Apparently I haven’t been mentioning my brother-in-law enough in my blog. No, he’s not a janitor, but this is the goofiest picture I could find of him.
Month: May 2003
Ask Yahoo! RSS release
Ask Yahoo!, a daily column that features Q&A with Yahoo!’s expert team of Surfers, is officially syndicating its content via RSS. As reported here back in April, RSS support for Ask Yahoo! had previously been available as a Beta release only. This week, Ask Yahoo! marks five wonderful, question-filled years. To celebrate this momentous occasion, […]
Ploni ben Ploni
John Doe. Joe Schmoe. Ploni ben Ploni. When the Gemara needs a placeholder name but doesn’t want to use a real one, apparently it uses the name פלוני (transliterated here as Ploni). Ploni can be used both as a person’s name as well as a name of a place. In mock contracts, sometimes the formula […]
Yoav and Ariella in SF
This photo of Ariella and her bro in San Francisco is from a week ago. I finally transferred a batch of images from my digital camera today.
Self-Destructing DVDs: Divx redux
Disney to Begin Renting ‘Self-Destructing’ DVDs (Yahoo! News) Hey, didn’t we already do this about 5 years ago? This time, the underlying technology is something called Flexplay.
Adventures with DB_File::Lock
I like the Unix DBM file format (a.k.a BerkeleyDB). I use it for static data (like the zip code-to-latitude/longitude database for the Hebcal Interactive Jewish Calendar) and for dynamic data (such as the subscriber database for the Mountain View High School Alumni Internet Directory). BerkeleyDB is also great because it has many language interfaces. I […]
US Copyright Office hearings on DMCA at UCLA
Some entertainment industry heavies will be testifying at UCLA on exemptions from the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA: U.S. Copyright Office, Anticircumvention Rulemaking Hearings Schedule The hearing is in the Moot Court room, 1310, on the first floor of the law school.
Mikel Maron: Reactive Links
A superb idea today from Yahoo! alumnus Mikel Maron: Reactive Links. Anytime someone click-thrus on these redirect links, the service records that action… more active links could be big and red and quiet links could small and blue, or whatever you like. These links change their character depending on their usage. [Brain Off] It reminds […]
Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web
At lunch today we were talking about trademarks and whether Yahoo! is a brand name or a generic term. Since it’s used in Chapter 1 of Gulliver’s Travels, it clearly pre-dates the web company. And the first use with an exclamation point probably comes from the Erasure song which was released in 1988 on The […]
Hebrew Computing on Mac OS X
We’re thinking about buying a Mac. One of the things that has been holding us up is lack of support for Hebrew software. Until Mac OS X 10.2 was released, the operating system didn’t even offer native support for Hebrew. However, we’re still waiting for some important applications (such as NisusWriter) to come out with […]