In LA

I was greeted by my email this morning with two messages from my blog that there were comments on a post requiring moderation. For the first time since I started this blog, two people posted comments in one day. I think they may be the 2nd and 3rd comments received by this blog ever. This made me wonder, so I took a look at the stats for “Top Page Hits” generated by the prolific Owen Winkler’s BAStats wordpress plugin. It turns out that my post How to play Windows Media files on a Mac has received 141 hits in the past 24 hours. But how could that post suddenly have received 141 hits when the main blog page itself only received 20 hits in the same period? The answer was provided by the same plugin in its “Top Referring Pages” report: the Windows Media post was referred by www.myapplemenu.com as well as myapplemenu.com and the archive page www.myapplemenu.com/2005/06/30/. That’s where all those readers and commenters came from. So welcome, myapplemenu.com readers. Feel free to stick around, comment, leave, stay, whatever floats your boat. I’ll be posting more MacOS X hints as I come up with them. I’ll be checking out myapplemenu.com as well — I’ve subscribed to its RSS feed using the very nice RSS reader NetNewsWire. For some reason, this particular post was attracting lots of comment spam, so I’m closing it to further comments.

Or at least, they will be able to unite soon when at least one more Jewish woman becomes a traditional scribe to join Vancouver’s Aviel Barclay in her career path. According to this article at Forward (a journal from New York founded in 1897 and published in English, Russian, and Yiddish!), Aviel is the only soferet (traditional scribe) at the moment, but there’s at least one more soferet in training in New York.

“Black Berry Sheet” © copyright A. Barclay

A bit of explanation about sofrim (scribes) and some historical background is in order: There are many ritual objects used in the practice of Judaism, from Torah scrolls to marriage contracts (ketubim) to tefillin and mezuzot, that require the work of a scribe. There are all sorts of rabbinic laws and traditions relating to the exact shape of the hebrew letters in such inscriptions, and it’s a profession requiring a large amount of technical skill (certain kinds of mistakes in writing a Torah scroll require starting the section over), halachic (Jewish law) knowledge, and a good aesthetic sensibility. Traditionally, sofrim have been male, and many orthodox would argue that this is the way it should be for a variety of reasons. There’s a heated halachic debate on this issue within the orthodox community.

So this makes Aviel Barclay’s situation very unique. I stumbled across her blog/diary and webpage today. Some of her ketubim (marriage contracts) look very nice, and she is writing an entire torah for a congregation in Seattle. She also writes amulets and teaches the kabbalah of the letters.

Aviel is very traditional and thus looks within the rabbinic tradition for her responses to critics and to inform her own thoughts and rationalizations. I mention this to explain some of the rather technical-sounding halachic language and logic in her posts. You may need a hebrew and aramaic dictionary to get through some of those posts with the meaning intact, but the photos of her work scattered through her blog need no translation.

Y’all Mac users probably already know that you can capture screenshots to a file on the Desktop by hitting command-shift-3, and command-shift-4 to capture a specified portion of the screen to a file (if you don’t know about that, try it — you can delete the file later). But you can also copy the screen or a portion of it to the clipboard rather than a file by adding the control key to those key combinations.

This can be very useful if you want to paste a screencap into an email message or an iChat conversation. Just shift-control-command-4 and drag across a portion of the screen to copy it to the clipboard. You can also change any of these key combinations in the ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’ section of the ‘Keyboard & Mouse’ System Preferences pane. I’d advocate leaving them as-is and learning the defaults so that you can take advantage of the combos you’ve memorized when you sit down at macs other than your own. And your ability to remember multiple-key combinations will come in handy when you start using GNU emacs to edit all your text files.

I’ve decided I need to learn more math to better understand the algorithms used to generate computer graphics, with an emphasis on feature tracking and optical flow analysis. I’ve decided on a goal, which is to be able to understand the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. I picked this algorithm at random because its description looks a lot like that of other functions I’ve tried to figure out in the past. So I’m going to have to brush up on linear algebra.

