Essays Section Menu
Index to Shlomi Fish’s Essays
Essays and Articles about Computing
Essays and Articles about Software Development Best Practices
What you should know about automated software testing
A brief, and mostly programming-language-agnostic, primer.
Ideas for automated tests of static web sites
Like those generated by static-site-generators.
Cross UNIX Portability - Facts and Myths
The title says it all pretty much.
The New Breed of Version Control Systems
An article giving an overview of several prominent open-source version control systems that provide an alternative to CVS.
Which Open Source Wiki Works For You?
An article giving a roundup of open-source Wiki implementations which enable the user to create a world-editable web-site.
Comparing Microsoft to Drug Dealers
An essay explaining why comparing Microsoft to drug dealers is misleading.
Articles and Essays about Perl
The Joy of Perl
An essay that explains why I like Perl so much. Also see a discussion of it in perl.org.il
Solving Puzzles with LM-Solve
An article about the LM-Solve puzzle solving framework, and how to utilize it for a new puzzle.
Debug Your Programs with Devel::LineTrace
A lightning article about how to insert debugging callbacks into a Perl program without modifying its code.
Building Navigation Menus
Some general discussion of navigation menu and other site flow patterns in web-sites and then how to utilize the HTML-Widgets-NavMenu module to generate them.
Simulating a Two Domain Website on the Localhost
How to test the local copy of a two-domain web-site without breaking its links.
Using Test::Count
How to keep track of the number of tests executed by a Perl test script.
About Supporting Older Releases of perl5 For CPAN Distributions
Why I am unwilling to support too old versions of the perl 5 core.
Critique of Where Perl 6 is Heading
An old and out-of-date critique of where Perl 6 was heading, based on the fact that it was such a large deviation from what Perl 5 is. I have changed my mind after all that.
Theming Bash
Multiple shell configurations - how to implement them and what to put inside.
Patronage and Self-Patronage
An essay that talks about three types of sponsorship for an open source developer: patronage, collective patronage and self-patronage.
Call for a fork of the Linux kernel developers community
This document called for a fork of the developers’ community of the Linux kernel, focused on friendliness and respect among the participants and constant advocacy against disrespect and the unnecessary use of strong language and personal insults.
Essays about the BSDs
What I learned from porting my projects to FreeBSD
Why my projects cannot support NetBSD (yet)
Why the BSDs should not blame the USL vs BSDi lawsuits for Linux’s dominance
Computer games-related tutorials
Getting Street Fighter 2 Up and Running in MAME (on Linux)
Getting Sonic the Hedgehog Up and Running in Linux
Essays about Copyright Law
Acting against Anti File Swapping Lawsuits in Israel
An article that explains my motivation to act against anti-file-sharer lawsuits in Israel. The link is to a Linux-IL discussion about it, but contains a link to the original article.
Essays about Media and Culture
Bazaar-style Movies Revisited
An essay about an innovative (and still theoretical) way of creating a movie.
Some related FAQs I co-maintain:
Freenode’s ##programming channel’s FAQ - covers questions about programming in general.
The Freecell Solver FAQ - questions about solitaire games and especially Freecell.
Freenode's #perl’s FAQ - commonly asked questions on the Freenode #perl chat room. Mostly about the Perl programming language and augmenting the upstream Perl FAQ.
