Shlomi Fish’s Homepage

23-Jul-2011: New Translations of Stories

Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage. The first highlight is that I’ve gone over the site and converted most ASCII single quotes and double quotes I could find to their Unicode equivalents. In the process, I corrected many typos, XHTML validation problems, and other issues.

There are new fortune cookies:

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

There’s a translation of the of Human Hacking Field Guide to Written Arabic. This was done by Vieq - thanks!

The Hebrew translation of the screenplay Humanity - the Movie is now complete.

Furthermore, the XML-Grammar-Fiction page was enhanced with examples and links.

There’s a new Test.pm to Test::More partial converter, which may be of interest to programmers maintaining legacy Perl code.

See comments and comment on this.

27-May-2011: Translations of Stories to Hebrew (For the Alternative Book Week)

Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage. Most of these are ongoing translations of various English stories to Hebrew. These were done in preparation for the “Alternative Book Week” in Tel Aviv University (see its Facebook page). It is going to take place on Tuesday, 31 May 2011 between 09:30 and 16:30 in Tel Aviv University, next to the Gilman building, the department of Humanities. Several indepentant writers are going to read from their prose there, including me. You are welcome to attend, listen to the participating writers, and provide us with welcome support and input. Hope to see you there!

There’s a new joke in the aphorisms and quotes page:

In Soviet Russia, cats own you. No, wait! Cats own you everywhere.

I posted the first part of my Selena Mandrake - The Slayer screenplay to its place in FanFiction.net where one can rate it and post comments. There is some new text in the ideas for the future document.

I started preparing a Hebrew translation of my Humanity - The Movie screenplay.

There are two new fortunes in fortune collection.

We now mirror the web parody “Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?” (via Websurdity and Debunking 911).

The various screenplays in English in the stories section now have better capitalisation, punctuation and grammar, and their visual style was also improved. There are also many grammatical corrections to the story The Human Hacking Field Guide and a lot of progress was made in its Hebrew translation.

The XML-Grammar-Fiction page now contains coverage of Screenplay-Text and Screenplay-XML, as well as examples for the grammars and their outputs.

Enjoy!

See comments and comment on this.

13-May-2011: “Selena Mandrake” and Improvements to Other Stories

Here is what’s new on Shlomi Fish’s Homepage since the last update. It’s been a month and there are many major changes.

A new work-in-progress screenplay titled Selena Mandrake - The Slayer can be found in the stories section. This is a supernatural dramedie, that is a parody/tribute/spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and some other works of fiction and non-fiction. I have a pretty good roadmap for what I’d like to write there so I hope to get the first draft soon.

Selena: This reminds me. I really should update my Mandriva system at home. I have not in several days, now. And to think I originally had my friend Aaron install Mandrake Linux for me, because I thought it was cool that it was called the same as my last name.

Jessica: Heh, maybe you should become Selena Mandriva now.

Jonathan: Or Selena Mageia.

[ Selena bursts out laughing. ]

Selena: That sounds like a name of a vampire slayer… or a vampire.

Jonathan: Or both.

Selena: Yeah. I told you about how I was nicknamed “Puffy” and then “Buffy” during one summer camp, right?

Jessica: Yes, many times.

Selena: Yeah, I found it amusing at the time. For a while afterwards, I insisted that my friends call me “Buffy” until I realised it was silly, and reverted back to “Selena”.

I’ve also began translating the second version of my novella The Human Hacking Field Guide to Hebrew. One can find the ongoing Hebrew translation and its Fiction-Text source, under CC-by-sa - same licence as the English original. In addition, I can say that the story is being translated to Modern Standard Arabic in the OpenDocument format by an Egyptian enthusiast of open-source software, and more translations will be welcome.

In addition to all that, version 7 of my novella The Enemy and How I Helped to Fight It, in Hebrew and English, with many improvements is now available online. I especially would like to thank Miriam Erez Translations for providing some copy-editing work.

