Sunday, December 14, 2003
Moving on again
I was not too surprised by Tuesday's news, since I have pretty much been waiting for that shoe to drop ever since this shoe dropped.
Since last July I have anyway felt rather a fish out of water in the AOL development culture, and I am hoping that this will have the good side of getting me back into the open source world where I feel I belong.
So, what are the effects of being laid off for someone who hates writing about himself?
Highlights:I don't have to do the annual self-assessment which would normally take up a large proportion of the man-hours in December.
Lowlights:I did have to update my resumé.
Thursday, December 04, 2003
Moving on
Tonight, which is the first night after the end of the period of saying Kaddish for my late mother, Gwen Montagu נעמי בת אברהם ושרה נ"ע, I was meditating and had the following insight. I hope I will be able to write it down as clearly as it appeared to me.
כִּי עִמְּךָ מְקוֹר חַיִּים בְּאוֹרְךָ נִרְאֶה אוֹר (תהלים ל"ו י')
For with You is the source of life; by Your light we see light. (Psalm 36, 10)
Most people today other than the ultra-Orthodox think of mourning practices in general, and Kaddish in particular, as being for the benefit of the living, as a process in which the bereaved reaffirm their belief in God and God's justice over the course of eleven months, to aid themselves in gradually coming to terms with their loss.
Classical Jewish sources give a completely different perspective: of Kaddish as for the benefit of the dead, as something which alleviates the judgment of the wicked and helps the souls of the righteous ascend from level to level in the Garden of Eden.
My insight tonight was that there is no contradiction. If the bereaved relatives are full of grief and unable to move on in their lives, their parent's soul will be unable to move on in the next world, because it will be too concerned for them and will be searching for ways to pass down comfort to them. By finding comfort through the mourning process, the children are relieving the parent's soul of that responsibility and allowing it to move on to its own next destination.
I don't know quite what to make of the fact that at much the same time I was having these thoughts, a dear friend was posting to me a pointer to the last paragraph of this article, which says almost exactly the same thing from a Catholic perspective.
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Unusability
Searching for tickets on Orbitz I get this error message:
"Flexible date" searching is available for destinations in the US, Canada, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Please enter a new destination or change to "dates not flexible" search.Firstly, why the hell didn't they say that on the previous screen? Secondly, do they really think that I might say “Oh, there’s no flexible search option for flights to London? I’ll just have to go to Chicago instead.”
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
Resopmoc Allizom
It's definitely good news that the standalone version of Mozilla Composer will have configurable toolbars, as seen on this screenshot.
It removes at a stroke all the excuses previously used by iso-8859-1-centric fanatics for not fixing the bug that there is no toolbar button to set the paragraph direction.
Friday, October 10, 2003
Reason to Disbelieve?
I have noticed before how intelligent people will throw logic to the four winds when discussing their religion. It’s interesting to see atheists doing it too.
I’m quite sure that Hixie would not come within a thousand miles of perpetrating a multiple non sequitur like this in connection to any other topic.
Not that I think that the position of the Catholic Church as represented in the quoted article is reasonable, but where is the genocide? And, even if we agree for the sake of argument that this is the position of the whole institution, from the Pope downwards, how do we get from there to “the concept of religion”? Not “the Church”; not “religious fanatics”; the whole friggin’ concept.
Even if you argue that there is a positive correlation between holding religious beliefs and being dangerously irrational about other issues, which seems to be what Ian is saying (and much the same as what I said in my own opening sentence), how did we get to the concept of religion?
I’m not a great fan of arguments by analogy, but I can’t resist this one in this context: many of the forums where web standards are discussed are infested by a high proportion of annoying and opinionated berks. Is this a reason to reject the concept of web standards?
Sunday, October 05, 2003
Anatomy lessons urgently required.
