I don’t believe in fairies. Oops! A fairy died.
I don’t believe in fairies. Oops! Another fairy died.

The prefix “God said” has the extraordinary logical property of converting any statement that follows it into a true one.

A Jewish Deduction

The Bible dictates that “Thou shalt not seethe [= cook] a kid [= young goat] in his mother’s milk”. To avoid any possibility of breaking that regulation, the Jewish tradition ruled that it also applies to female goats, to mature goats, and to the meat and milk of two completely unrelated goats. It is also forbidden to eat the meat with fresh milk, and it applies to beef and mutton as well (including mixing the milk and meat of two different beasts). Finally, chicken, which are incapable of milk production, may not be eaten along with any mammal’s milk either.

We are fortunate that most mathematicians were not Jewish. Otherwise, it would have been forbidden to divide by all numbers between -1 and 1.

I used to be arrogant. Now I’m simply Perfect.

If the ancient Greeks had invented UNIX, Murphy’s Law would have been known as Aristotle’s Law.

Had they invented MS-Windows, Murphy’s Law would have been known as the Law of Socrates.

Microsoft’s slogan used to be “Microsoft - making it all make sense.”

It should have been: “Microsoft - making it all make sense. Ours.”

Linux - Because Software Problems Should not Cost Money.

The American Lottery - all you need is a dollar and a dream. We will take the dollar, but you can keep the dream.

Shlomi Fish

“Shit Happens” according to the religions of the world (Deltas by Shlomi Fish)

Judaism: God knows you will do shit, does nothing to prevent it, but makes you take the blame for it anyway.

“Shit Happens” according to the religions of the world
(Deltas by Shlomi Fish)

Judaism: God is all the shit, all the non-shit and all the intermediate demi-shits in between.

Let’s interpret the past according to the present and not the present according to the past.

Shlomi Fish

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

Programming Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about stars.

— Shlomi Fish

[Discussing the shortage of IT workers as of 1998 on E-mail]

Shlomi Fish to Omer Zak: “Even the NSA doesn’t have enough programmers. But it is not likely that they will have more, and that’s because Summerschool at the NSA may might as well be the name of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s next movie.”

Omer Zak to Shlomi Fish: “And as opposed to I Know What You Did Last Summer, it is going to be scary.”

Objective philosophy is like a pencil sharpener for one’s mind.

Oh! I wish you could see the look on his face! Actually, I would have also liked to see the look on his face, but just then I woke up from the dream.

Had I not been already insane, I would have long ago driven myself mad.

“Aside from all that, I planned a political simulator that forecast the two World Wars after I entered all the relevant data until the year 1000 AD.”

“Do you have a computer at home?”

“Oh, no! At present the program is written on a paper. Don’t ask how much time it took me to fully eliminate all bugs out of it. But it was great fun!”

“Likewise.” Added the interviewer and said: “Your answers were also very… unusual.”

“Although this description cannot testify on their quality, I take it as a compliment.”

The government of the Supporter will finance your travel, and you will be able to leave tomorrow morning. We would like to inform you of the following facts: we cannot assure your safety during this travel. Furthermore, despite your long service at the Organisation and your constructive proposal, we cannot say, wholeheartedly or halfheartedly, that we wish to protect your safety. Likewise, we cannot guarantee that we would not take actions that may harm you, indirectly or in a direct manner.

We hope to see you here very soon.

“Okay, I think that I can now return to my country and my village. By the way, how many forbidden books do you have?”

“Oh,”, one of them said to me, “their number is growing geometrically. When I checked two weeks ago, their number was 2,148,763. A week ago there were 4,278,109 forbidden writings. Now there must be about 8,600,000 ones.”

“You are wrong.”, I said to him.

“I beg your pardon?”

“There are now exactly 8,517,559 or 8,517,560 forbidden books.”

“Why is it so important?”

“Why, it means that, for the time being, you have 82,440 or 82,441 extra books which you can read at bedtime if you can’t fall asleep!”

“And what is the nature of those activists: Socialists? Communists? Liberals?… ”

“Let’s say, for the sake of simplicity, that they are people of my intellect, only that as opposed to me they are sane.”

A more experienced programmer does not make less bugs. He just realizes what went wrong more quickly.

BTW, for an editor with no replace feature (at least not on Windows 95), no regular-expression search and replace, no indentation support, no syntax-highlighting and no macros and scriptability features: MS Notepad is one hell of an editor!

Suggested Improvements to the Documentation:

The WYSIWYT project was for a long time fascinated by Microsoft’s tremendous desire to advance its Internet Explorer web-browser. We saw the fact that they switched the help systems of the upcoming Windows 98, as well as Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0, to HTML a major step in advancing our project.

As a complementary step, some of the chief heads of our project suggested that the Windows’ manuals themselves, as well as all of Microsoft’s ads, will be designed in HTML and printed after being rendered by IE 4. While this project is in the preliminary and planning stages, we expect it to acquire a large momentum soon.

If: 1. A is A.
2. A is not not-A.
does it also imply that:
1. B is B.
2. B is not not-B.

I know I’m blond, but I have to colour my hair brown, so people would not think I’m stupid. Because, like the title of the book says: "You’ve only got Three Seconds".

Actually, since Amazon sent us two books like that, you’ve only got six seconds.

Knuth is not God! It took him two days to build the Roman Empire.

Knuth is not God! God has already released TeX version 4.0.

Shlomi, Have you ever considered taking a Turing test? ;-)

<sarcasm>
Sure I did. I sat at one point of an IRC channel, and someone tested me. Eventually it was discovered that I am a computer, but it turned out the other side was an Eliza program. Strangely enough, I could not detect that the latter fact was true.
</sarcasm>

There is no IGLU Cabal! None of them could pass the Turing test. But strangely enough a computer program they coded, could.

Knuth is not God! Google is not God! RMS is not God!

God himself said that was the case.

Knuth is not God! Typing “God” into Google and pressing “I’m Feeling Lucky” would not lead you to his homepage.

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 2084 ("The Great WWW-Wisdom Shootout")

Knuth is not God! Unless you confuse him with Dijkstra.

(I am patenting issuing a TINIC with anything else but the phrase "There is no IGLU Cabal!". The patent number is kept secret to avoid violating the copyright of its text)

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 2021

C++ supports Object-Oriented Programming, roughly as much as COBOL supports Functional Programming.

I hope that if it had not been clear before, it isn’t less clear now.

Jack: Hi, Sophie!

Sophie: Don’t “Hi, Sophie!” me.

Jack: Don’t “Don’t ‘Hi, Sophie!’ me” me!

My opinions may seem crazy, but they all make sense. Insane sense, but sense nonetheless.

Shlomi, I’m considering naming a corollary of Godwin’s law after you - any discussion of anything is over when you mention Freecell Solver.

— Muli Ben-Yehuda on #kernelnewbies (irc.kernelnewbies.org)

Muli: BTW, I think that any discussion only begins to gain momentum when I mention Freecell Solver.

— Shlomi Fish on #offtopic (irc.kernelnewbies.org)

There’s no point in keeping an idea to yourself since there’s a 10 to 1 chance that somebody already has it and will share it before you.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

Two apples a day will keep two doctors away.

“You are banished! You are banished! You are banished! Hey! I’m just kidding!”

[Discussing Foreign Languages Knowledge in the U.S.A]

Ben Collins-Sussman: Tis’ true, unlike Europe, the language doesn’t change every 100 miles.

Shlomi Fish: And unlike England, the accent does not change every 10 miles.

What happened to Christopher Michael Pilato?
Is he gone?
Is he gone for good?
Is he gone for better?
Is he gone for best?
Is he gone forever?
Will he return?
Who is Christopher Michael Pilato, anyway?

