Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities.

New definition of a civilized planet

During the early days of the atom era, several Sci-Fi authors wrote stories under the assumption that the Galactic Federation defines a civilized planet as a planet, whose lifeforms have been successful in using atomic energy.

A day ago I browsed a book about Life in a bookshop (sorry but its name escaped my memory). According to the book, it seems that life on a planet starts surprisingly short time after the conditions on it have been stabilized. However, if a planet is being continuously bombarded by asteroids and comets, all life is destroyed and needs to restart evolution from the beginning.

Apparently, this was the condition on Earth until 3.8 billion years ago. Only then, the time between consecutive catastrophic asteroid collisions began to be low enough for life to make significant progress in evolution.

This leads to the observation that a truly civilized lifeform on a planet is a lifeform, which can actively defend itself against asteroids and comets on collision course with its home planet.

Speculative consequences:

  1. Humans were created by bacteria (the really dominant lifeform on the planet, according to the book), with the goal of developing technology to defend the bacteria against asteroids and comets.
  2. Once humans demonstrate the ability to defend Earth from killer asteroids, they become eligible for membership in the Galactic Federation. Not once they explode the first atom bomb
  3. Planets with rings may be harboring sentient life. The rings may have been result of destruction of killer asteroids. In the solar system, there are rings around Saturn and Neptune. Is there sentient life on Titan?
  4. The rate of knowledge accumulation is higher in mammals than in other animals such as dinosaurs. This is because when a child is not attached to its parent for long time, the child learns slowly from the environment and does not pass its knowledge on to the next generations. So the evolution depends only upon DNA. Once mammals came into existence, parents started imparting knowledge to their offspring together with the milk. So the rate of knowledge accumulation became independent of DNA mutation rate. Humans made the transition to the next stage by developing the technologies of writing and computers. This stage apparently is what is required to develop effective defenses against killer asteroids.

Proof of nonexistence of telepathy

I am now viewing the movie “What women want”. I recorded it on VCR a week ago and today I have the time to view it. The movie is about a man, who acquired the ability to read women’s thoughts and how he deals with his newly-acquired faculty.

After seeing few scenes showing women willing (figuratively) to lick the floor on which a man, who understands them, walks – I reach the conclusion that if there were any possibility for telepathy, telepaths would have had such huge advantage in natural selection that no more than 10% of men would lack the ability to read women’s minds.

Risk management is often not culturally acceptable

Yesterday I at last received the book “Waltzing with Bears” by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. The book is about managing risk on software projects. The book was ordered few weeks ago (together with few other books) from Com.Books. Due to difficulties in obtaining this out-of-print book, it arrived few weeks after the other books.

As I read the book, and as I recall an argument I had yesterday with someone, I notice the fact that several people, even apparently rational ones, employ magic based thinking. They say that if you mention a risk, the very fact that you mention, or even think about, a risk dramatically increases the probability it will materialize. They say it when I want to practice risk management together with me.

I would like to suggest the following magic antidote: while it may be magicallytrue that if you think about a risk, you may cause it to materialize. However, if you think about a risk with the mindset of managing it, and then you do something to mitigate the risk, and you have a plan how to deal with the risk, should it materialize – then the very fact you are thinking about all those things magically reduces the probability of materialization of the risk. Furthermore, even if risk does materialize, then it would do so in a tempered way, without incurring annoyance, anger. Sometimes even with a feeling of excitement about the unexpected adventure, which brings some interest to one’s life.

Tour in Florentin neighborhood of Tel Aviv

Few months ago, I was in a Bekol-organized tour in the Neve-Zedek neighborhood of Tel Aviv. Today I had a similar tour in Florentin neighborhood, which lies to the southeast of Neve-Zedek. This time, we had to pre-register for the tour. Apparently, the need to pre-register did not deter people from joining it, and the group counted about 40 people – significantly larger than usual.

We started today’s tour in Beit Immanuel and visited the Immanuel church (formerly German church) next to it. The area had an interesting history. It started by a group of American religious zealots, who figured out that Jesus would come again if Jews return to Palestine. So they immigrated to the sorry land to prepare it for the Jews. They were not successful in their venture, and returned back to USA. Some of them needed monetary assistance from none other than Mark Twain to return to USA. Their buildings were built of wood.

