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Carob, anyone?

This Sunday to Tuesday the whole family was on vacation in L.A. for two days, doing all the obligatory L.A. touristy things. A great time was had by all: the kids especially enjoyed Universal Studios and I especially enjoyed the Getty Museum, but everybody enjoyed everything overall. Coming back was quite a shock, though. After […]

How do you say “Simon” in Japanese?

While debugging some issues with Japanese IMEs today, I experimented with entering my own name to see what would happen. The normal way to write it in Japanese would be in Katakana, シモン, but I tried converting it into Kanji to see how it came out. The result was: 諮問 I asked a coworker what […]

Synchronicity strikes again

<glazou> smontagu: btw, you think you’ll update your blog before the Armageddon ? <smontagu> glazou: funny you should ask that <smontagu> I was just asking myself the same question What makes it especially funny is that I was considering blogging about the Armageddon! Specifically about the Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and […]

Flattery will get you most places

I spent most of today debugging an issue that I knew nothing about this time yesterday, and now know a bit more about. I seem to have come up with an empirical solution, at least Note to bug reporters: saying things like “a lot of effort regarding arabic support in mozilla especially the arabic/bidi support […]

And so to blog

I have been reading an interesting new web log. Either the author is using a different calendar or he has serious bandwidth issues, since his posts are showing up with a 343-year lag. “[I] went to my office, where there was nothing to do.” Is it just me, or does that sound exactly like Pav […]

A terrorist by any other name

Syrian President Bashir Assad, rejecting criticism of Syria allowing Hamas and the Islamic Jihad to operate offices in Syria: “Of course we don’t have, in Syria, organisations supporting terrorism. We have press officers.” A recent press release from the Jihad: four killed and three wounded during their Sabbath evening meal.

All you need is credit

I have often thought it ironical that Paul McCartney and I happen to share our birthday. Everyone in the world is either a Lennonite or a McCartneyite, and I am a fanatical Lennonite. Recently Paul has sunk to new depths by crediting Lennon-McCartney songs to “Paul McCartney and John Lennon”. Somehow this reminds me of […]

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One in a million

The wise men of Chelm were discussing whether one would be better off to have been born or never to have been born. After seven days and seven nights they came to their conclusion: one would be better off never to have been born, but who is that lucky? Maybe one in a million. Here […]

Remove the what?

Heh. Daniel is funny. For the record, you can get Chinese food in the Middle East, though you might have trouble ordering sweet and sour pork. I own a recipe book of “kosher Chinese cooking”, in which all the pork recipes have been changed to beef. It’s a rather sloppy job: the typeface is visibly […]

Laughing Matters

The article I linked to a little while ago is the only article of mine available online in the “Jerusalem Post” archives, which is a shame. It was the less good of the two opinion pieces I wrote for them. Here is the first. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to submit it to a […]

Tefillin time

I never thought I would be able to point to something I have in common with Madonna, but now we have both been seen wrapping black leather straps around our left arm and the fingers of our left hand.

One man’s dignity is another man’s heresy

I wish I knew more about the current controversy surrounding British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks than I can learn from reading articles in the “Guardian”, “Jewish Chronicle” and “Jerusalem Post”. As reported, it makes very little sense. If it is unacceptable to say “In heaven there is truth; on earth there are truths”, will it […]

It bugs me

It’s interesting to read that Microsoft has hit upon the idea of “adding an option for customers to go to a Website where they can learn more about and even fix the errors they report.” Perhaps we should sell them a license for Bugzilla. In the same article, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is quoted as […]

It was good for me. Was it good for you?

How about that? Yesterday’s pathetic plea for attention was answered, and I lost my link virginity.

Matras, anyone?

Life is so hard. How will I ever be famous if even people who acknowledge me don’t link to me? That article was interesting to read. I always thought that it would be obvious to anyone that the Hebrew numbering system is so straightforward that a child can master it, but for someone looking at […]

Ritual Mocking

Joel Spolsky has been reading Peter Trudelle and Matthew Thomas, and draws the conclusion that distributed open-source development doesn’t have the bandwidth to achieve results — a conclusion which Matthew himself doesn’t agree with. I have noticed another characteristic of a project like Mozilla as opposed to a conventional development project within a company. To […]

I have been working on a paper on Hebrew numbering, which is on my people.netscape.com site together with my paper “ The Story of Bidi Mozilla” from the last Unicode Conference, soon to be available in a native HTML version instead of that rather nasty Powerpoint to HTML conversion.

I love praise as much as anyone else, but I have to confess that this is a little bit over the top. Anyway, I hope it attracts a lot of new users to the Hebrew Mozilla site.

I read Golden Gate by Vikram Seth this week, a book I have been keeping an eye open for for years, and was not disappointed. When I read An Equal Music a few years ago I thought it was one of the best books I had read for a long time (although I later found […]