Can anyone draw a plan as to how to teach a computer to laugh? Say we define laugh as print “LOL”, and define smile as print “:)”. How would a computer know when to print any of those, and when to operate an Eliza program?

Judging by IRC or AOL, randomly would do just fine. 😉.

In Philosophy, as much as in software engineering, you don’t get credit for originality. What matters is the final product, not who came up with the idea for each feature first.

Unfortunately as other people have mentioned - the HURD is seriously lacking in developers, especially driver writers. Linux is to blame for most of that.

KImageShop is seriously lacking in developers, and the GIMP is to blame for most of that.

He has a high degree of idealism, a high degree of stubbornness, and an even higher degree of inability to distinguish between the two.

> Thanks, applied as change #22936.

And thank you for applying this patch. But to be honest, I’m a little disappointed. I expected it won’t go in so easily and will trigger some discussion here. But there was none. No typo corrections (“you misspelled ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’”); no flames ("this patch is the worst thing since non-sliced bread"). Nothing.

Someone should do something about it. This direction is not healthy for p5p. Seriously.

[Commenting in Slashdot after Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to use open-source software in the California government:]

> This is obviously because Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are girly men.

Yeah and what are the offerings of the open-source world? Let’s see:

1. Linus Torvalds - Looks like a dweeb, ergo is a dweeb. How girly is that? (plus his wife can kick ass better than him) 2. Richard M. Stallman - a hippy. How girly is that? 3. Eric S. Raymond - a nice looking man with a moustache. Baby faced, so he looks a bit girly to me. 4. Larry Wall - a cross between Linus and RMS (i.e: a hippy dweeb) that is even more girly.

So who do we have left? Alan Cox? OK, he’s manly. (huge man, huge facial hair, etc.) And all the others are so negligible people don’t even know how they look like.

Note: this comment may have been a bit cruel, so sorry. Don’t take it too seriously, especially if you’re one of the guys I laughed about. I hold you all with the greatest respect. Seriously.

Sincerely yours,
Shlomi Fish (who is a quite girly male himself).

If his programming is anything like his philosophising, he would find ten imaginary bugs in the "Hello World" program.

Hacker sees bug. Hacker does not want bug. Hacker fixes bug.

Tcl is Lisp on drugs. Using strings instead of S-expressions for closures is Evil with one of those gigantic E’s you can find at the beginning of chapters.

Linus Torvalds: "95% of Programmers consider themselves in the top 5%".

Shlomi Fish’s Corollary: "95% of Programmers consider 95% of the code they did not write, in the bottom 5%."

(The other 5% have read "Joel on Software".)

C++ is complex, complexifying and complexified.

(With apologies to the Oxford English Dictionary).

The first phrase that should be taught when teaching a new language is how to say “Do you speak English?”.

The first thing that needs to be taught when teaching a new computer tool is how to exit it.

He who re-invents the wheel, will understand much better how a wheel works.

He who re-invents the wheel, may actually invent a much better wheel.

Shlomi Fish

He who re-invents the wheel will likely design a square wheel and spend a year trying to figure out why it doesn’t work properly.

Nadav Har’El

Sometimes you don’t need to be familiar with a better alternative to know that something sucks. Take Microsoft Word for example.

The difference between a good student and a bad student is that a bad student forgets the material five minutes before the test, while a good student five minutes after it.

Real programmers don’t write workarounds. They tell their users to upgrade their software.

Jewish Atheists are the only true Atheists. They beat the hell out of Goy Atheists.

“You know:”, the physicist said, “in my opinion since you left the Organisation you acted without thinking a lot before you did things. I would describe your behaviour as deriving from spontaneousness and fickle‐mindedness that border rashness. Do you also think so?”

“Of course!” I replied, “Except for arrogance, rashness is my only defect!”

The current solution offered by Nvidia may be the second-best solution. But this is one case where the second best solution is not good enough.

If it isn’t in my email, it doesn’t exist.

And if the whole world says one thing and my email says something different, email will conquer.

-- an Israeli Linuxer.

The bad thing about hardware is that it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. The good thing about software is that it’s consistent: it always does not work, and it always does not work in exactly the same way.

On Sunday 01 April 2007, chromatic wrote:

On Saturday 31 March 2007 15:26, Yuval Kogman wrote:

uses_version_control sounds more like lacks_manifest_skip_file which should deduct kwalitee IMHO.

Maybe so, but how else can CPANTS detect that you use the world’s most advanced version control system: CVS?

Are you kidding?

CVS is not advanced as:

1. Microsoft Visual SourceSafe - the only sane choice for good data integrity and portability.

2. tarballs/zip-files and patches. This one excels in convenience, and robustness.

CVS is a very advanced version control system, however. I do wish that Subversion (which is a VCS that I have to use against my will) was as good as it is.

( Shlomi Fish answering to chromatic on 01-April-2007 )

• Larry Wall can understand the Perl code he wrote last year.
• Larry Wall gets the colon.
• There are at least 137 Larry Walls in the U.S. but only one that matters.
• Larry Wall applies a patch manually quicker than GNU patch.
• Larry Wall dreams in Perl.
• Larry Wall can program in his sleep.
• Larry Wall is lazy, impatient and full of hubris.
• Larry Wall has more dollars in the bank than in his Perl code.

-- Larry Wall facts by Shlomi Fish

Electrical Engineering studies. In the Technion. Been there. Done that. Forgot a lot. Remember too much.

Well, for the record, *I* am without faults, but I’ll mention them here anyway:

1. I really hate scriptaculous
2. I kicked a dog the other day
3. I pushed an old lady aside, on my way to get a cup of free coffee
4. I secretly program in Python
5. I like to interject and make lists

I’m not an actor - I just play one on T.V.

Trying to block Internet pornography is like climbing a waterfall and trying to stay dry.

— Drew Dexter

I’m not straight - I’m Israeli.

Hi Omer! Mazal Tov on Chen and yours marriage. It reminds me of a quote from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre:

"At this period she married, removed with her husband (a clergyman, an excellent man, almost worthy of such a wife) to a distant county, and consequently was lost to me."

Well, in your case I can say that both of you are almost worthy of each other. Congrats again!

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

It does not mean what I think it means, but it means what *you* think it means.

<evil-laugh>Muahahahah…</evil-laugh>

A few weeks ago, I’ve been to Freenode’s #perl, talking to merlyn and other guys, when we got to discuss the Biblical "Tower of Babel Myth". As it turned out, the commonly perceived interpretation was not the one most scholars find as more sensible, which is the one we ended up being taught at Junior High School.

What most people think is something like that:

The people spoke to each other in the same language, concentrated in one place, and decided to build a tower high enough so they can reach God. God, a small dwarf who lived in the sky, was afraid of the efforts of these people, because he feared they’ll reach him. So he cast an 8th level Spell of Language Fragmentation, caused these people to speak in different tongues, and without being able to understand each other, they ended up spreading across the Earth. God was relieved and returned to his dwarfish deeds, as dwarfs do.

Shlomi Fish in (Based on what his Bible teacher said)

This reminds me of Paul Graham’s articles, in which he claims that LISP programmers are better. But why is it so (whether or not you agree to the conclusion)? There are at least two opposite reasons: 1. Because programmers that learned LISP become better 2. Because good programmers prefer LISP when they come to know it.

No. 1 is true, naturally. No. 2 is not true - I know LISP but I prefer Perl. Others like Python, etc. The reasons I don’t prefer LISP are:

1. The standards of Common LISP and Scheme don’t define anything practical.

2. LISP is at the moment incredibly verbose.

3. As Larry Wall noted, all LISP code comes in parenthesis and so it all looks the same. (Perl is the exact opposite in this regard).

4. I cannot make heads nor tails of serious LISP code. Many LISPers create so many macros and use them along with regular LISP code, so you keep having to refer to the previous definitions, and make a lot of research to get you started.

SICP Scheme is easy and fun. But serious LISP code can take too much time to understand. OTOH, recently I had little problem reading the source code of other Perl programmers, and extending it or fixing bugs. (likewise for Python).

We don’t know his cellphone number, and even if we did, we would tell you that we didn’t know it.

plis tak mi auot from yuor mail list.

-- This Engrew sentence contains very few errors.

What do you mean by "WDYM"?

Chen Shapira: spent 5 hours yesterday trying to get Windows to print on my new wireless printer. It still doesn’t work. On Ubuntu it worked after few minutes.

Shlomi Fish: Heh. Linux++ .

Chen Shapira: I’d do Windows-- , but this may result in an integer underflow.

A few days ago I joined #mandriva on Freenode trying to get to the bottom of a problem I have with KMail at work, where I cannot start KAddressBook from inside it. I asked my question and soon afterwards received:

• One Thunderbird recommendation.
• Two Evolution recommendations.
• One Sylpheed Claws recommendation.
• One GMail recommendation.

The problem is that I wasn’t interested to learn about alternative E-mail clients, and just wanted to get my problem solved. And in GMail’s case it was completely out of the question due to my work’s constraints.

I recently had to figure out how to do something with wget: get everything below a directory on the web-server, without following links to outside it. So I logged in to Freenode’s #debian channel, where there are many knowledgeable people to ask it. The first answer I got was "RTFM". So, I read the wget man page, but could not find it there. Eventually, after telling people that it would be faster to give an answer, I got a reply ( add the -np -r flags). But this has been the last straw.

I composed my own acronym. Just like RTFM is "Read the Fabulous Manual" and STFW is "Search the Fabulous Web", then JATFM is "Just Answer the Fabulous Man". It means that it’s usually faster to answer someone’s question than to ask him to RTFM, which is just going to annoy him. I think the RTFM mantra has done a lot of damage in the UNIX/Linux world, and I hope JATFMing would prove to be a more healthy ideology.

A: I’m busy right now - I have to do TWAIN.

B: Do Shania Twain?

C: Oh, I’d love to do Shania Twain.

—Adapted from a conversation on Freenode’s #perl

So, yeah… there are no gods, only heroes. And anyone can become a hero. And even heroes are just regular people.

I don’t suppose we should propose that as an alternative to Perl gods, there should at least be Perl saints:

http://www.stallman.org/saint.html

Of course, I’m not sure what being a Perl saint would imply. Using nothing but Perl? (Including not C in which perl 5 is written?)

Oh well.

Not that I mind the Perl gods stereotype stuff.

Regards,

Shlomi Fish (a Perl saint^W hero wannabe, but definitely not a Perl god)

Of course, I’m not sure what being a Perl saint would imply.

It would imply having been killed for your faith in Perl.

Does that make Randal the Spanish Inquisition?

No one expects the Randal Schwartz condition. 😉

Of course, I’m not sure what being a Perl saint would imply.

It would imply having been killed for your faith in Perl.

Does that make Randal the Spanish Inquisition?

No one expects the Randal Schwartz condition 😉.

I almost feel honor bound now to start a noise band called The Randal Schwartz Condition. I could shout his rants into a microphone while the rest of the band flogged a newbie live on stage.

Duane Obrien writes:

Alternately, The Randal Schwartz Condition is now accepting bookings for birthdays, weddings, religious ceremonies of any kind, or occasions where your consulting company throws a big party at some conference. Email me off-list for details on how to get advance copies of our demo “I’m The Real Tim Toady”

I’m already thinking of words to the “tune” of “I’m the real Slim Shady”.

Damn you. 😊

In that case, lacking good links or a definitive reference text, I’ll have to ignore your comment earlier.

I hope it’s not much of a flamewar so far, but it sure seems to have escalated into a minor one. “You are a Nazi!” ( Godwin‘s law ) - oops!

Please. The Nazi’s were socialists. I’m a little to the right of Attila the Hun.

And I thought Attila was a Humanitarian.

I often wonder why I continue to hang out with so many people, who are so pedantic. And then I remember - because they are so pedantic.

— an Israeli Perl Monger

<monty-python>

A: You Linux kids are so lucky. When we were using Windows 95 and Windows 3.11 it kept getting stuck and we lost all our data. We had to reboot it.

B: You used Windows 95! Lucky Bastard! When I was your age, we used DOS on CGA screens, and we were lucky if we had 4 colours, much less a true windowing environment.

C: You had DOS with graphics? Lucky bastard! When I was your age, I used VT-100 terminals connected to a VAX. 128 characters should be enough for everybody?

D: Visual Terminals? When I was your age, we used teletypes on a PDP-11: the computer printed on paper - very slowly. Can you imagine cat’ing a really long document?

E: Teletypes were heaven compared to the punch cards that I was using. Imagine going over to the computer with a large amount of punch cards and then dropping them all.

F: Punch cards! What is this talk about punch cards? We input machine code directly using buttons and LEDs.

G: And all we had were NAND gates!

</monty-python>

I met a guy in the bar, talked to her and she gave me her phone number.

Two female dogs talking about modern-life:

Jasmine: It’s so cool! On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog!

Daisy: Yeah, but everyone can tell right away that you’re a bitch!

[Discussing the shortage of IT workers as of 1998 on E-mail]

Shlomi Fish to Omer Zak: "Even the NSA doesn’t have enough programmers. But it is not likely that they will have more and that’s because ‘Summerschool at the NSA’ may might as well be the name of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s next movie."

Omer Zak to Shlomi Fish: "And as opposed to ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ it is going to be scary."

Kilmo: why would you like to make fun of the crypto world ? ;) The NSA does know what you did last summer. And by putting this on the web, they know that you know.

Which may lead to interesting philosophical issues. BTW, in a conference I was attending we were given a sticker saying: "NSA - free email backup".

They still have some issue with the retrieval procedures, but besides of that - they are quite a trusted service.

Shlomi Fish: In my case, I think every random Joe can learn a lot about me. Even if he’s not in Google or the NSA or whatever.

Kilmo: Yep. But this is a world-wide service that they offer. (Along with several co-operations, like MI5/6).

Ran Eilam To Shlomi Fish: so what are you working on? Working on a new wiki about unit testing fortunes in Freecell?

Well, despite the fact that I hardly publicised my last essay about the "Closed Books", it has been chromatic’d. Rumours are that all the bloggers whose blog posts/essays were deprecated on chromatic’s blog are now rich, famous and the object of the affection of many attractive members of the appropriate sex. Memo to self: prepare a limited edition T-shirt: "My blog post was chromatic’d. I pwn you as a blogger."

Richard M. Stallman (RMS) decides to release his brand-new editor, "Emacs" on the CPAN with its first version 29.999.99. In order to package it, he invokes the trusty ol’ module-starter (see http://search.cpan.org/dist/Module-Starter/) which creates a skeleton of a CPAN distribution for him.

He fills in the skeleton with the actual code of Emacs, types "perl Build.PL", and "./Build test" and makes sure all the tests pass. Then he types "./Build config --gui" and gets a nice GUI to configure the various parameters of the Module meta-data.[M-B-Data]

In the GUI, Richard goes to the Trove categorisation tab, and selects categories. This is done in a similar way to Freshmeat’s project categorisation dialog (a list of options to the left, with selected options to the right and arrows to move them left or right, while allowing multiple select options.). He chooses such categories as "Programming Language :: Lisp", and "Intended Audience :: Emacs Users", "Operating System :: GNU", and "Topic :: Editors". (Note: I believe the category list should be fetched using a public web-service to keep them up-to-date.)

After several weeks of having the editor on CPAN, Richard has received many patches, and wrote a lot of code on his own. Now Emacs is not only an editor but a calendar tool, an Eliza program, a web browser, a mail user agent and many other things.

So in order to release version 30.000.00 he needs to update the categorisation. He runs ./Build config --gui again, and adds more categories. However, he enters too many categories (because Emacs now does them all), and the GUI refuses to save the file because it will overflow the limit that the web-service specified the CPAN classification services allow to handle. So Richard keeps only the important categories, adds more tags, and saves it.

He then tests the distribution again, and uploads the new distribution to the CPAN.

Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft decides to use Richard Stallman’s Emacs as the basis of his company’s state-of-the-art product Microsoft Editing Macros™ Enterprise Edition XP .NET Professional. However since MS Editing Macros™ is a commercial, proprietary program which he intends to sell at computer stores, Bill is not going to upload it to the CPAN. He builds upon Emacs, sends patches to Richard and learns a lot about it.

When he’s finished building Microsoft Editing Macros™ he surfs to the Emacs homepage on CPAN, and adds some categories and tags of his own.

Eventually, enough people like Bill tag and categorise Emacs, and it gains more classification.

Larry: final exams are on Tuesday and through Friday, so you won’t see me for a while, or if you do - then you should shoot me.

Shlomi: I Will shoot you with my cross-intertubes-laser-gun.

Larry: HAHAHA.

Shlomi: Which I don’t have.

Larry: Which network topology will you implement, for better accuracy ?

Shlomi: I’ll just depend on the standard TCP/IP routing. Overlay the laser on top of the TCP packets.

God gave us two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we read.

Only wimps complain about bad code. Real men clean it up.

Shlomi Fish

Wikipedia has a page about everything including the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_sink .

shlomif: hack, hack, hack ; save ; make ; make test; commit. And start over.

mrjink:hack, hack, hack; save; make; swear; fix typos; save; make; make test; swear some more; hack some more; save; make; make test; cheer; commit.

meep: hack, make, test, segfault, oh noes, revert to previous revision

Well, it’s not a threat - it’s a warning, and he won’t be harmed much by acting against my advice. A threat is something like "Stop posting political posts or I will burn your house, rape your wife and daughters, banish you to the middle of Antarctica, convert all your Perl code to PHP, and then post it on thedailywtf.com."

Regarding what you say that "no one cares if you unsubscribe", then this reminds me of what Fred Brooks says in "The Mythical Man-Month": "How does a project becomes late? One day at a time.". If you’re not careful, you might lose a large percent of your blog’s readership, one subscriber at a time.

What does "IDK" stand for? I don’t know.

PHP error debug list:

1) did you use the correct argument order? if you’re a good programmer, use the *reverse* from what you think it is. see if it works. no? you’re not a good programmer, or you learned PHP’s braindeadness and can go on to step 2).

2) did you think about your code? if so, don’t. PHP will do it for you so you can do mindbogglingly stupid stuff, such as not escape the data that goes into your SQL queries.

Give me ASCII or give me deaþ!

In the Technion, there are many ways to get from one place to the other, but they are all the same length.

English spelling aims to be consistent. Publicly and methodically.

Mike “The Mouse“ House (a.k.a “D.J. Salinger”) was a rap artist who experienced only limited success, and a computer geek, when he decided to start selling CDs of open-source software. He turned to spamming to publicise his business, but realised that most of the spam messages he sent were blocked by E-mail filters. He decided to use the notorious obscured image spam, but since he had a few blind friends, he opted to also include an audio recording of a rap song with the message.

House received a few offers from his spam campaign, but his real break came when a few enthusiasts of the spam song shared it on the Internet, where it became an instant hit. The song eventually hit the charts and MTV, and made D.J. Salinger famous, who quickly released his first successful album called Rap to the spam, Ma’am!, with such highly acclaimed hits as “Rap to not get trapped” and “He ain’t Nigerian. He’s a Spammer!”.

As a millionaire, House decided to donate some of his money back to sponsoring open-source projects, and has donated 100,000s of U.S. Dollars to such causes as the Free Software Foundation, Linux International and SpamAssassin. “If it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t have made it big”, he said, and said he’s now working on a second album with a similar theme.

I promised, I forgot, I did not keep my promise — just shoot me, and get on with it!

An original philosopher knows the right combination of ideas to steal.

• To err is human - to apologise - divine.
• To have bugs is human - to fix them - divine.
• To have bugs is human - to find them - divine.

I might be mad. But I’m a mad genius.

If God exists and is the ego-maniacal, sadistic, and helpless, creature that is described in the Old Testament, then we’re in deep trouble.

Sophie: Let’s suppose you have a table with 2^n cups…
Jack: Wait a second - is ‘n’ a natural number?

A kid always wishes they were older until they are 18. Afterwards, they always wish they were younger.

Shlomi’s Father: If you don’t sort the dishwasher, the dishwasher won’t be sorted.

Shlomi: No, it won’t be sorted by me.

Shlomi’s Father: No, it won’t be sorted at all. We will throw away the dishwasher.

Together: Along with all the dishes.

All languages of the world suck. If you require people to declare variables (like in Pascal, C, Scheme or Perl 5 with strict), then people will tell you they like variables to spring up upon first use. Without variable declarations, then you get various weird side-effects of the implicit scoping. If you use curly braces for scoping, then you’ll have to type more and there’s more clutter. With indentation-based scoping (like in Python), you’ll find it hard to introduce multiple-expression lambdas.

Rob Pike and Paul Graham hated object oriented programming (OOP) and so they didn’t introduce it in their “Go” and “Arc“ languages, well after OOP has become mainstream. And guess what? Many people, including me, think that OOP is still a good thing (and no, in my opinion, C++ did not do OOP very well) and so gave up on Arc quickly and did not look closely at Go.

Dynamically typed languages (like Perl 5, Python, Ruby, or Lisp) possibly suffer from many subtle errors; Statically typed languages (like Haskell) are less expressive and it seems that about one third of the language design papers published on Lambda the Ultimate are about various funky extensions to the Haskell type system to allow for better expressiveness.

Purely functional languages have no assignment and most people find them harder, in part because the world around us has a lot of state, and they also need to do funky compiler tricks to make you feel like you don’t need assignment. Non-functional languages have side-effects and so are prone to many errors.

If you have goto or goto-like statements (such as exceptions or Perl 5’s “last LABEL;” (more like “break” in C) or “next LABEL;”), then you encourage code to not be factored correctly. If you don’t have such stuff, then programmers will hate you for having to go through many hoops to write quick-and-dirty code.

Perl 5 has a dedicated regular expression syntax which is treated magically by the parser. PHP and Java use strings for them, and require weird escaping and backslashing rules to interpolate the sub-regexes inside them. And if you incorporate a first-order syntax for regular expressions, then people will want similar first-order syntaxes for XPath, for XML (like some recent versions of Visual Basic .NET have), and for all other grammars you may need to embed.

Finally, many people absolutely hate all the clutter created by the leading sigils of Perl 5 (the "$", "@", etc.), and similar languages, but they allow for much better backward compatibility, facilitate the so-called “interpolation” (= embedding inside strings), and also give some important visual cues when skimming code (even without syntax highlighting).

You are damned either way, whatever you do.