Their buildings were then inhabited by the German Templers. The Germans were very successful in settling in some places in Israel (there are German neighborhoods also in Jerusalem and Haifa). Their nemesis was their Nazi tendencies, which caused the British to eventually remove them from Palestine during World War II.

The Immanuel church is built differently from the usual buildings in Israel, and entering it makes you feel as if you left Tel Aviv and Israel and are now somewhere in Europe.

The tour guide then took us to two culinary delights of Florentin neighborhood. There is one place which she claimed makes the best sandwiches in Israel. We tasted samples of the sandwiches and they indeed were excellent. (This cleared the mystery why preregistration and prepayment for the tour were asked for, contrary to usual practice. The organizers needed to make sure that the locations prepare for us the food samples.)

We next visited a restaurant, whose name is that of Jesus Christ and the ADMO”R Melubevitch. Officially its name was “Messiah ben David”. It, too, was a culinary delight. The third tasting place, where we were at end of our tour, was Conditoria Slonicky, where the sweets were prepared according to the tradition of the Jewish inhabitants of the Greek town of Slonicky.

In middle, we visited the museum in memory of Avraham “Yair” Stern. He was the leader of LEHI, the third and smallest group of freedom fighters, who fought the British Mandate. He was captured in the house where the museum is now, and was brutally murdered by the British police officer who caught him.

One leaflet caught my eye. The leaflet announced that LEHI is disbanding as the State of Israel has been founded. They declared that they do not recognize the authority of the British Mandate, the Jewish Agency, the Hagana, etc. etc. But the recognize and accept the authority of the State of Israel. This explains why they were not a troublesome political factor after the War of Independence. Several of the LEHI members enlisted in the IDF and other Israeli defense organizations. Several years later, one of their leaders became Prime Minister of Israel. I find it amazing that before founding of the State of Israel, there were three freedom fighting organizations, which were not always at peace with each other. Yet, in the years since then, the leaders of all three organizations had their turns at being Prime Ministers of Israel (first, David Ben-Gurion, then Menachem Begin and finally Itzhak Shamir). And this was accomplished solely through the ballot box, without bloody or bloodless revolutions. I feel this is amazing.

Another interesting tidbit is about the Jewish suicide bombers. Two freedom fighters were captured by the British and were sentenced to death by hanging. They and their compatriots decided to smuggle a bomb into their cell. Then, a moment before getting hanged, they are to explode the bomb in the execution chamber, thus dying from it and taking with them several British officers and soldiers.

The plan was foiled because a Rabbi insisted upon being with them when they are executed. They did not want to hurt him, so they hugged each other in the cell two hours before being brought to the execution chamber and exploded the bomb between them.

The tour lasted four hours, rather than the two hours which are customary length of Bekol-organized tours to interesting places in Tel Aviv.

Hafuch al hafuch (literal translation from Hebrew: reverse on reverse)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/20/atm_viral_peril/ (ATMs in peril from computer worms)

Instead of using MS-Windows XP and adding anti-worm, anti-virus and anti-anti-anti-missile missiles, why don’t the banks insist that the ATM vendors use a secure OS? Or at least hold them contractually liable to any damage due to insecurity holes of the OS being used?

My first Debian bug report

Today I filed my first Debian bug report.

I commanded the system to upgrade to the most recent version of Debian Testing packages, as I do each few days (except for mandatory-stable-software freeze periods before important lectures or demonstrations).

This time, upgrade of the hal package failed, due to failure of the /etc/init.d/dbus-1 script to start. I worked around the problem by stopping dbus-1 and rerunning the installer.

Then, I filed a bug report using ‘reportbug’. It was assigned the bug number 277179. The nicest thing was that I did not have to manually collect information about my system configuration or package versions. ‘reportbug’ did this automatically for me.

(Then I found that other people already reported the bug (bug No. 274702).)

Isn’t it great that it is so easy to report bugs!

Today in Tel Aviv University

Each year, on a Friday before the beginning of the academic year, the Hearing Impaired Student Day is held in Tel Aviv University. This year it was held today. The organizers invite current students, and also future and former students are welcome. As they mix together, the experience of the oldtimers rubs on the newcomers. The tips get passed from generation to generation and the age-old wisdom gets spread (even though most of it is only few years old).

After the Day, I went to the Dyonon bookshop. The gate next to the bookshop was already open only in the outgoing direction, so I knew that I’ll have to walk around the campus to get back to a parking lot on its east, where I parked my car. Oh well.

