of the remaining co-incidences there.

Happy Purim, though it seems like it's a particularly rainy one this year.

Etymology of the Word "Cat"

2010-02-23T14:59:33Z

According to the Wiktionary entry of the English word "Cat" (for domestic felines, etc.) it is originally derived from the Late Egyptian "čaute", feminine of "čaus 'jungle cat". I guess the Hebrew word for Cat, "Chatul" has a similar origin, and I never noticed the similarity between the two words until I've read the etymology in the Wiktionary. There are similar words in other European languages: the French chat, and the German "Katze", and the Arabic word for Cat is Qitt.

Make sure you avoid a useless use of "cat"…

Personal Log

2010-01-16T19:17:46Z

On Friday, I went to the Hebrew Wikipedia meeting that commemorated it having 100,000 entries now. I enjoyed the food there, but left after the first round of lectures. Still, it was a nice refreshment from what I usually did and I had to wake up early to come there on time.

Later on that day I worked on Freecell Solver and today I wrote a report about it to the mailing list. I also spent a lot of time cleaning up my hard-disk and removing a lot of cruft, both from my home-directory and the main partition.

Today was less intensive for me and I mostly rested. However, one of the connectors on my glasses became faulty and as a result the right handle does not hold up properly, and I need to replace it tomorrow. Very annoying.

Finally, here are some albums I enjoyed from Jamendo: