Daily minefield

OK, that’s it. Hadar has to move to Haifa to do her Ph.D. in the Technion.

Which means that i’ll have to leave the beautiful Giv’at Ye’arim and look for a new home and a new job. At least i can be happy that it’s not Tel-Aviv.

In my last round of job hunting everybody happily accepted the CV in the RTF format. This time i tried to use PDF for a change. One workplace already specifically asked me to send it as DOC. Talk about freedom of choice. To hell with PDF, then.

I need to find a job, so i’ll send DOC, but i will only use OpenOffice to edit it.

Zip

I just discovered a curious thing.

If you rename an OpenOffice.org file to a .zip file, you can unzip it and read its innards in plain XML.

It doesn’t work like that in Microsoft Office 2003, but it should be the default in Office 2007 – except the actual XML will look completely different. To make things utterly confusing, Microsoft called their kind of XML “Office Open XML”. Get it? “Office Open”, but it is not compatible with Open Office.

Maqaf

There’s a hyphen in Hebrew, which doesn’t look like the regular hyphen. It is called “maqaf” (מקף) and it is aligned with the top of the line like this: ־.

It appears in Torah scrolls and in most printed books and newspapers, however it doesn’t appear on keyboards, so most Israelis just write a minus instead when they type. So בית־ספר (beit-sefer, school, lit. book-house) becomes בית-ספר or even בית ספר. The rules for using the maqaf are not taught in schools, so many people – me too – use it inconsistently and often omit it altogether.

Apparently it has issues with Unicode – according to the Unicode standard, maqaf should be used as the hyphen for Hebrew, and proper implementation of Unicode will process it as a right-to-left character unlike the minus, which is a left-to-right character and should be used only with numbers. However, most popular implementations of Unicode (read: Microsoft Word and probably most web browsers, including Firefox) are not really correct. They make life easy for Israelis and treat the minus as the right-to-left hyphen, so it is easy to write this:

החנות פתוחה בשעות 09:00 – 16:00

(The shop is open 09:00 – 16:00)

The problem is that it disregards traditional Hebrew typography and few people seem to care. OpenOffice.org is correct as far as Unicode goes, but most Israelis think that it is just stupid that they can’t write the usual way and throw centuries of our printing tradition to garbage.

On my laptop i made a keyboard mapping that includes the maqaf and i try to use it whenever i can in email and documents. I use it in handwriting too. Some people on the Hebrew Wikipedia use it, although it is controversial. Some free-thinking Hebrew bloggers use it in their blogs (see Digital Words). And that’s about it.

But today i was pleasantly surprised. The maqaf appeared in an article about American junk-food on YNet (i wrote talkback 25). YNet is Israel’s number one online news source. I don’t think that all the articles use it – probably the author of this article was a crazy type like me, or maybe he used some auto-conversion software. I think that i’ll send an email to YNet asking them to use it everywhere.

Please tell me if you want the keyboard mapping with maqaf that i made. It is for Windows. If you use Linux, BSD or Mac, you are probably clever enough to find it on your system by yourself. If you have a server on which i can host it so the public will be able to download it, you’ll make me joyous.

Vegan Spam

Here you go:

X-Gmail-Received: af5da61812e6f0b5e7f7133d607317213a97b783
Delivered-To: amir.aharoni@gmail.com
Received: by 10.65.248.15 with SMTP id a15cs102679qbs;
        Mon, 17 Jul 2006 22:42:20 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.49.41.18 with SMTP id t18mr336896nfj;
        Mon, 17 Jul 2006 22:42:20 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <?WORD??WORD?@?mail_domain?>
Received: from F246A7D4ECFC4A2 ([210.75.200.85])
        by mx.gmail.com with ESMTP id r33si415786nfc.2006.07.17.22.42.18;
        Mon, 17 Jul 2006 22:42:20 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: fail
Message-ID: <36781866608732.A3D0FB1D07@5MVMO>
From: "{WORD)" <{_WORD){WORD)@{MAIL_DOMAIN}>
To: <amir.aharoni@gmail.com>
Subject: {}NEW} {STOCK_2}
Date: {DATE}
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook, Build 11.0.5510
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106
Thread-Index: {ALNUM[36-36]}
Content-Type: text/plain;
        charset="Windows-1252"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

{BODY}

It gives a peek into the spammers’ inner systems. {}NEW} {STOCK_2}, {BODY}, {_WORD){WORD)@{MAIL_DOMAIN} are probably templates, placeholders for actual values and something went wrong in their processing. The actual message that i received was blank.

Also, it was sent by Microsoft Office Outlook. Is Outlook efficient enough to process spam? Or is it fake?