Wednesday 8 October 2008
Wednesday 8 October 2008 at 23:08
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Computerstuff
Richard Stallman recently railed against "cloud computing". The Guardian’s Jack Schofield also warns against its dangers:
"Look, if you have data online, you can lose access to it at any second, through hacking, an idle whim, a simple mistake, or some financial or even natural disaster. In fact, calling it "the cloud" is a good metaphor, because it’s insubstantial and easily blown away. It’s not Google’s fault, it’s the nature of the beast. "
If this might be true with big companies like (...)
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Wednesday 30 July 2008
Wednesday 30 July 2008 at 22:12
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Peace
I’m sitting here on my patio, taking in the cool night air, listening to Kate Bush, thinking of my trip to India in a few days. There, across the valley, in Na’alin, a family is grieving the death of their child, killed yesterday by live ammunition. His family had tried to keep him home, away from the daily demonstrations. Had he lived, he could have been proud that, even as a child, he resisted the stealing of his village’s lands by the occupying power. But he didn’t live, and I cannot (...)
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Friday 18 July 2008
Friday 18 July 2008 at 12:29
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Books, movies, music
Last night, in the framework of the Jerusalem Int’l Film Festival, was the first public screening of the first two episodes of Chaim Yavin’s ID Blues (Teudah Kehula in Hebrew).
The series very effectively explores relations between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel (i.e., those who carry the blue Israel ID card).
As with his previous series Land of the Settlers, Yavin puts to good use his credentials and qualities. Name recognition, face recognition, and his iconic status in Israeli news (...)
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Tuesday 15 July 2008
Tuesday 15 July 2008 at 00:01
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The rest
M., originally from Barcelona and now in Jerusalem, had been a volunteer in Wahat al-Salam during the 2nd Gulf War. All the other volunteers had fled, before the airlines cut their flights Since that time I hadn’t seen her. I only knew that she had initially gone to live in Efrat (the West Bank settlement), where she had converted to Judaism. I assumed that she was still there and happily married to a religious Jew.
On Saturday afternoon, she suddenly showed up on our doorstep, together (...)
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Sunday 6 July 2008
Sunday 6 July 2008 at 22:51
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The rest
I found myself turning the evening news off fairly quickly again tonight. The programme opened with an item about a government decision to investigate police wiretapping used as evidence in the investigation of a sexual harassment scandal involving a politician, several years ago. The TV news brings us stuff like that every evening, and I’m tired of it. The real news goes unreported, while this crap is placed in the spotlight. As if it weren’t bad enough that the politicians are doing a (...)
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Sunday 6 July 2008 at 00:03
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Peace
Every six weeks the Israeli Thich Nhat Hanh sangha holds a day of mindfulness in the Pluralistic Spiritual Ctr and I join partly to manage the screening of a recorded dharma talk.
The last couple of times, besides the work with the projector, there have been lots of early morning preparations; this time carrying and assembling tables, so that I have wondered whether the day was more relaxing or stressful.
It’s a pleasant group of people to be with and the practice is meaningful for me, (...)
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Saturday 5 July 2008
Saturday 5 July 2008 at 01:15
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Computerstuff
Nova Spivack, one of people behind Twine, differentiates in his blog between social networks and interest networks:
"Social networks are about connecting to people and messaging with them — they are basically the next evolution of contact management and email.
"Interest networks are about leveraging collective intelligence to discover and share great content around your interests — they are the next evolution of social media (discussion forums, wikis, blogs, social news aggregation, (...)
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Wednesday 2 July 2008
Wednesday 2 July 2008 at 22:19
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Computerstuff
On ReadWriteWeb I read about a new web service called Posterous. It’s an ultra-simple blogging interface that allows you to send in posts by email. It even arranges content for you, makes photo-galleries and sets up slideshows.
It’s a nice idea. Although other services like Wordpress do allow posting by email, Posterous apparently does so more successfully. A service that allows you to post photos and messages from virtually any situation, like from your mobile phone, opens up (...)
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Wednesday 2 July 2008 at 01:53
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The rest
I attended / sat through seven end-of-the-year school events this year. Six of them were at the WAS-NS primary school and I was there to take pictures. I do the same every year. The children perform various plays, skits, dances. The teachers show slide shows and talk about the past year. Parents read out long speeches, words of thanks, sometimes in rhyming couplets, which enter one of my ears and go out the other. I usually can’t follow more than the most obvious themes of the plays - (...)
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Thursday 26 June 2008
Thursday 26 June 2008 at 21:42
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Computerstuff
I’m usually the one who ends up writing the minutes for our meetings - but I usually find it hard to revisit them later or send them out to the team. Today I discovered that I could make life easier by using Google Docs.
I wrote the protocol while the meeting was taking place and shared it with everyone on the team. Anyone with a laptop computer could see the protocol as it was being written. Anyone who has corrections to write or things to add these immediately or do so later. All (...)
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Thursday 26 June 2008 at 01:16
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Peace
This morning went to take pictures of the art workshop for the kids from Tulkarm - most of them are from the refugee camp. They arrived yesterday, and their main activity was to create some paintings, together with children from the WAS-NS school.
Roos, A woman from the Dutch Embassy, which sponsored the project, came along. As we watched the children painting, I asked Roos if she thought these could be Dutch children. She said "sure!" I remarked that the children in our region are (...)
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Wednesday 25 June 2008
Wednesday 25 June 2008 at 00:32
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Books, movies, music
One of the infinite possibilities of Google Earth and Wikipedia is to visit the locations you are reading about in books. I’m a slow reader, so there are plenty of opportunities for side trips along the way.
Now I’m reading "Shantaram", a 900 page novel by Gregory David Roberts, set in Mumbai. At the place I just left off, Roberts stands on the top floor of Bombay’s tall World Trade Centre, while it is still being built. He gazes down upon the slum where he lives.
And, guess what: Google (...)
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Tuesday 24 June 2008
Tuesday 24 June 2008 at 00:02
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Computerstuff
The other day I began to experiment with a new version of the hieronymouse blog under WordPress. My purpose was to enable some additional features that are not available under SPIP, like writing through third-party software (Flock and Drivel).
Lately, for convenience’s sake, I have been sending material to a social-networked blogging site, myopera.com, though with some misgivings:
On the one hand, I think that non-networked blogs are becoming a little passé in the world of social (...)
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Sunday 22 June 2008
Sunday 22 June 2008 at 23:38
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Computerstuff
I worked for hours on the problem of posting via the Flock web browser, before discovering via Google that it was necessary to create an .htaccess file with the lines:
SecFilterInheritance Off
Reference: http://codeinzen.net/2007/10/27/xml-rpc-issue-with-wordpress/
That works for Flock. The Drivel blog editor still doesn’t work for me, however.
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Thursday 19 June 2008
Thursday 19 June 2008 at 00:07
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Computerstuff
Daughter Ella left for Barcelona this afternoon, to meet up with the Rainbow gathering, currently near the town of Leon. Doesn’t seem like long since she came home from India. Europe will be different for her. During her year in Sicily, she didn’t travel very much - now it’s another phase in her life.
One of her deliberations was whether to take a camera. Eventually she decided on her old Rebel - a film camera. When I first traveled to India, I didn’t take a camera. I wasn’t sure about (...)
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