Since Daniel frustrated me yet again by writing a blog entry in a strange Gallic language, and since my knowledge of the aforementioned Gallic language is good enough to read Asterix and Tintin, and good enough to see that the aforementioned blog entry was probably interesting to me; but nevertheless bad enough that I didn't really know what it was saying, and bad enough that I make embarassing errors like offering to baiser respectable women on IRC goodnight, I decided to try Babelfish again and see how much it has improved since the last time I used it, rather than ploughing through the text with the dictionary. Also, there is something about Glazou’s tone which makes me suspect he is using words and idioms that I won’t find in the dictionary anyway.
Not that this last point works in favour of using Babelfish. Its dictionary seems to be even smaller than mine, and its grasp of idiom is so minimal that it makes the impression that it isn’t even trying. I don't know what calottes chantantes are, for example, but I don’t somehow think that “singing caps” is the right English equivalent.
But the funniest thing in the translation was an idiom that Babelfish knew an English equivalent for. Ladies and gentleman, the English for vieux cons is “schmucks”.
Monday, September 01, 2003
Resolutions
From now on there will be no more hidden subtexts and secret messages in this blog (except for certain parts of this entry). I will say what I mean, and mean what I say.
I appreciate the sensitive reaction from my friend, but I don’t want to put friends in the same position in the future.
Friday, August 29, 2003
VIZZINI: I'm waiting
Last January I read that someone had discovered an annotated edition of Beowulf with translation by no less than J. R. R. Tolkien, and that it was “scheduled for publication this coming summer.”
I’m still waiting.
Being an unashamed intellectual snob and show-off (what my ex-wife would have called a “tadas mocka”), I prefer for myself to read Beowulf in the original, but I would like to be able to recommend to friends a translation that goes some way towards conveying the atmosphere of the poem as well as just telling the story, and I have high hopes of Tolkien in this respect.
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Internationalized site of the day
And the winner is: The Weather Underground. Try playing with your Accept-Language header and reloading.
Friday, July 18, 2003
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 missing just two days at the office, I came back to an entirely new world. I felt like Rip van Winkle, or Honi Hame'agel.
Thursday, June 26, 2003
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 this meant, and he told me, “a request for information from one's peers”. Isn't that cool?
Wednesday, June 04, 2003
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 Jerry B. Jenkins, which I have been working my way through recently.
These are the first examples I have come across of what you might call Christian Science Fiction. They take place in the not too distant future, at a time when true believers have been taken to heaven in the Rapture, the world is ruled by the Antichrist (a Romanian politician who has made his way up the ladder to become Secretary-General of the United Nations and then Potentate of the Global Community), and, in Israel, a distinguished scholar called Tsion Ben-Judah presents the result of his research on the identity of the Messiah.
Rather disappointingly, Ben-Judah's conclusions (in the second book of the series, Tribulation Force) are no more than a recycling of the same arguments that Christian missionaries have been using for centuries to prove that all the Messianic prophecies in the Bible refer to Jesus. Just to take one example (and I am quoting from memory since I have already returned that volume to the library), he says that Isaiah prophesies that the Messiah will be “born to a virgin”. Well, no. The reference is to Isaiah 7, 14, as quoted in Matthew 1, 23, but how could Ben-Judah, who is described as an expert linguist, be unaware that the original Hebrew talks about עלמה, a young woman, and not a virgin?
The way I see it, the definitive Jewish teaching on the Messiah comes from Yeshayahu Leibowitz (my translation below):
הגאולה מופיעה כמציאות שהיא תמיד מעבר למה שיש, שלעולם אין מגיעים אליה, אך לעולם יש להתאמץ להגיע אליה … המשיח הוא לעולם בגדר מי שבכל יום אחכה לו שיבוא, ואילו המשיח הבא בפועל — תמיד הוא משיח-שקר.
Redemption is always one step ahead of reality. We can never reach it, but we can always aim towards it. The Messiah that we believe in is the one who we wait for every day and hope that he will come. A Messiah who has already come can only ever be a false Messiah
Saturday, January 11, 2003
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 which I can say THANK YOU.” is an excellent way to get your bugs prioritized.
Wednesday, January 08, 2003
And so to blog
I have been reading
“[I] went to my office, where there was nothing to do.” Is it just me, or does that sound exactly like Pav talking?
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