During the upgrade of dasBlog I managed to lose write permission to my content, so I couldn't post.
Now it's fixed (thanks to my lovely ISP Mirshetet.org)

Overall, I'm happy.. :-)

I'm using FireFox and AdBlock for quite some time, but recently I'd a page that I had a page that was simply so full of ads that I no longer had the ability to selectively nuke the annoying ads.

I just added a filter that tell AdBlock to remove anything with *ads* in it, and forgot about it.

Then I went to a page that said "we rely on ads for our existance" and I suddenly noticed that I don't see any ads.

It's so nice... :-)

Apperantly Yukon won't be the only DB out there with .Net support, Oracle intend to join the fray and IBM's DB2 is not far behind.

I wonder what version of .Net they are going to use outside of Windows, should be a good push for Mono.

And the mandatory question, why aren't they doing it in Java? Especially Oracle, with its Java commitment?

Anyone knows how to get the number of posts I made so far?

8 months and 2 days to go (244 days...)

I'm trying to test both Gemini and BugTracker.Net as issue tracking systems.
They both fail for one reason, data base access. I've SQL Server Express Beta 3 running on my computer, and while I can use Express Manager to connect to it, I can't seem to do that in anything else.

The connection strings that I'm using are:

Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=Bugs;Integrated Security=SSPI;

And it just don't work, I'm scratching my head here, and it's very annoying!

I'm using SpamBayes for a long time [checking...] (11 months, 21 days), and I  haven't seen much of a spam ever since.

I recently had a spam get into my inbox the first that I can remember in a long time. This had really made it easy for me to see how much of a non-problem spam has became for me now.

I disclose my email freely, and it takes about five minutes every week to go through Spam/Suspected spam folders and clean them up.

Very few false negative, and no false positives yet.

Continuing on the language theme.

My mother tongue is Hebrew.
I read/write English very well, can understand & talk well enough to manage seeing a movie / having a conversation - but that still need polishing.
Arabic - Some basic vocabulary and words, good curses.
Russian - Very few words, several curses.

I usually curse in either Arabic or Russian, I almost never curse in English, and rarely in Hebrew. I have no idea why is that.

I wonder what my English is like.
Very rarely I've a chance to speak English (usually with Red Cross representives), so most of my English comes from books and the net.
That tends to affect's one speach (write?) patterns.

Am I using a proper English? Do you think that  I have accent odd sense of English?

I'd to revert my mother's computer to use IE again, because one of the major sites she uses globes, won't work properly in FireFox (their fault).

Bummer.

Joel complains that there are some concepts that you just can't translate from one language to another.
In his post he talks about three concepts:

• Davka - which translate to "in spite of" or "because" in most normal uses, but it doesn't gives you the true meaning of the word because unless you speak Hebrew, (and more than that, unless you live in Israel for quite a bit of time) you wouldn't understand what this mean. Most often, you see people do actions that make no sense, when you ask them why, they answer "Davka" and that sort of explains it.
• Rosh Gadol / Rosh Katan - Big Head / Small Head, respectively. Those are terms that are taken straight from military service {where most people encounter them for the first time}.
  Rosh Gadol is to think outside the box, to understand what is going on and respond to what is happening, to forsee needs and solve them before they become problem, taking risks.
  Rosh Katan is the reverse, doing just what you're told, working by the rules and not doing anything more than you were told to do.

Trying to answer Joel's challange¹:

No matter how debunked Whorf is, I'm still convinced that Israelis are more likely to do things in spite of all common sense, simply because they have a word for it - davka. And I have been forced to write entire essays simply because I cannot find any other way to convey to English speakers the difference between thinking beyond your assigned duties and roles and following the rules blindly. All I wanted to say was that methodologies encourage following the rules and I need everyone on my team to be able to think beyond the rules, and see where the problems are, and how to solve them.

To someone who has never learned Hebrew it takes me two or three books to explain that. MSF is a fraud–an attempt to consolidate all the extra things Microsoft programmers do in a set of rules which are supposed to work if you force small minded developers to implement them. And it’s never going to work.

¹I won't win the prize, for the simple reason that I don't think that this is a correct translation, there is too much cultural baggage in those terms that can't be easily expressed.