Moreover, I explicitly marked many of the the works of fiction on the site, the essays, and the software resources with a Creative Commons licence. Share and enjoy!

There are some style tweaks, I’ve documented the use of the EvilPHish emblem, and there are some new fortune cookies:

• rindolf: Mithaldu: I think most contemporary T.V. kinda sucks.
• rindolf: Mithaldu: it seems very phony.
• Mithaldu: rindolf: same, i haven’t actually switched on my tv in five years
• rindolf: I prefer a YouTube video of a kitten riding on a turtle.
• rindolf: Mithaldu: :-)
• Mithaldu: :D
• rindolf: Mithaldu: yes.
• rindolf: Mithaldu: there is one, BTW.
• Mithaldu: oh i do not doubt that
• rindolf: Don’t know if it’s authentic.
• rindolf: I saw a friendly cat today, and he purred after I scratched his head.
• rindolf: I like Friendly cats.
• rindolf: I think lolcats are very subversive.
• rindolf: Or were.
• rindolf: “Ceiling cat is watching you”
• Mithaldu: cats are the definition of subversive
• Mithaldu: they adopt you
• rindolf: Mithaldu: heh.
• rindolf: In Soviet Russia, cats own you!
• rindolf: In Soviet Russia, cats are your master!
• rindolf: Well, in Soviet Russia and everywhere.
• kent\n: rindolf: you got it backwards.
• kent\n: In soviet russia, cats are actually your pets.
• Mithaldu: hahaha
• rindolf: kent\n: heh.
• rindolf: kent\n++
• rindolf: I feel better now.
• rindolf: Empowered but calm.
• rindolf: Thanks to the cats jokes.
• Mithaldu: world healing by cat jokes
• rindolf: Hopefully, I’ll sleep well tonight.
• kent\n: Next on the agenda. DICK JOKES!
• rindolf: Mithaldu: cats are good for healing I think.
• rindolf: kent\n: NO!!!!!
• kent\n: ( don’t worry, this won’t take long )
• Mithaldu: yes, as long as you do not own cables
• Mithaldu: kent\n: you mean it won’t BE very long
• Mithaldu: hurr hurr
• rindolf: kent\n: I’ve got 99 problems but kent\n ain’t one.
• kent\n: ;)

Hope you enjoy the new stuff on the site and stay tuned for more.

See comments and comment on this.

05-Apr-2011: New and Improved Stories, Screenplays, Aphorisms and Bits

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.

See comments and comment on this.

06-Jan-2011: Essays about Bipolar Disorder and Open Source, new open source programs, and new humour items

I’m sorry for not updating the site’s news feeds for a long time, and as expected there’s quite a lot new.

There’s a new humorous bit in the Aphorisms collection:

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.

There’s a new Chuck Norris fact:

Chuck Norris can make the statement “This statement is false.” a true one.

There are new fortune cookies.

Due to an incident where one of my domains was blocked by a anti-spam blacklist, we now have an anti-spam Policy

I have a new page about me mentoring others in the world open source and/or open content. Also related is the new page about how to start contributing to open-source software.

I have made my essay titled “Dealing with Hypomanias” live and previously announced it on my non-technical blog. Also see a recent related post on the Just 1 Random Guy comics/blog about his experience as a person with Bipolar disorder.

There’s a a new greasemonkey script for expanding the descriptions of Freshmeat.net.

The Black Hole Solitaire Solver page now includes a description of the tables in the SQLite dump that collected the data from running the solver on the first 1 million deals of PySolFC.

There’s a new solver for Kakuraso which is a puzzle game that can be found on the Brain Bashers site. That solver was written in Python using lp_solve.

Another new project is Module-Format, which is a Perl 5 module to perform bulk operations on the various notations fo Perl modules.

The Linux Kernel “make xconfig” enhancement patch was updated for the newly released 2.6.37 kernel.

There are some new links in the pages against bad software.

I’ve also updated my resumes.

