Scribo, Ergo Sum

Today I helped Ben & Shiri move to a new place at Ramat Poleg. Their new apartment is nice and spacious, and has a great balcony with a fantastic view of the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, we ran into another “great” example of Israeli forward thinking at its best - the elevators in their new building were too small to fit a 3-persons sofa and a large futon base.

Yes, that’s right. There was no way to get standard furniture like a sofa into their apartment except for carrying it 9 floors up the stairs. We weren’t that desperate so we ended up shlepping it back to Shiri’s mom’s place. We did, however, carry the futon base up the stairs.

What I find astonishing about this is that the building is fairly new - it was built 9 years ago, so it should be pretty modern. I’d like to find the stupid architect who designed the building, merely 2 years before the millennium celebrations, and did not consider it important to facilitate the actual moving of stuff into the building. So if you know who is the architect of 22 Mordechai Gur, Ramat Poleg (I think that was the address), please let me know

What I’d like even more is to find the moron at Netanya’s city council that approved the building plans and kick his ass, or at least make him carry the sofa.

I think everybody should watch this great educational video over at http://www.storyofstuff.com/. It reminds me that I need to finish up on my writing of the Nature’s Capital series.

Last week we went to the Zoological Gardens in Jerusalem (literally named “The Biblical Zoo” in Hebrew).

Here are a few photos. They link to their full-size versions on flickr.

I haven’t posted anything for quite a while. Lots of things accumulated on my to-write list, but meanwhile, I want to post a few pictures of my desktop. I recently upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbons), and it comes with compiz working right out of the box.

Youtube hosts quite a few videos demonstrating the Desktop cube, wobbly windows and other 3D effects. I don’t have such a video, and now that I finally figured out how to take screenshots while rotating the cube, here they are. Clicking on the small photos will open the full-size photos from flickr in a new window (or you can just middle-click on them to open in a new tab if you are using firefox or ie7).

Here is the first picture, showing the desktop rotated between two workspaces.

This picture demonstrates the cube’s transparency feature, and the famous gears inside. Notice that you can see the youtube video inverted from behind (it continues to play during rotation).

Just for fun, I replaced the cube cap with one of Yuval’s painting instead of the compiz default one.

This one here shows that compiz can easily handle a dual-monitor configuration, which I use at work.

Here is the one-big-cube display for dual-monitor, instead of multiple cubes.

Next there is the issue of the applications switcher (the one that kicks-in when you press Alt+Tab). Compiz can do much better than the mundane list of applications titles. Here is the ring switcher.

Here is the shift switcher. It is very similar to what Windows Vista offers (one of its highlights, as far as I know). I am not sure which one came first - perhaps they both copied the design from Apple.

There are lots of other effects to show, but I think it is much better to try on your own. So next time that you want some cool graphics, forget about Vista. Get Ubuntu live CD and try it out.

By the way, the background picture behind the cube - called the skydome - is of Avalanche Peak, New Zealand. It’s a wonderful place, I high recommend that you visit it if you happen to travel in NZ south island

I recently moved this blog to http://www.herenow.org.il/blog/. This is a minor relocation so WordPress, the software powering this blog, won’t interfere with other stuff that happens under the root folder of my web server.

Although this is a minor change - just move a few files and update one entry in the database - it turned out to be more complicated than I thought. Moving the blog to a different folder also changed the address of its rss feed. The difficulty lies in assuring a smooth and transparent transition for current subscribers who use an rss reader that is already configured with the old address of the feed.

Here mod_rewrite comes to the rescue. I used it to configure the web server so it redirects any requests for the old rss feed to go to the new one. With such a configuration, current rss readers will request the old feed and be automatically redirected to the new one (using an HTTP 301 response code), without any action required from the users.

Such a configuration is doable with mod_rewrite. Whether it is easily doable, is debatable

It turns out that the old rss feed had three different addresses:

• http://www.herenow.org.il/?feed=rss2
• http://www.herenow.org.il/?feed=atom
• http://www.herenow.org.il/feed/

I wanted to setup all three addresses to redirect to http://www.herenow.org.il/blog/feed/. This turned out to be quite tricky. I haven’t used mod_rewrite before, and most of the examples that I found online didn’t exactly match what I needed.

Eventually I succeeded, after a few days of trial and error. Here is what I added to .htaccess file at the root folder of the web server. Perhaps this will help other bloggers who are in a similar situation:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^feed=.*$
RewriteRule ^$ blog/feed/? [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^feed.* blog/feed/? [R=301,L]
</ifmodule>

I won’t go in to the details of this configuration, but let’s just say that the devil is in the little details. Every character matters