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.

Debian, at last

Those days I am installing Debian in my IBM ThinkPad R40e laptop.
The installation is not fully OK yet. The USB mouse does not work after I disabled BIOS USB support to prevent keyboard lockup at boot time. The internal mouse causes the graphic cursor to jump to the lower left corner at the slightest provocation. I am still learning my way through Debian.

However, I can already start appreciating the power of Debian relative to RedHat and Fedora Core, which I have been using so far.

Debian has reputation of being more difficult to install than several other distributions. What I find is that Debian installer does not hide from you the complexity of what it is doing. But if you are not afraid of scrolling messages and of doing hand editing once in while and of learning new things, Debian is not difficult.

It seems to me that there are few kinds of people. One kind want the control provided by Debian and are willing to pay the price of messing around when this becomes necessary. Another kind want the software to handhold them – hide from them complexity. But when something goes wrong, they are left with having to try things randomly or asking for help from the local guru.

Once I get it to work to my satisfaction, I’ll check the Debian installation and if its Hebrew support is good enough, I’ll consider adopting the dictatorial policy of helping my friends with their computer problems only if they work with Debian (even if today they use MS-Windows XP).

Accessibility in Linux

Some time ago I made the mistake of stressing the desirability of having a lecture about accessibility in a meeting of a Linux Users’ Group. Now I am stuck with researching for the lecture.

Among other things, I found this link:
http://www.washington.edu/accessit/articles?197 – How does accessible Web design benefit all Web users.

This is an important link, in view of the current campaign to make several Israeli Web sites accessible to Mozilla users.

Find the similarity between Itzhak Rabin (1995) and Gal Fridman (2004)

Today I was in a shopping mall when a plasma TV caught my eye. It broadcast the mistral race in which Gal Fridman won the gold medal, first “proper” gold medal won by an Israeli in the Olympic Games.

The broadcast was, according to bottom messages, accompanied by a voice commentary by someone. Of Course, The Commentary Was Not Made Accessible to The Israeli Deaf.

Thus, the comments, which I wrote nine years ago (https://deaf-info.zak.co.il/d/deaf-info/old/rabinfuneral.html), still apply. While names were mentioned here and there and the mark times and positions were broadcast, this was courtesy of the Olympic Games original broadcasters. IBA does not have any credit for it.

August Penguin 2004

The story starts with a Thursday evening orgy of Sushi and CashFlow(R). While I figured out several weeks ago that CashFlow(R) is not the ultimate tutor for success in managing monetary affairs, it nevertheless is a fun game. Especially when my playmates have their real-life experience to draw on. It was especially fun to encourage each other to make silly mistakes and bad business decisions, “Fear Factor” style.

Thus it came to pass that today in the morning, I had to undergo multi-stage bootstrapping process to bootstrap myself out of bed and into car.

I was late, so I arrived at August Penguin 2004 in middle of the CoLinux lecture. It took me some time to search for the event – a poster stating the relevant hall number/s at the main entrance would have shortened my search to order of O(1).

The nice lady, who sat next to me, estimated that the actual schedule slipped by half an hour. Later Joel Isacsson gave his lecture about the top ten mistakes of embedded Linux users. The transparencies were well-written and witty. I assume that also the audio part of the lecture had similar high quality.

After the lecture ended, there was a break and I went out to the books booth, hoping that the books, which several weeks ago I asked ladypine to arrange for are there. When coming there, I realized my mistake of not first patronizing the books booth. The only book remaining from my original list was “In search of stupidity” by Merrill R. Chapman. After another round of looking over the books, I bought also “Essential PHP Tools” by David Sklar. In my defense, I must say that the people, who sold the books, did not look polished (as in polished operating procedures) in particular and they filled the desks also with some Harry Potter book (keep away, all Harry Potter fans! I did see and did enjoy the first Harry Potter movie! I swear in the precious mini-Kazit CD-ROM which I received in the August Penguin!). They had also piles of “for dummies” books.