Goals can be dangerous. Back when I was around 15 I decided I was going to tackle Bach’s Prelude 2 in C minor. I worked on it for a long time, and never did finish. It was very frustrating. Since then I haven’t really touched a piano.

When I have enough space for a piano I’ll start practicing again, and without a doubt I’ll master that piece. But maybe I’ll start off with something that’s closer to my skill level.

There’s a list of “Ancient Texts Online” available here courtesy of the Paleojudaica blog. It includes such writings as the Babylonian Talmud, the Septuagint, Writings of Maimonides, the New Testament in Greek, etc.

NewsinChinese is a very cool site. It’s a blog that aggregates a bunch of Chinese news stories and displays them. As you mouse over each Chinese character, a small window pops up that shows the character, its pronunciation in pinyin, and meaning.

There’s some very cool furniture designs at OOMS, including gold staples and a very positive tombstone.

If you’ve been looking for a band of Jewish motorcycle enthusiasts to join, you’re in luck. The King David Bikers are ready to ride, and there’s probably a branch in your city.

I wonder if Rabbi Ira Stone, former Rabbi of Seattle’s Congregation Beth Shalom, is a member. On weekdays he would always ride his hog to synagogue and show up wearing leather pants and a helmet.

This BBC article spells out exactly how much the British taxpayer spent on the plush existence and travel itineraries enjoyed by the royals. It comes to £36.7m, or “61p” (pence?) per taxpayer.

As a citizen of a constitutional republic that has no role for and does not fund the lives of royalty (unless celebrities are considered royalty and ticket prices to see mediocre movies is akin to taxation), I find this news very amusing. Time to ramble on…

Royalty to me is a throwback to a time when people believed that coming from a certain family line automatically made a person more fit to rule. In many cases, Kings had a religious role within an official church, and they and their family often were thought to have been chosen by god for service as pampered rulers. This meaning may be preserved in the title of the current Queen of England (who also “holds” 15 other crowns), which begins “Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God”.

AFAIK, the Queen of England doesn’t really have much of a hand in the politics of Britain. She promised at her coronation to be a constitutional monarch, which means that (although Britain doesn’t actually have a constitution) she’ll let the people rule themselves via statutes and customs. Quite an abdication of authority there, voluntarily becoming a mere figurehead, but undoubtedly a smart choice in order to avoid being overthrown one day. It’s cheaper and more pleasant this way (who knows what amount of damage the palace would incur in a revolution).

On the plus side, continuing the traditions related to royalty offers people a connection to the past and a way of indicating reverence for the customs of their ancestors, a source of nice gossip for the tabloids and news, and a public face for a kingdom. It may seem like a bunch of silly pageantry to me, but there’s no lack of silly pageantry in countries that eschew the very idea of royalty.

But as the “value-for-money” quote from the “keeper of the privy purse” implies, if you’re going to have royalty, at least they should come at a low low price to the public. Keep the costs low enough and the subjects/public won’t ever have to decide whether the value has been exceeded and move on to an era in which royal folk will be regarded as simple human beings like everyone else.

There are many ways to play Windows Media files on computers running Apple’s OS X:

• Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 9 for Mac Os X — straight from the horses mouth. Plays Windows Media audio and video ok, streaming and files. Does not support playback of nearly as many formats as Windows Media Player for Windows.
• Flip4Mac — I haven’t tried this commercial option ($9), but these folk have apparently licensed the windows media codecs and written them as QuickTime codecs so that you can install them and then simply play back Windows Media files inside of QuickTime Player.
• VLC — a media player that plays just about every format (as well as DVDs), and can also be used to stream media from one machine to another.
• MPlayer OS X — Originally a “Movie Player for Linux”, now available for Mac OS X as well as Windows. Like vlc it plays just about every format well, and also does some fancy filtering and scaling. This is the player I use most often for all non quicktime formats, because I like the UI better than the others, it seems to perform better, and the visual quality is very nice (video generally looks better from mplayer than from Windows Media Player — perhaps due to better filtering and scaling?)