Author: Dotan Dimet

Simon Montagu has a blog

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date October 06, 2002

Al Ha VeDa is the blog of Simon Montagu, Netscape’s current BiDi/Hebrew expert. He used to work for IBM (in the team that implemented BiDi in Mozilla), and then moved to Netscape – a move several of the more active independant contributors did. Apropos of this(?), he writes:

Getting through an interview requires basic social skills. This makes open source projects the natural home of the folks who write really cool code but also happen to be total dorks.

The link to Simon’s blog comes from Ian Hixie, who has a account of his heroic struggle with the Hebrew numbering system.

Software and Programming

Abiword and Hebrew Word Processors

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date October 03, 2002

The latest version of AbiWord supports BiDi (Hebrew and potentially Arabic) text editing!

Unfortunately, Word docs opened up with it look weird (neutral character get shoved to the start of the line), and it doesn’t seem to be easy to work in.

Good start, though. Looks like the open source Hebrew word processor scene is heating up, with both this ASbiword development and with the Israeli Finance Ministry’s announced support for an IBM intiative to add Hebrew capabilities to Openoffice.

Software and Programming

Text pipes

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date October 03, 2002

Crystal Software make an interesting app called TextPipe Pro, which tries to bring the power of UNIX text filters to a Windows GUI. They have a bunch of other products which expand the text manipulation from working just with text (in files or in the clipboard) to working with mail attachments, Word documents and databases.

Roleplaying short

New Campaign note

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date October 03, 2002

Our new campaign just had one session (Monday), and Israel even did a web page for his character, Theodore Alexius Victor Warner the Third, with a session summary, saving me the need to recap.

Resources

Honeyguide and Mantis Shrimp

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date October 01, 2002

Raphael Carter’s Honeyguide Weblog hasn’t been updated since April, but he had a good link to a great site about
Stomatopods (Mantis Shrimp), which are inarguably the coolest crustaceans on earth: “Stomatopods have the most sophisticated visual system in the world”… “Stomatopod strikes are the one of the fastest known movements in the animal kingdom.”…”The force of the strike of a large Californian species approaches that of a 22 caliber bullet”. They’re smart, too (and I have Jack Cohen’s testimony on that…).