After the long line for ice cream (in exchange for coupon which is worth two balls), I returned to the hall and saw the last part of the trivia contest. I also saw Joel Isacsson is talking with someone who has a Nokia 9210i. Joel asked me about a deaf mutual acquaintance who is now in USA, but at the time lived in Israel, and (twenty years ago!) borrowed from him a modem in order to be able to communicate with me via phone – those were the days when we started the Israeli TDD project.

The guy with 9210i had some gripes and wishes about the software.

Someone then made a speech (according to the event schedule, it was to be a speech by a leader of Hamakor), and prizes were handed out to the five nominated contributors to the Free Software scene in Israel. Afterwards, I went back home. If I won anything in the lottery, I assume that this made the one after me a very happy person.

I made a mental note to arrange for accessibility next August Penguin. Look for additional hearing-impaired Hamakor members and together arrange for the various accessibility provisions we’ll need.

What I wrote 16 years ago, as a bored physics M.Sc. student

1st Joint Conference Between Earth Physicists and Epsilon Uridani Physicists

5. Discussion about Quantum Mechanics

E.U. present their model of the microscopic universe and their key thought experiments.

Earth present Quantum Mechanics.

E.U. physicists ridicule it – citing quickly all those paradoxes (such as EPR, quantization of gravitation, etc.). All paradoxes except for two are already familiar to Earth physicists.

E.U. criticize also the thought experiments, starting from Stern-Gerlach experiment. Their attack is on the fact that the abstractions have not been properly constructed. Some of the neglected details are, in fact, very important.

Then, a review of the histories of the ideas is made.

E.U.: WHAT?! Your physicists do not learn epistemology?!!!

Summary

The Earth physicists took advantage of playing with symbols without referents: their mathematics is very developed. E.U. can use several mathematical concepts developed on Earth for their physics research.

How to care for an URI and feed it?

I am developing an application, which needs to be aware of the concept of URI. A quick Google search yielded the following URLs:

  1. What’s a URI?
  2. MonkeyX’s Hairy Thoughts about semantic Webs

What I really would like to:

  1. Find how to specify a section inside a file, in terms of offset relative to beginning and length.
  2. Locate a Python module, which knows to do everything a mortal needs to do with URIs.

Accessibility of disability related Web sites

I am active in the “Accessible Community” project in Petah Tikva.
This project is part of an effort made in several Israeli cities to improve the quality of life experienced by people with disabilities.

Today there was a meeting of representatives of the “Accessible Community” project from several cities. Among other things, two Web sites were announced:

  1. http://www.kn1.org.il/
  2. http://www.matnachim.org.il/

Of course, I asked about accessibility of those Web sites to non-IE browsers. Both announcers of the Web sites claimed that their Web sites are accessible to everyone.

After returning home, I surfed into those Web sites using Mozilla. I found that the first Web site has a problem of text layout, which causes some frames to overlap. The links, which I checked, did work. With the second Web site I saw no problems in my limited testing. I cannot finish this journal entry without an amusing anecdote. I schlepped a woman, who walks on crutches, to the meeting and back to her home. The woman is very active in the campaign against non-disabled people parking at spaces reserved to people with disabilities. Near her home there is a parking reserved for the car of another disabled person, and it was empty when I arrived there. I stopped my car in the reserved parking place to let the woman go out and then exclaimed “Oh, I am occupying a disabled parking!”. She LOL and almost ROTFLed.

Proposed new terminology: bound platform vs. free platform

When you want to develop software, and choose a platform on which the software is to be run, you have two choices, as follows.

Bound Platform
Your software must run on the same platform as some existing software. You are constrained also in the choice of computer language to be used and the SDK.
Free Platform
Your software will run on its own hardware, with no need to share hardware with any existing software. So you are free to choose whatever hardware&software combination that is convenient for you. You are free to choose OS, computer language and SDK.

Today, my default choice for Free Platform is LAMP (where P stands for Python). If I ever need to develop a very secure solution, I’d look into OAMP (where O stands for OpenBSD). In the future I hope to be able to upgrade to LAMS (where S stands for Scheme).