Various transliteration conventions (or a lack thereof) and dialectal differences make it very difficult at times to gather all possible variations for transcribing Hebrew words into English characters. This can make using search engines to find Hebrew terms in English sources very difficult, or could make it hard for a piece of software to identify what someone is referring to when they enter a string of text. For example, biblical book names each have a number of ways of being written, and my BibRef solves this by simply storing a list of alternative names and abbreviations.
Another way of identifying an entered string with one of many options is with regular expressions. As such, I have attempted below to devise regular expressions to match all expected spellings for each tractate (masechet, masekhet, maseches, meseches, etc.) of the Mishnah. Please note that this is only a draft: I expect to improve the regular expressions, and feedback is much appreciated.
Using this as a background study, it may be possible to automate the building of regular expressions for Hebrew words (with vowels given), although many of the expressions below also cover a number of irregularities that would be hard to incorporate into such a builder. Consequently, one could also build a list of all possible alternative spellings for a word, which could then be used with a search engine to make searches of these Hebrew words comprehensive. (Edit: the current expressions below overgenerate way too much and would probably be inappropriate for that task.)
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Facebook’s applications platform/API has made it a much more versatile world of activity. Many, or most, are basically useless, but the idea of third-party extensibility in general has allowed Facebook’s uses to multiply (and has given developers an easy development and deployment framework).
But Facebook groups (or other features) could do with the same versatility being available. Applications could make groups a powerful framework for tasks like:
- charting fundraising by or for the group
- publishing regular event times
- better-than-forum planning and discussion tools
- polls, voting or surveys
- rostering
- game tournaments
- friend wheels to show how group members are connected
- Countdowns, countups and counters (e.g. how many of my yeargroup have got married)
- hundreds of thousands of other things only other Facebook users could come up with.
There’s a good chance Zuckerberg and his team have thought of this already, but the privacy arrangements would have to be quite complicated: at the moment individual users consent to individual applications having access to their personal information. Just because a user is a member of a group with an app, that doesn’t mean they consent to the app knowing about them. Will users have to consent to a group’s apps when they join it, or each time the group admin adds another app? That’s potentially a lot of bureaucracy.
Basically, this could get messy. But the future tells of bright and endless possibilities.
I had to write about it some time, and it’s just too hard to avoid now. The Opera web browser, which I have been using dedicatedly since 2001, on Tuesday released an alpha version of their upcoming version 9.50, codenamed Kestrel. I’m very excited.
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After hesitantly accepting a few and later removing them, I’ve generally avoided the craze of Facebook applications. While I could imagine great potential for them, without more centralisation, most are highly redundant and plain annoying.
Nonetheless, I have for a long time wanted to know the relationships between my friends on Facebook. I.e., who of my friends know each other? More so, who is a common friend of a lot of my friends, but is not listed as my own? (more…)
Forwarded emails are not as popular as they used to be. But every now and then, someone receives something they agree with, or something that concerns them (most often), and forwards it along to a handful of faithful forwardees.
If this sounds like you, STOP.
Or at least check first to see if you can find evidence that what is said in the email is true. A lot of what you read online is fact; most is opinion. Some is true, some is false, some wavers between the two. Others may be true opinion but based on false backgrounds.
That was the case with an email I received today. Twice, from opposite sides of the world. (more…)
As the Facebook craze sweeps the universities and high schools of Australia, I have begun to find myself with a problem: I don’t know who my friends are anymore. And by that, it’s not a matter of trust, but that all sorts of people I’ve known but otherwise wouldn’t call “friends” have decided to “Facebook friend” me. Do I accept? (more…)
Isn’t OnlySimchas so much prettier without those annoying flashing ads everywhere? Once you’ve seen it without, you’ll never want to go back. (Facebook too…)
It’s as simple as right-click -> Block Content, click, click, click. Ahhhh….
And it’s only one small reason to use the Opera Web Browser.
PS: Yes, this is a shameless promotion for my part in the current generation of Browser Wars. It’s the only software I promote regularly, and I have had good reason to snce 2000. It runs my life and with IE or Firefox or Safari or Konqueror, I am crippled. And it’s worth it.
PPS: No, Opera isn’t the only software out there that blocks banner ads. But it makes it easy, and there are enough other reasons to want to use Opera.
People tell me they’re not into the blog thing. But they’re well into the email thing—after all, it pretty much comes direct to you and so is much easier to access.
So at my guess people just aren’t using blogs properly. The key to the modern blog is that they can be read as a web page, as an email, or in just about any other collected format. This is due to something called RSS feeds. An RSS feed collects together a summary of a site, such as news from the Jerusalem Post, or posts from my blog, or comments on my blog.
So instead of me having to send out annoying mass emails along my travels, what you need is an RSS reader or aggregator. There are literally hundreds of these around. (more…)
