"We, the Living Dead" additions, and "The Perfect IT Workplace"

New text has been added to the screenplay "Star Trek: We, the Living Dead":

[ There's a cat lying on a table there content. He's half-white and half-grey. ]

Katie: oh, look! A cat. [She approaches the cat and starts petting it.]

[ The cat purrs and then says: ]

George the Cat: oh, yeah!

Katie: [Startled] Bleh, you're a talking cat.

George: yes, but why did you stop?

Katie: I'm not used to cats talking to me.

George: ah, well, yes, it takes some pre-vampires time to get used to that here.

Katie: I suppose you're older than me.

George: most probably. I'm about 5 milliard years old.

Katie: bleh!! You're older than my planet!

Two of my newest aphorisms were added to the Aphorism collection:

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!

The first revision of a new essay - "The Perfect IT Workplace" was published. It was released pre-maturely due to someone redditing the article, but may still be of interest:

The Best Tools that Money Can Buy

This cannot stressed enough. As Joel Spolsky notes (based on Steve McConnell) in item No. 9 of the Joel Test, you need to "use the best tools that money can buy".

If you buy old, broken and/or barely functioning hardware, you'll spend a lot of time debugging the problems there, which will waste a lot of precious time. And you may lose a lot of reputation and customers due to down-time. Relying on reliable, high-end hardware is a much better idea.

I've been to two workplaces that gave me an old computer with a 40 GB hard-disk. It wasn't enough at all. At one place, we've reached the limit of this hard-disk due to several large source code checkouts, and as a result needed a bigger hard-disk. And the only hard-disks the lab had were 80 GB ones, which were bought because they were the cheapest (per-disk, not per-capacity). Please, buy large enough hard-disks.

At the same workplace, I was given a computer with a read-only CD-ROM drive. It was not even a DVD reader. I brought a DVD of audio files from home, and could not read it. In this day and age, read/write DVD drives are the standard, and are ultra-cheap.

The interview with Adrian Ettlinger was converted into XML-Grammar-Screenplay in a true fashion of "Eating one's own dog food". The proto-HTML source will be placed online soon.

New links have been added to the Guide to Israeli Open-Source Resources.

New film recommendations have been added to the movie recommendations.

New quotes have been added to the Fortune Cookie Collection. Chronological updaets can now be found for them in their web-feeds.

Syndicated 2008-07-22 04:02:40 from shlomif

Hardware Log: ATI HD 2600 Pro

Up until this Saturday, my Linux workstation had an old Nvidia GeForce 4 MX card, whose fan recently died. We decided to upgrade the card, and I told my father that an ATI card would be preferable over Nvidia, because AMD/ATI are more FOSS-friendly and released SPECs. So he bought an ATI HD 2600 Pro card. It's r600, but quite low-end (but still not as much as the GeForce 4.).

We delayed installing it, but this Saturday, after I had to reboot after the new kernel update, we got to it. The hardware replacement went surprisingly well, and then we booted the computer. Everything went well on startup, and we got the login prompt. Then startx worked right away, as my Mandriva Cooker installation detected the hardware change and set up all the drivers accordingly. Mandriva++ .

Not everything worked flawlessly. I had to edit the xorg.conf file to re-add the settings for the Xkb Hebrew keyboard, and to change the Bits Per Pixel from 16-bits to 24-bits. Then I was happy. I'm using the RadeonHD open-source drivers, which don't really do 3-D yet, but since there are SPECs for them, the situation is expected to improve.

I'm so glad I've now escaped from Hang-vidia-land, and have a card from a company that plays along with the open-source ideology. I hope to contribute further to the open-source drivers by reading the SPECs and writing code, and hopefully I would be able to understand what I need to do better than with Nouveau. In any case, since I'm not obsessed with "gamer" computer games and am not using the high-performance 3-D/2-D effects in much, I can survive just fine using the non-3-D enabled drivers. (Just as I used the "nv" driver before the upgrade.).

Syndicated 2008-07-21 13:26:36 from shlomif

What Meital is Doing in the IDF

(in Hebrew, this time.)

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

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

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

שלומיף: אה.