• 1 User to start a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_a_Light_Bulb article.
• 1 editor to tag it with the “No original research” template. (Without giving a reason)
• 3 users to find citations for the article.
• 1 editor to claim it violates the wikipedia “Neutral Point of View policy”. (without giving a reason).
• The original user to ask why he thinks this way on the talk page.
• 5 users to find occurrences of changing a light bulb in popular culture.
• 1 anonymous user to correct an “it’s” to “its”.
• 1 editor to revert it.
• 1 editor to revert the revert because it was a real typo.
• 10 users to rant in the talk page that Changing a lightbulb is not notable enough.
• 10 Wikipeders to start similar articles in French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Esperanto, Ido, Hebrew, Klingon, Mandarin Chinese, and other languages.
• 10 more people to periodically keep the articles in sync with the English version.
• Starting the cycle again on the localised wikipedias.
• 1 Person to argue that the article should be merged into the main article about the inventor of the lightbulb.
• 5 People to argue on the talk-page who the inventor of the lightbulb was.
• 1 Person to start a wikiquote page about changing lightbulbs.
• 1 Person to add it to wikibook.
• 4 persons to gradually delete content the section about “choosing a good chair” until it only reads “choose a good chair.”
• 1 person to write it again.
• 1 deletionist to remove the article due to all of its perceived problems.
• 3 months from now:
• 1 different user to feel the absence of the Changing_a_Light_Bulb article, create it and start the cycle all over again.

As expected from the latest trend in the Perl blogosphere this post will be about Roles. And Moose! And Roles in Moose! And Moose in Roles! And Roles outside Moose…

Seriously now, this is a post about a completely non-Moosey and non-Roley script I wrote to filter the use.perl.org master journals' feed.

E-mail, web feeds and doing something productive — choose two.

The worst way to waste your time is to never waste it.

Sophie: I’m hungry today.
Jack: well wait until tomorrow - maybe this feeling will pass.

We agree. But do we agree to agree?

sed and awk make me sad and awkward.

The English Wikipedia: now you don’t see it - now you do.

I recall discussing Buffy with a Jewish American friend, who used to be secular, and now has become an observant Jew, and married a woman who properly converted to Orthodox Judaism, and they have some children. We discussed the fact that Sarah Michelle Gellar was Jewish, and yet that many men (and some Lesbian women) were more attracted to Alyson Hannigan’s character, Willow Rosenberg, who was a shy and sheepish, redhead, Jewess. Then when I mentioned that Hannigan was only a maternal Jew, he said she is “kosher” (because someone whose mother is Jewish and who did not convert to a different religion, is a bona-fide Jew). I found it amusing that you refer to women by the same word as you do to food, but I think the ancient Hebrew word "kasher" also means "approved", "appropriate", "legal", etc.

In any case, both Hannigan and Gellar are now married, and so trying to separate between them and their husbands is not kosher. ;-)

The Israelites and the Philistines schedule a large battle. The Philistines have far superior equipment with armours made out of iron, which the Israelites don’t have. Eventually, Goliath, a tall Philistine giant, steps forward and asks for an Israelite man worthy enough to fight him and determine the fate of the battle (something which was quite common in the ancient Near East). It seems the Israelites will lose the battle.

Out of nowhere, a young Israelite boy whom hardly anyone knew about steps forward with a sling and a few pebbles. Goliath thinks this is ridiculous and ridicules him. However, the boy quickly puts a pebble in his sling, and after rotating the sling to achieve a very large speed (not unusual with slings) hurls the pebble with great accuracy (also not unthinkable, because shepherds in the Near East effectively used slings to kill lions and other predators to their flock) into Goliath’s face, which was uncovered to allow him to see. Even if Goliath’s shield bearer wanted to, he could not lift the huge shield in time, and Goliath was completely not agile in his suit and armour. The sling’s rock smashes Goliath’s brain, and he falls to the ground dead. The Israelites have won the battle.

That boy’s name was David.

Why is it important here? Because David was a “hacker”. Why was he a hacker? Because he knew the rules, and played by them, but knew how to bend them, in order to earn his victory. Hackers bend the rules.

And here’s the thing: this is what an action hero is all about: he makes his own rules, or he even breaks them, and does not accept his fate. This is whereas a tragic hero is bound by many invisible rules, and accepts his fate, which is, almost certainly going to be death.

And in real life, you should also aim to be a hacker or an action hero, or the many phrases it used to be called.

Wikipedia deletionists don’t die. They lose notability and get deleted.

It’s kinda, sort-of… pretty much… quite… awesome I tell you - awesome! Got it? It’s kinda awesome!

Shlomi Fish: Whenever you spell “JavaScript” with a lowercase “s” (and a capital “J”), God kills a kitten.

Joel Crisp: Whenever you use JavaScript on the server, God kills a datacenter.

There are two kinds of fools. One says, “This is old, and therefore good”.
And one says, “This is new, and therefore better”.

— John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

Two more kinds of fools. One says: “This is popular, and therefore good”.
The other says: “This is good because it’s not popular”.

— Shlomi Fish (though may not be a 100% original sentiment).

Another kind of fool: “‘mainstream’ is bad.”

— Shlomi Fish.

That’s why I feed my leprechaun every day — because there are not enough phonemes in Navajo to tell him to get his act together and find a job.

— Shlomi Fish‘s response to “Above All That is Random 5” when asked “That’s why… what?”

If Ayn Rand was born in the 1990s, she would be Christina Grimmie.

I love being convinced that I was wrong before. That way I know I improved and am now wiser. Like the Klingon warriors say when it happens: “What a great day it was for me to die!”.

You are much more likely to find a good significant other - with a perfectly sound mind and body - in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy/etc. conference than you are in the middle of the wilderness.

A lot of people think that the proper way to achieve world domination is to create an architecture that will solve the whole world’s problems and then some. We’ve been seeing quite a few of them since Joel on Software wrote this article: Ruby, Google Go, Node.js, Mozilla’s Rust, Clojure, Scala, Perl 6, etc. Some of them have or will mature to something truly nice, or have inspired a lot of features in other languages, but it’s hard for plain-old-single-you to compete with them, and here is something interesting: not too many people want them.

What do people want? Chuck Norris/etc. factoids, lolcats and other captioned images, funny cat videos, parodies of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (♥), photos of attractive (or even not too attractive) men and women, screencasts of games or other programs (including many open source programs), photos of scenery, new and improved recipes for preparing food (and of course - tasty food itself), new, old or renovated jokes, and some interesting tales and anecdotes from your life. And naturally - programs that can scratch an itch - however small.

Some people told me that my solver for Freecell and other solitaire games, simply called Freecell Solver is useless, but it's not - it's just a niche program. And I received hundreds of E-mails about it. Furthermore, given that Freecell is (or used to be) a big phenomenon in Israel, where many boys and girls starting from the age of 18 found themselves playing it on the Israeli military computers out of boredom, then the fact that I have written a solver for it, has impressed many people I talked with or met, including some attractive (both physically and intellectually) young ladies. They ended up asking me about how it was written, and which algorithms it employed.

So Freecell Solver was one of my most successful programs, not despite being a niche program, but because of it. Niche programs own. Not only that, but niche everything is great. Many people whom I referred to my stories helped themselves to the screenplay Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead” because it contained Star Trek in the name, and because there are quite a few fans of the Star Trek franchise and worlds.

The more of a niche artwork you write, the more a large subset of those who like it, are likely to pay attention to it, try it out, and enjoy it. For more information, see Eric Sink’s excellent and inspiring essay “How to get people talking about your product”. For example, DuckDuckGo was originally marketed as a search engine by Perl geeks, and for Perl geeks. It was a good marketing decision because the Perl community is small, cohesive and is at a good strategical position to influence other communities. Right now, many people who are not Perl programmers, are using it, as well as, or even in preference to Google, but choosing Perl was a good preliminary strategical decision. We can expect that with the future growth of DuckDuckGo, that it will use more performant technologies than Perl more and more, but it will still owe some of its initial success to starting out as a Perl product.

Scary thought of the day: The Princess Bride: the 3-D Remake.

I don’t remember whose idea it was, but we ended up enrolling Eve into the Homecoming Queen contest. When Eve discovered she was on the nominees list, she was a bit upset.