The site’s building instructions were updated but may still be incomplete.

See comments and comment on this.

09-Oct-2010: New humorous bits, fortune cookies, and updated software

There’s a new humorous bit titled “Copying Ubuntu Bug No. 1”. It was also featured on my tech blog where it received several comments.

Tel Aviv, Israel: “Ubuntu can’t have all the fun only for itself”, open source distributors are saying as they rush to copy its Bug No. 1 titled “Microsoft has a majority market share”.

Debian, Ubuntu’s parent distribution, has set up Debian Bug No. 1 which also reads “Microsoft has a majority market share”. Mandriva, another competing distribution has set up Mandriva Bug No. 1: “Microsoft has a majority market share and Ubuntu has a majority market share on the Linux desktop”. Fedora, Gentoo, Archlinux, Slackware and other distributions are expected to follow suit.

Speaking of Ubuntu, tomorrow it would be 10-October-2010 - 10.10.10 and it would be the release date of Ubuntu 10.10 codenamed “Maverick Meerkat”.

There’s a new page with a Hebrew translation of the song “Buy the Fish” from my Humanity - The Movie screenplay.

There are new fortune cookies in the fortune cookies collection and the RSS feed has now been fixed (the corresponding Atom feed is still broken due to a bug in the XML::Atom CPAN module).

Often when I ask the people I train if they know Perl, they tell me “I don’t know Perl. I can only read it.”. I wonder whether it indicates that Perl is not a write-only language as some people like to claim.

-- Gabor Szabo (Perl Programmer and Trainer)

The solver for Black Hole solitaire was converted to C, which made it much faster and less memory-hungry. The results and statistics of running it on the first 1 million PySolFC Black Hole deals are available in the link.

Version 1.03 of libtap, a C library for testing using the Test Anything Protocol (TAP) is now available with several improvements.

Many of the code excerpts in the Perl for Newbies series were corrected for Modern Perl practices.

The website also now has a better “404” page, and as usual there are many new links in the various pages. Enjoy!

See comments and comment on this.

07-Aug-2010: “COBOL - The New Age Programmming Language”, “Don’t Abuse JavaScript”, and other news

There’s a new parodical page titled “COBOL - The New Age Programming Language”:

NASA Uses COBOL.

And so do:

• Your bank.
• Your insurance company.
• Your government.

COBOL runs your life.

A new page “Don’t Abuse JavaScript!” has been added.

JavaScript has become popular due to being useful for scripting browsers, which is acceptable due to being the only commonly-acceptable portable choice for that. However, lately, it has been utilised as a host language for many other realms where there are far saner and superior alternatives.

This page aims to explain why JavaScript should not be abused for such stuff.

There are new fortune cookies:

• dxtr: Do we have any doctors in here?
• rindolf: dxtr: with Ph.D. or M.D.?
• munik: I have a PhD in Linguistics!
• munik: ^ lie
• munik: :]
• dxtr: rindolf: I don’t care as long as they can treat patients
• rindolf: dxtr: heh.
• munik: :o
• munik: webmd.com
• munik: might be better than #perl
• dxtr: rindolf: That question would be fun in combat. “WE NEED A DOCTOR HERE!” - “PH.D OR M.D!?”

More recommended open source programs have been added to the favourite open source programs page, including Xfce, Pidgin, tmux and htop.

The Cross-platform abstraction libraries is now licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence.

There’s now a list of calculators on the numerical software page.

There are new links in the “Stop Using Internet Explorer” page the anti-Apple page, and in the PHP Sucks page,

A greasemonkey script to fix a qa.mandriva.com annoyance has been added to the Greasemonkey scripts section. Furthermore, the remove “from=rss” script was updated to deal with the even more obnoxious “from=rss” suffix in recent URLs.

I added details of my Acer Laptop to the “Computers’ Specifications” question on the FAQ.

The site’s source page was updated with up-to-date instructions.

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