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

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

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

Syndicated 2008-07-17 08:32:20 from shlomif

Hebrew Words to Describe People

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

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

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

I should note that as opposed to English, Hebrew is fully gender-aware: all nouns, including objects are either male or female, whether in singular or in plural. So let's go. <h3>Male - Zakhar (זכר) and Female - Neqevah (נקבה)</h3>

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

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

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

I didn't hear the word "Zakhar" used for "a man" in a similar fashion to the English "a male". <h3>Ish (איש) - Man/Person, Ishah (אישה) - Woman, Gever (גבר) - Man</h3>

"Ish" means more like Person, and Gever is more like man as in manly or male-like. Like "Akhlah Gever" - "one hell of of a man". Or "Eizeh Gever!" - "What a man!". Ishah means "a woman", but again, it may be a bit derogatory in certain contexts. Once on a scouting group tour, a kid who joined us called one of my female peers an "Ishah" and she said that while she technically was one, it was still derogatory to call her that. A male teenager will also object to being called "Ish" or "Gever". <h3>Son, Boy, Guy - Ben - (בן) and Daughter, Girl, Gal - Bath (בת)</h3>

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

Note that there's a slang term for "Banoth" (= girls) called "Bananoth" which means "Bananas" in Hebrew. My female cousin once used "Bananim" (a play on "Banim") too. This is considered rather old-fashioned in Hebrew, but may become retro. <h3>ילד - Yeled - a male child and ילדה - Yaldah - a female child</h3>

Here we start deviating from English. In Hebrew, "boy"/"guy" and "girl" have many different translations. Yeled means a male child or a boy, and Yaldah means a female child. Note that children and adolscents up to high school still call their peers like this. If a 16-18 years-old will say "Pagashti Bahurah Babar" (= I met a "bahurah" (see below), a female guy in the Bar) he is likely to be boasting to his fellows about meeting an older woman. (Similarly, when swapping genders.) On the other hand saying "Pagashti Yaldah Babar" - I met a girl in the Bar would imply he met someone of his age. <h3>נער - Na3ar and נערה - Na3arah</h3>

This also means boy and girl but this time older, normally an adolescent or teenager. Note that adolescents are likely to refer to themselves and their peers as "Yeled" and "Yaldah". It also means a young lover (male or female), or a young underling (for the masculine form) or a maid (for the feminine form). In 2nd Samuel 2, they say "Yaqumo Na Ha'ne3arim we'Yesahaqu Lefaneino", which means "May the boys rise and play (= fight games) in front of us". This is like a corporate manager, or an army officer is likely to refer to his underlings as "my boys", or like in the movie Speed, where the Lutenant refers to one of his officers as "my boy, Jack". <h3>עלם - 3elem - "he-damsel" and עלמה - 3almah - damsel</h3>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like I said previously, it's a term mostly used by people above high-school. Note that in Hebrew in order to say "my co-worker told me about her parents", you'll often say "Mishehi me'havodah sheli sipra li al Hahorim shelah", which means "someone from Work told me about her parents.". Or "A Bahorah from work". That's because saying "Haverthi la'3avodah"/"Haveri La'3avodah" (my co-worker) is more unweildy and less natural for a Hebrew speaker. <h3>Conclusion</h3>

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

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

Syndicated 2008-07-15 20:01:57 from shlomif

Predicting Three Comebacks

Well, it's a common belief that comebacks in technology don't happen often, but this time I predict three comebacks. I cannot recommend that you base your decisions (much less investment plans) based on it, but here they are. <h3>Comeback #1: Non-x86 Machines</h3>

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note that it is not the end of either Intel or much less the end of Microsoft. I still see workstations dominated by x86 in the near future, and both MS and Intel are insanely profitable and have enough time to re-invent themselves. But I think (and hope) we'll be seeing more and more non-x86 servers and to a lesser extent workstations. <h3>Comeback #2 : Mandriva</h3>

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

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

Here are some Israelis who converted away from Ubuntu lately:

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

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

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

Writing this from a Cooker (which is the Mandriva equivalent of something like Debian Testing or Unstable) system. <h3>Comeback #3: Perl</h3>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syndicated 2008-07-07 11:41:18 from shlomif