“Homecoming Queen? Me? Why would I ever want to be a homecoming queen?”

“Eve, we thought you could see how beautiful you are, and how much people could like you, if they got to know you.” I answered.

“Hah! Well… oh heck, I don’t have a ready reply. But I’m going to get you guys for this. I really will.” and she started to walk from there. “You’ll see.”

Eve showed up to the homecoming queen nominees roundup, wearing one of her best dresses. When her turn came, she began her speech:

“Ladies and Gentlemen. I don’t know how many of you know me, but my name is Eve Siegel. I urge you to vote for me for homecoming queen, not for your sake, but for mine. I really need you to vote for me, because my entire future depends on it. Seriously.”

“Take a look at my Résumé, for example. ‘Experienced in computers and programming since 1994.’ ; ‘Experienced in Linux and UNIX technologies since 1998’ ; ‘2000-2005 - Debian Packager’, ‘2005-Present - Mandrake Packager’, and more of this vain. Tell me, who will take a second look at this C.V. if it did not say, ‘2005 - Elected as a homecoming queen.’?”

“Now for what I’m going to do if I’m elected. I’m going to erect a gigantic statue of Tux the Penguin, this guy [picture showing on the screen], and also one for Beastie the BSD Daemon, [picture showing] for good measure. I’m going to fight against abusive behaviour toward nerds and geeks, for computer literacy, and… for world peace. What the heck!”

“But all these philanthropical causes are secondary to my egoistical motives of having to win this title for my own good. Thank you!”

She practically brought down the house with this speech. Even Taylor and I could not resist a maniacal laughter. She ended up being one of the five finalists. As the elections were on, Eve started her own campaign sloganed “Don’t vote for Eve!” and gave away pamphlets with nothing but raves about the other four contestants. This also increased her karma considerably.

She wore the same dress during the homecoming queen ceremony, as during the pre-election. As the runner-ups were announced, she was given warm hugs from all-of-them. She ended up being the first runner-up with a margin of only 5 votes to the real winner. She ended up saying she was glad she did not take the title, but I never saw her happier than on that day.

She did not put it in her résumé.

When Eve and I got together to go shopping, we went to a clothes shop. “You know, my newfound powers are intoxicating. Three guys hit on me at school since the weekend, including this really cute Football player.” she said.

“Hmmm… ” I said.

“Are you ladies alright?” the shop’s clerk (Tim, a young and handsome man) approached us.

“Hey Tim!” I said, “I don’t believe you know my friend Eve here.”

“Eve Siegel!” she said and extended her hand.

“Tim O’Brian.” he said and they shook hands. “OK, I’ll be there if you need me…”

Eve followed him with her gaze for a few seconds, and then smiled and went back to looking at the clothes.

“Will you stop that?” I whispered to her.

“Stop what?” she said.

“You’re totally into him.”

“So I’m lusting him a little bit, so what? ‘But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.’”

“Well, girlfriend, committing adultery in your heart is perfectly harmless and quite rewarding. And I’m not really raping anyone. I’m tenderly making love to them.”

“Listen,” I snapped at her, “Taylor is my best friend, and I swear that if you…”

“I’m crazy about Taylor.” she interrupted me.

“What?” I said.

She changed her pose. “I’m crazy about Taylor. Always have been. I promise I wouldn’t do anything to hurt him.”

“You always have been crazy about Taylor? Why didn’t you tell him that?”

“Come on, have you looked at me then? I wasn’t his type. He always dated these well-groomed girls, who had some sense not to rebel like I did. Hell, he also dated this incredibly dumb cheerleader once.”

“Stacie wasn’t dumb!”

“I was being sarcastic! My point is that he was way out of my league.”

“Oh!” I said and tried to hug her.

“No hug!” she said. “In any case, I’ll do my best to make things work between Taylor and I. And even if they don’t, we’ll remain good friends. The kind of friends who go to movies together, or socialise at LUG meetings, fix dates for each other, etc.”

“Good, I’m glad to hear that. Now where were we?”

“Picking clothes.” she said, and after a while added: “You know, we should drop by Radio Shack and get some dolls of Tux and Beastie the BSD Daemon. I totally dig these guys. Oh! And a nice Looney Toons poster. I’d hate to pump money into the MPAA’s lawsuit machine, but I really like Marvin the Martian.”

“Who are you, and what have you done to Erisa?”

“Hey, the makeover was your idea, Jennifer. What have you done to Erisa?” and we both laughed.

“Hi Taylor!” we said one after the other.

“Hey guys, ” he said, “what are you guys doing here?”

“Helping Erisa get ready for her date.” I said.

“I’ll get her.” Amanda said, and went up the stairs.

“Don’t you think you look a bit plain for the date?” I asked.

“Well, it’s only a movie and a pizza. Plus, there’s no way on Earth that Erisa is going to look better than I am.”

“Holy virgin mother of god!” exclaimed Jeff. He was looking at the staircase where Erisa stood, descending it slowly. Her jet-black hair was arranged in a ball and a pony tail, shining from the light. Her dark purple dress made her look especially beautiful, and complimented her body. She looked wonderful.

“So, ” she said after she reached the ground floor, shaking her body and extending her hands, “how do I look?”

“You look… ” Taylor said, “divine!”

Erisa thought for a moment and then said: “‘Divine’s good.”

“Here, Erisa…”

“Hey, ‘Erisa’ was the old (and temporary) me. Call me ‘Eve’ now.”

“…Eve! Here - I brought you flowers.” and he handed her the flowers he had.

Eve (!) smelled them, and said, “they smell nice. Mum, can you put them in a vase with some water?”

“Ahhmm… Eve, can we stop by my house and give me a chance to pick up some better clothes?”

“Why?” Eve said, “we’re going to miss the movie.”

“Well, people will look at the two of us and say: ‘she is way out of his league!’”

Eve approached Taylor. “Well, to quote Richard P. Feynman, ” she said as she tied her arms around his neck “‘What do you care what other people think?’ We both know you’re a great guy and I’m so lucky to go on a date with you. Mwaaa…” and she kissed him on the cheek.

“Well, ” he said, “I guess we’d better get going. Bye all!”

“Bye!” we all said. Eve and Taylor left and Taylor gave us a thumb’s up as he left, and we gave him back.

A woman is a lady, even if she is or was a porn actress or a prostitute. Treat her with respect, be honest to her — be a gentleman.

I wear prescription glasses so I may be half-blind, but at least I'm trying hard not to be a complete dick.

while some people seem to have better talent for some things from an early age (or what you call "age"), many great artists worked hard to acquire it. Furthermore, hard work can and should be a lot of fun, and it's important to also "Have a life" and eat&drink well ("Wine"), enjoy the company of people of any sex ("Women") and have clean , creative, recreational fun, however amateuristic or lame ("Song").

I've started writing about all that in an essay on my site which I called “Putting All Cards on the Table (2013)” and now I wish to combine it, with some newer and older insights into “Putting Many Cards on the Table (2015)” which will likely need to be updated in upcoming years as well.

Like the old (and wise) adage goes: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is now”. What it implies in this context is that the earlier you start honing a skill, the sooner you will become better at it.

Anyway, what I suggest you do is go outside and socialise more: talk to people with dogs ("Hi! Nice dog! How is he called? How old is he? What kind of dog is it? What's your name? What do you do?") , interesting shirts, tattoos, etc. Also - make sure to talk to shop clerks, shop vendors, waiters/waitresses, barmen, baristas, etc..

One thing I learned from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratatouille_%28film%29 is that "Everyone can cook", or do most other stuff that was shown to be possible. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief (action) heroism is about bending the rules, and finding you own unique, resourceful and ingenius, "hacky" way to do things like David used a sling to shoot goliath instead of using a spear to fight him and most likely dying. My essay has a section about why David was an action hero and a "hacker", in a broad definition of the word.

