Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

Back to the lost cause of document interoperability (I just love lost causes): as you may or may not remember¹, back in 2008 – almost exactly 1 year ago, after the OOXML fiasco – I wrote a tirade about how Microsoft can attack the (really) open OpenDocument Format by botching their implementation of it in MS-Office 2007 SP2.

Well, guess what – they did botch that and while Rob Weir takes a Hanlon’s razor view on this, I can only say: “Told you“.

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1. probably not as no one commented on the original article [↩]

מי שעיין בתמונות שהעליתי לאתר לאלבום מרץ 2009, אולי שם לב לתמונות של שולחן העבודה שלי במשרד ולמקלדת המאוד שחורה שמונחת שם. כן, אני מחריש אותה מאז מרץ שאז הפתיע אותי אדם (או בכינוי הנוכחי – “הבוס”) אם האביזר האופנתי הנ”ל¹:

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1. מה, שחור זה תמיד באופנה [↩]

אחי מסביר למה הוא כותב בלוג, והתחלתי להגיב אבל חשבתי שאולי מגיע פה הסבר יותר רציני:

כמו שערן אומר – אני לא כאן כדי להיות מפורסם או להרוויח הרבה כסף. אני לא חושב שאי פעם השלתי את עצמי שהבלוג הזה יהיה פופולארי אפילו ברמה של כותבים בבלוגוספרה הישראלית, אבל אני בכל זאת משתדל לכתוב (יש תקופות טובות יותר ויש תקופות פחות טובות, אני עומד על בסה”כ כ-300 רשומות).

הסיבה שלי היא קצת אוטוביוגרפית – אני חושב ועושה הרבה דברים שנראים לי חשובים, וחבל לי שהם יעלמו: אם היה לי רעיון מעניין אני רוצה לדבר עליו ושזה לא יעלם שעה אחר כך. אם הייתי במקום ונהניתי בו, זה נחמד לחזור ולקרוא על זה ולהזכר.

זה בעצם היומן שלא כתבתי אף פעם, ואני טכנולוג – אם לכתוב יומן אז רק ברשת. וכבונוס יש גם תגובות ודיונים – אני תמיד שמח לשמוע מאנשים שאני לא מכיר או שלא דיברתי איתם כבר הרבה זמן.

אני מתנצל על השתיקה בחודש האחרון, יש לי המון דברים לכתוב, אבל לא ממש זמן לעשות את זה. אני די עמוס בעבודה וכשאני חוזר הביתה אני רק רוצה לנוח ולהתנתק מהמחשב – לא חשבתי שזה יקרה אף פעם – אבל בשבועיים האחרונים לא ממש פתחתי מחשב בבית.

בכל מקרה, מצאתי אתמול זמן לסדר קצת תמונות וסידרתי אלבומים מהחצי שנה האחרונה:

• פה תמצאו תמונות מאימון ההסבה מפברואר
• כאן יש תמונות מהנגב שצילמתי בהכנה לטיול ובזמן הטיול של אורי בשביל ישראל, וגם את “מקרה פילברג והכדור הצהוב”
• ופה יש תמונות מהטיול לכרמל בסוף השבוע האחרון (כדאי לבדוק, יש שם שפנים 😉 )

אני אספר על עוד דברים שקורים, בהמשך כשיהיה לי זמן.

Blog spamming was never something that a blogger can ignore, but the problem of comment spam had mostly been taken care of by Akismet which works incredibly well – lately it have let through only a few false negatives a month.

Registration spamming on the other hand is rather new – I’ve been getting a lot of these (several hits a day) only in the last half a year or so. I’m still not sure what they are trying to do – its not like registered user are exposed to less strict spam checking and even Akismet false negatives do not show up on the site: I have to approve 1st time commenters by hand, so comment spamming basically just spams the administrator.

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I installed a pre-release version of Windows 7 to play with – I’m actually supposed to know what I’m talking about when I dis the next version of Windows ;-), and the second impression is what the title is about: it just behaves and looks more like Mac OS-X then all previous Windows releases.

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[Update: initially I thought this problem was limited to IE7 and earlier, I was wrong and it also happens in Internet Explorer 8. Kind of destroys what ever expectations I’ve had remaining for IE8]

Although Internet Explorer 8 was already released¹ most users are going to stick to previous versions – I know this for a fact as even though Internet Explorer 7 is already more than a couple of years on the market it still only has slightly better then 50% of the Internet Explorer market (not including other browsers).

That being said, its always “fun” finding more Internet Explorer bugs, something which the web developer I’m working with is proficient in (which she isn’t really doing on purpose – I’m not sure if it counts in her favor or not 🙂 ), so here is the latest one she stumbled upon²: (more…)

1. and it boasts a superior rendering engine – which is almost on par with  Firefox 3: it breaks horribly in the WordPress edit post dialog – its the first serious rendering problem I’ve seen with IE8 [↩]
2. I haven’t documented the several previous ones we encountered – I might do so in the future [↩]

I’m not much of a music listener – I don’t like to listen to music idly and I’d rather much listen to talk shows when I’m doing things that do not require absolute concentration – for example while driving, cooking or doing house chores. A couple of years ago I found that podcasts are very handy in those situations – when you are away from a computer and there is nothing interesting on the radio (the demise of the radio talk show would be a subject of a different post). My current podcatching setup I think would interest people, but I’ll also leave that for another post.

Today I want to discuss a new podcast that just started¹: Free as in node.

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1. I’m a bit late on the bandwagon – the first episode was released two weeks ago, and they already have a second episode which I haven’t listened to yet [↩]

Its that time of the year again, and we are back in Linux release season. The usual suspects are all here again except for openSUSE who moved to a funky 8-month~year release cycle (I’m not sure they know what release schedule they’re using).

I’ve been testing the pre-releases of Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04 (haven’t had a chance to test Mandriva 2009.1 which is a shame because I used to really like Mandriva) and my impressions are as follows:

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[Sorry about this Israel-specific post being in English – its just so annoys me and I want the rest of the world to know about this.]

Israel has on general very good road – compared to many modern countries (in Europe and North America): national roads are all at least dual carriageways with many of them triple carriageway or even more; roads are mostly lighted at night except maybe single carriageway roads in rural areas; even road maintenance which was historically horrible in Israel is pretty good now days.

That being said, the state of driving in Israel is horrendous – people simple have no road courtesy whatsoever! The most common annoyance I have with traffic in Israel is that on a triple carriageway, where you have three lanes to choose from, the slowest one (which often has average speeds way under the low Israeli speed limit) is the middle one! If you’re just driving along at about the speed limit (maybe a few km/h over it, I can’t pretend I’m a saint), then you normally would be driving on the rightmost lane, passing people on your left. Very very annoying, not to say dangerous near interchanges. More ludicrous is that if you are in a real hurry and want to drive at speed that will normally get you a speeding tickets, you also mostly drive on the right most lane – as the left lane is occupied by people who think they are the fastest on the road but in actuality only drive around 100 km/h.

And all that before we discuss drivers switching lanes without signaling, driving on the center between two lanes, breaking abruptly for no obvious reasons, and the most annoying behavior – being the first car at a stop light the driver stops about 2 car-lengths away from the stop line. I have no idea why they do that, except for increasing the likelihood of a traffic jam this serves no purpose I can understand.

I hate Israeli drivers.