The highlight of today's news item is that there's a new essay titled "Why Closed Books are So 19th Century?":

And despite all that, we can often see that books are getting published on paper, and either completely not available online, or their free re-distribution is restricted. They are often available on Peer-to-Peer networks or illegally, but their use is still restricted, and complicates things.

In this article, I'd like to note why non-open books (or at least books that are not available online) are as pointless as non-open-source software.

The other changes are more minor:

• Improvements to the Recommended music page.
• Added my Vim configuration files to the site.
• There's a new fortune cookie.

Enjoy!

The first revision of a new essay, "What Makes Software High-Quality?" (with a focus on open-source software) was added to the essays section:

The Program is Available for Downloading or Buying

That may seem like a silly thing to say, but you'll be surprised how many times people get it wrong. How many times have you seen web-sites of software that claim that the new version of the software (or even the first) is currently under work, will change the world, but is not available yet? How many times have you heard of web-sites that are not live yet, and refuse to tell people exactly what they are about?

More text has been added to the screenplay "Star Trek, We the Living Dead":

Katie: Professor Shlomo Abramovich? You're King Solomo... Errr... I'm not talking with you again. [Goes to sit on the Swing, frustrated.]

Shlomo: Mosheh, remember I told you about Katie?

Mosheh: oh yeah! She looks cute when she's angry.

Katie: Moses, right?

Mosheh: that's right.

Katie: well, in case you've had any interest in me, I should note that I have a policy against getting involved with people who are 4 times my senior or more.

Mosheh: relax! I have married girls who were 15 times my junior or more and my own descendants, and retrospectively I can tell that many of them were more mature and rational than I was in most respects.

a new question and answer has been added to the FAQ about why I don't obscure my email address.

Added a note about the site's hosting provider, and a link to this page from the front page.

Added a "Slashdot this" badge to the bottom of the text of all the pages, next to the "Bookmark This" button.

I'd like to thank Alan Haggai (alanhaggai@gmail.com) for finding a problem in the site, which allowed me to correct it.

A guide to Israeli Free and Open Source Software Resources on the Internet was added to the site. Please let me know if you have any additions to it.

New fortune cookies have been added to the "shlomif", "shlomif-fav" and "joel-on-software" collections:

I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true - I no longer know how to use my telephone.

Bjarne Stroustrup quoted in http://xrl.us/bgzi4

New affiliations have been added to my contact page.

The HTML markup of some of the pages was cleaned up, and several bandwidth optimisations were made, so it should load a little faster.

New links were added to many pages.

The breadcrumbs trails in several pages were fixed.

I added a new Essay Define "Zionism"! about some ambigious terms relating to the Jewish nature of Israel.

A second revision of "Open Source, Free Software and Other Beasts" is available.

As usual, there are also the regular slew of fixes, and additions (including new links). I'd like to thank "acid burn" for pointing out a few typos, which have been fixed.