Another advice I can give you is to accept the fact that you're depressed and be content. It's OK to be depressed, like this episode of Simsons illustrates: http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Moaning_Lisa . Also, one of the the best ways to be happy is to be content with what you have and who you are and accept and love yourself. "He who has more is not happier than he who is content with less.".

Finally, I've recently been tweeting a lot (see my feed at https://twitter.com/shlomif/with_replies ) about Darwinian Fitness which I believe is manifested in humans in (sexual) attractiveness, a.k.a: "hot"ness (which is not the same as beauty and I believe is more important), and which has a very good and positive correlation with competence a.k.a what Marx referred to as "able" in his “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” slogan.

Now, this fitness/attractiveness is not the same as the so-called Physical fitness and as I contemplated on a tweet, “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candice_Swanepoel , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_Kerr , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Watson or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Lawrence can get more and better dates when in a cranky mood, than the buffest obscure female body builder/"fitness" competitor on a good day.”, and that's because they are more (biologically) fit. Moreover, in British slang "fit" came to mean a sexually desirable MOTAS regardless of how athletic he or she is.

If you still want to lose weight then I suggest following my variation on Maimonides' advice for dieting. Namely:

1. Eat well, and eat what you feel like and want to.
2. Don't eat in haste - eat in comfort and enjoy your meal.
3. Eat according to the stomach - not according to the eye.
4. Eat until you're 75% full - not until you're 100% full (and can't eat another bite).
5. A bit minor, but my father kept eating food along with extra bread, so he'll feel more full, but I think it has an adversary effect.

Finally, there was this Slashdot feature which claimed that most men and women claimed that their male relatives were more intelligent than their female ones, and I believed the problem is that men and boys tend to be more confident than women and girls (or used to at least), and that implies taking more chances, being more sloppy, allowing yourself to make mistakes, and accepting the fact that some people will dislike you. After a while, I saw this music video by Christina Grimmie which has the very same theme, and this pet theory of mine was reinforced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYX8sjIzjGw .

It’s OK if you forget my birthday, but please don’t forget my 364 unbirthdays. Contact me to say you love me, and every day can be the best day of my life so far!

The world is full of people, who each have their own personal whims and quirks, and which they expect you to remember and accommodate for, all the time.

It always works at the end. Too bad it doesn't work right away at the beginning.

Some people grow older and wiser. Not I. I grow older and more foolish.

How can you make a programming language that will be good for everything if you cannot even make such a screwdriver?

I understood what Monads are for 5 minutes. Then I had to let go of the understanding. It was too intense to be kept inside my head.

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: It’s not funny!!!

Shlomi’s Friend: You will take good care of this book, right?

Shlomi: Oh, don't worry! I’ll just tear the paper apart, burn it, dip it in sulphuric acid, radiate anti-matter on it, and teleport it to a black hole.

Shlomi’s Friend: That’s it? I do it to it every day.

Step 1: Be Clever. Step 2: Use this to write obfuscated code.

Step 3: get fired for writing obfuscated code.

Step 4: Get killed by the maintenance programmer.

Step 5: Burn in hell for a milliard years for writing obfuscated code.

Step 6: Profit??

A lecture or two ago, when Guy Keren was saying that linux would never ever be a gaming platform i tried to point out he was wrong, and it's actually doing OK, and everyone looked at me like i'm crazy.

Some rules of thumb I tweeted about recently:

1. If someone tells you something is impossible and you can't do it, it probably can be done.
2. If someone tells you something will *surely* never happen, it likely can happen.
3. If someone tells you are an idiot and are definitely wrong, then you probably uncovered an Elephant in the Room and are right. Also see “Encourage criticism and try to get offended”.

In general, people who are sure of themselves are probably wrong, as I am not even sure of the Aristotlean Logic which got us incredibly far.

HP-UX is not a UNIX, and AIX is even less of it than that.

Back when I was in the 9th grade, during a Physics lesson, one of my classmates complained to the teacher that something we were learning was too hard. So my teacher asked her “Do you see people with picket baskets outside?” and she answered no. And then he said “Well, then you should know that life is no picnic!”.

I want to create a programming language called “Multiply” so people can say “I program in Go, Forth, and Multiply”.

Take your schedule estimates and multiply them by Pi. Take your expected profits and divide them by Pi.

Dictionaries are so convenient to use in Python/Perl/etc. that people use them there even when they do not really need to. On the other hand, they are so clunky in C, that people do not use them there even when they do need to.

You can never truly appreciate the Gilmore Girls until you've watched it in the original Klingon.

Note: many of my stories are not too realistic, and aim to reflect a better and more idealistic reality than the one many people would perceive. This is in part because, I am an idealist, and plan to remain so (and my idealism is dynamic and constantly changes), and wish that my words and deeds will carry reality forward instead of preserving the status quo.

You can never truly appreciate Hamlet until you've read it in the original Klingon.

But all the mightiest Klingon warriors have watched The Lion King instead (or in addition), possibly with Klingon subtitles.

( Caveat Emptor: I am a straight and non-trans male, so I may not know what I am talking about. Here be dragons. )

Most men do not spend a lot of time and money on beauty products, even though they often have their share of frustrations with their hair, and they look fine. As evidence, several heterosexual women who looked at some of the photos people took of me told me I looked handsome.

Moreover, most underage girls look cute, lovely, and beautiful, despite not using makeup.

The Scroll of Esther testifies that, during the time of the Persian empire (circa 470 BC), a woman's makeup process took 12 months, and these fictional women were blown out of the water by Hadassah (who became queen Esther), who was simply confident, was being herself, and doing it in her own (imperfect and thus perfect) way.

So I suspect most beauty products are the stone soup (or placebo) effect for women: they instil confidence, but then can be avoided altogether for an even better, more natural, and more beautiful look.

In my favourite sketch of the British comedy troupe The Mighty Boosh, the Ape of Death (a male) has suffered from hair problems even as a child, and then after six minutes of treatment says "Look at me. I'm so confident… and feel strong and supersexy!".

In the videoclip for the song “Nothing Compares 2 U”, the female singer Sinead O'Connor looks great bald. Moreover, the bald actor Patrick Stewart became a sex symbol, and a role model, playing the also bald Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the iconic television series Star Trek: The Next Generation.

As of January 2021, the canonical “Alpha Female” (think Sarah Bernhardt or Marilyn Monroe) appears to be Emma Watson, who happens to be short and not busty. Some people will always be unhappy with how you look or just tease you for it (see the old fable "The miller, his son and the donkey" and the song "Keep on Singin' My Song" by Christina Aguilera); the important thing is to realise that you are awesome, and can be confident and competent and beautiful, and even take your "faults" to your advantage.

(If you feel that what enough, or even just one, people complain about has merit you can try changing your strategy, but the “media”, including Web 2.0 social media commentators, will always generate a lot of white noise in all directions, and I admit I may have erred on that too.)

Update (February 2022): I now think that makeup which deliberately looks unnatural may be useful as an icebreaker, not unlike captioned or themed T-shirts, dogs, or jewellery:

1. Lovely couple at an Anime con

2. Emma Stone in “Cruella (2021)”

I suspect the media coverage of the violence in Syria to be skewed. I think most of Syria is peaceful most of the time, and that both the Syrian government forces and ISIL are harmless if not benevolent. I hope and expect Damascus to remain the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, and to feel as Shalom-ful as Tel Aviv or Beirut. Israel, the Hizbullah, the Syrian government, or ISIL, will accept money donations, but will gladly pay volunteers to do more than just be web/social media bloggers (often parody ones).

Same for most other causes.