In the shop, I surveyed the computer science books. There was a section for dummies’ level books (in Hebrew). Several of the more professional ones had the Java, C# (but also Linux) keywords on their covers. Also PHP and MySQL were represented, but less strongly. My current favorite, Python, was represented by only a single copy of “Learning Python” – at least as far as I saw.

Oh, the joys of academic world being disconnected from life’s practicalities.
If only they were academic enough to mention LISP or Scheme a lot…

Being a rabid bookholic, I somehow managed to leave the shop with only two books stuck to me. Both of them were from the economics&management section, where I did not look in my previous visits to Dyonon.

One book is “Focused Management – to do more with available resources”. It seems to give a lot of treatment to Eliahu Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints.
The other book is “Systematic Inventive Thinking and Technological Problem Solving” by Dr. Alexander Chernobelsky. The bibliography mentions few publications by Genrich Altshuller, and the book seems to contain a lot of TRIZ related stuff, but I did not see this keyword mentioned in it in my brief glance.
Both books are in Hebrew.

Lecture About Accessibility in Linux

Yesterday I at last could tick off the top item in my ToDo list.

The Linux accessibility lecture has finally been delivered to the Haifux club in the Technion, Haifa (http://www.haifux.org/lectures/112/ and if you have trouble opening one of the *.pdf files linked to the page in your Web browser, download it and view it offline using acroread).

In this context, the subject of accessibility in Linux is naturally divided into three sub-topics:

  • General introduction to the world of disabilities – for people who are not familiar with the subject.
  • Accessibility provisions in Linux.
  • Comparison between Linux and MS-Windows.

So, after some planning, negotiations and buttonholing, a bit of interleaving was retained. At beginning I spoke about disabilities (except for blindness). Then Ori Idan spoke about computer usage by blind people, and entertained us with tales about some amazing (to us sighted) feats of blind people.

Then I declared 15-minute break (somehow I was silently nominated as the host of the “mini-seminar”). After the break it was surprisingly easy to get the attention of the people for the second part of my lecture. At least, for me it was surprising, because I am used to the difficulty of getting the attention of a group of deaf persons at break. This time, I did not have to ask the room lights to be blinked few times to get attention.

Then I spoke and demonstrated what Linux (X-Window, Gnome) has to offer in way of accessibility.

I did not notice signs of sleepiness or boredom among the participants. Some brave souls asked questions or made comments. Ori Idan’s lecture (being delivered by an hearing person) drew out much more comments, questions and anecdotes from the audience.

After the lecture I was rewarded by a can of beer (comment: “free as in free beer”).

There were two disappointments:

  • Ladypine, who suggested that Ori collaborate with me, and who organized the meeting – could not show up after all due to personal reasons.
  • Interpreting assignments, in which the deaf person delivers a technical lecture to hearing audience (rather than an hearing person delivering a non-technical lecture to a group having deaf persons) are very rare. The Sign Language interpreter, whom I booked for the event, needed to meet me before the evening to prepare for the assignment, but this was not possible due to geographic reasons. So there were some difficulties in communication between me, the interpreter and the audience.

I also botched up the demonstration of the virtual keyboard utility. But I did not consider this to be an important part of the lecture. The demonstration of the Emacs visual beep feature went well, however ((setq visible-bell t)). This was more important, as Gnome does not handle visual beeping in behalf of applications (as far as I saw). Someone from the audience pointed out that KDE does handle this.

Is there a God?

Finally, there is an “official” FAQ about this profound question. It is at http://www.400monkeys.com/God/.

I would like to add the following questions to the FAQ, because the question “why do people believe in God?” is even more important than the question “Is there a God?”.

  1. Why do people need a religious belief?
  2. What is the cause for difference between people, who have greater need for religious belief, and people, who have less need for religious belief?
  3. What are the psychological factors, which cause a person to prefer a particular religious belief (or lack of any religious belief)?
  4. What causes some politicians to adopt a particular religion as a state religion, whose commandments and prohibitions must be enforced over the population in a particular territory?
  5. Under what circumstances would people tend to respect each other’s religious preferences, and when would they tend to force their beliefs into their fellows’ throats?

Notice that the subject is multidisciplinary even if we remove theology: it involves psychology, politics and sociology.