nondeterministic . net

Bus side A: "Shinui - The rule of law - Home of the secular and the middle class." Shinui is a political party whose name means ‘change.’

Bus side B: "Who is for G-d, to me." Spoken by Moses in Shmot 32:26.

Update 2/12: Turns out the quotation is next to a picture of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, making this an ad for religious Sephardi party Shas. Perfect.

And this evening, I went to a screening of Just Married, directed by Ayelet Bechar.

Maybe everyone else already knew this. But select a message with attachments in Apple’s Mail.app, and you can use menu option Message… Remove Attachments to, well, remove the attachments and reclaim the space in your email account. With 10.4, if you first save the attachments to disk, those files will retain a ‘Where from’ entry under ‘More Info’ linking them back to the original message. This way, everything stays cross-referenced and searchable, but files are stored where they belong (in the filesystem) instead of as base64-encoded garblygook. [continue reading “Mail.app: save space, add bouncing”]

Driving around Jerusalem in the rain at 1am with no idea where you are can be fun! Just remember this simple rule: if the sign says SLOW - BARRIER AHEAD - STOP FOR INSPECTION, turn around, because you are going the wrong way.

Now I’m back in Haifa, where they ought to post signs saying SLOW - TAXIS EVERYWHERE - DRIVEN BY CRAZY RUSSIANS, or maybe FAST - DOWNHILL AHEAD - IF YOU DON’T GO 200 KPH EVERYONE WILL HONK AT YOU.

Mac OS X Tiger Timesaving Techniques For Dummies by Larry Ullman and Marc Liyanage, page 239:

fiwt (www.nondeterministic.net/hack/fiwt, free): Another SIMBL plug-in, fiwt (find it while typing) lets you search for text on a page without bringing up the Find dialog. After you load a Web page, start typing the word you’re looking for and fiwt highlights the first occurrence. Press the backslash key to find the next occurrence.

I went up to Jerusalem today for a meeting. On the way there, I tried to take some photos of the separation wall where it goes near road six. I also have a few photos from Jerusalem and the Hebrew University campus taken before the meeting, and then precious one photo crossing from the Palestinian to the Israeli side of the wall after the meeting.

Please comment here or on Flickr if you’ve something to say… or if looking at photo after photo of concrete wall generates any reaction at all.

I lectured today on Java multithreading. To a group of high school students. Who just finished writing HTTP servers.

Simple HTTP servers. Handpicked students. And only an introduction to threads. But still.

On the way back to Haifa from Jerusalem, I also started my new photo essay, Teach Yourself Photography by Shooting from a Moving Vehicle, at Night. Wonderful, don’t you think?

And 100% of 54 people as of today agree, fiwt is del.icio.us.

So you’re using SlimStat which is a very nice piece of software: clean interface, useful data, and a price point that sure beats the Lamiaceae family. And you’re surely not going to put down the cash required for "professional" site tracking services.

But then Google goes and drops Google Analytics. For free. Huh. Might make for an interesting day in the graphs-and-charts-for-webdevs world.

Bonus points for anyone who can identify the source of the title without any help from the beast or its brethren.

I may or may not have reader(s) from Kansas. To him (them), my apologies. But your state is devolving.

(c.p. more reasonable alternatives)

We now find ourselves at "find while typing" version 0.5. Competition from bigger, fancier players who no doubt do a much better job responding to users’ feedback might be stiff, but that’s alright. Sometimes it’s just nice to have a bit of hackery with your name on it, even if it’s a small bit of hackery not must used.

If I develop a (software) system for you, at your request, and I ask you to evaluate that system, you should do more than just load it up, look at it, determine that it appears, in a visual sense, to have all the features you asked for, and call it done. I’m not looking for formal acceptance testing here, but just the mere appearance of a text box labeled “Foo:” and a button saying “Bar!” does not mean that

• my foos are the sort of foos you think of when you think of foos,
• my idea of bar-ing matches your idea of bar-ing,
• the baz thing you wanted to happen with the bar-ed foos ever happens at all, or
• things aren’t otherwise quuxed up in all manner of unforeseen ways.

Because you haven’t bothered to test the system!