I wish to plant trees somewhere in Europe with some old or new online friends. We may not stop global warming, but we can at least try and have fun and bring love and joy and inspiration to ourselves and others.

Com'on People.

Note that as opposed to secret do-gooders and in accordance with Jeremiah 9:22-9:23, I will be full internet attention whoring (but honest and non-pushy) about my contributions: both given - and received. Yesterday I went outside, and said "Shavua tov", "bon appetit", and "have an easy curfew" to friendly-looking strangers. I hope this will encourage others to dedicate time, energy - and gain it in spades.

The next revolution starts in us. Be a hero. Be a messiah. 😉

With all due respect to #COVID, putting people (especially old) in detainment makes them psychologically and biologically worse and worse. A study once concluded that exposing mice to radiation harmed their immunity system. However, my father (a biologist) told me that a different study found that just moving a mouse through corridors in a building had the same bad effect on their immunity system even without exposing to radiation, due to causing stress and fright. Humans wish to go outside and do what they want ( "as you wish" / "make it so" / "carpe diem" ): Saladin Style .

NOTE: here is a citation that my father found about the effect of stress on the immune system. I also recall reading that Maimonides noted that a person's optimism influenced his recovery, and there may likely have been earlier sources.

The months I spent in the closed psychiatric ward for being "bipolar" and unable to leave were worse than my 6½ years in the Technion, and they would be even worse if I weren't so resourceful: Highway to Hell ; Wyclef Jean - Wish You Were Here.

I at ~ 2006 "I'd rather be doing hot models than doing code".

I at ~2021 "I'm not just doing it for money. I'm doing it for doing hot youtubers!" . I think most attractive members of the appropriate sexes (MOTAS) are polymath, geeky and hacker (= action hero) entertainers/educators/amateur philosophers, anyway.

(Also: your kilometrage may vary, but I need only one attractive significant other at a time. Or fewer. )

Reflecting on Chun-Li vs Tifa (Street Fighter 2 vs Final Fantasy VII) - Girl Fight! Ultimate Fan Fights Ep. 5 video, I think both girls fought well. They should shake hands and declare themselves equally good and go:

1. Grab a few drinks or snacks together.

2. Hit on a couple of men.

3. Hit these men.

4. Make out with these men.

5. Make love to these men.

6. Make love to each other…😉.

7. Whatever floats their boat!

"War is good for business. Peace is good for business." — The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.

In Israel, we have Falafel, Hummus, T'hina, Shawarma, Shishlik…

And we love to eat Bourekas in the morning!

— Israeli teenagers tormenting English-speaking tourists while kayaking on River Jordan.

Despite common belief, the history and prehistory of planet Earth has been rewritten several times by Ashmedai, the meta-Satan who created the 3d1t "gods", a capacitanced reality which he endowed with many gifts of a blessing and a curse, only to realise most of his curses were turned into blessings. He has sworn to keep "backward compatibility" which was his mortal nemesis.

It matters if you're a girl or a boy and who your parents were. Some people have free will, some don't yet. He can hear some people's thoughts, and change matter and binary bits. Some people are strong or beautiful from birth. The reason why modern alpha females are not that pretty is because they are the daughters of an Alpha Male (son-of-David) and a bland looking female, who were crazily smart and had to work a little to look decent. You need to use different strategy for different people based on what they say.

Mass production does not happen on Earth, because factory workers are miserable, but the Q Continuum has been shipping duplicated raw materials and products to Earth.

The cast of Terminator: Liberation should come to my apartment in Ramat Aviv Gimel and we'll emblaze the hard disk containing Ashmedai as a gesture. He promised me Iran won't bomb Israel.

Kira Nerys was actually a Vietnamese orphan who was adopted by a Bajoran man who immigrated to Vietnam due to the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. He later relocated to the USA when the Vietnam War broke out, and Kira grew up there. At one point, she set up a multi-sessionned RPGs event titled "Free Bajor" as a joke, which escalated the actual Bajoran struggle for independence and ended the occupation.

Kira assigned her Terran friend, nicknamed "Dukat", as the pseudo- Cardassian official in charge of the negotiations. As a result of all that, Dukat was offered a position in the Cardassian government, while Kira became a national Bajoran heroine and the legendary profile "The Gamer".

As Melissa Joan Hart (= "MJH"; Clarissa, Sabrina ) was an old colleague of Dukat and he somewhat romanticised their friendship, she became a UFP ambassador:

[ Odo approaches an acrobatics overseer on DS9 ]

Odo: Hi! May I speak to Ambassador Hart, please?

Overseer: to whom?

Odo: [sighs] to Melissa Joan Hart?

Overseer: oh… [he whistles] Mel!

[ MJH arrives sweaty and out of breath. ]

MJH: hello Mr. Odo…

( An actual dialogue. )

Anyway, Dukat also was a popular Rock / Hard Rock / Metal / $loud-music-genre musician who had a series of concerts titled "Gul Dukat Live at Bajor" which were performed there. The front rows were populated by "Bajorans" on one side and "Cardassians" on the other (who were not necessarily citizens, residents, etc. of either planet). Moreover, during the climax of the show, they started throwing Terran tomatoes at one another.

Dukat thinks this has great positive energies, and these shows featured collabs with diverse artists from Metallica and Animal to Adele and Tiffany Alvord. These concerts have been very profitable, despite the fact that he had to comply with some regulations as a Cardassian politician.

Why settle for telling TheOneTruth when you can tell so many sexy&amusing lies?

The "gods" in the Selinaverse are any kind of leaders or guideline-generators which a conscious organism's mind emits their utterances as thoughts for guidance. Gods spawn imaginary realities of one another using self reference and circular "strange" loops by using the gift of learning / pleasure / conception (or "knowledge").

Now at one point during their history, the Bajorans were introduced to the devices used to communicate with The Prophets, a race of timeless aliens, who identified gods using superlatives such as "The Emissary", "The Invisible", or "The Master". They started their millenia-long attempts to correlate the titles with the actual entities. At first, Vedek Bareil, one of the first Vedeks, who is also known as "The Damage", placed a staff in the ground and ordered all vedeks to never leave its vicinity. This got tiresome, so several decades later, Blanché broke the staff into two, announced that he is now a "Kai" and that Vedeks can travel as far as they want. The Bajorans ended up burning both parts of the staff to prevent them from becoming objects of worship.

The Bajorans actually worked better against The Prophets, than the rest of the galaxy initially worked against The Bajorans, taking into account the fact that there can be a different, say, "The Master" for a certain time and locality.

Quark, a Ferengi, set up his bar close to Bajor in order to profit from "the industry around the Bajoran prophecies [which] is making millions".

Most early home computers (e.g: Commodore 64 or Apple II) suffered from the "Form over function" fallacy. I imagined a 1980s IBM PC clones commercial that featured Melissa Joan Hart as a child fixing PCs. Then the camera zoomed into her belt with the caption "It doesn't take a witch to fix this computer. All it takes is a Phillips Screwdriver." This commercial helped cement the PCs' dominance.

Hart was kind-of pre-destined to become The Witch given Vedek Winn predicted that their final name will be "Meli-Lisa Jo-Anne Heart" based on the profile's previous names.

The term "idiot-proof" (= laymen proof) and Joel's advice of fixing support requests permanently get a whole new meaning when some laymen are tech geeks who have github accounts and are versed in the command line. E.g: fortune-mod issue #45.

Jack: I suggest we stop eating for one year and thus save a lot of money. But what will we buy with all the money we save?

Sophie: we'll buy food!

First people were prejudiced about new vs. old. Then about popularity. Now they are about "mainstream"ness. "Two kinds of fools".

Let's just kill prejudice once and for all! When I described Kate in my Selina Mandrake story as a socialite, I was attacked, but what's wrong with being one?