random ten

While staying a couple of the days in the Dead Sea region I explored some of the many interesting rock formations behind the place we were staying between Qumran and Qalyah. There are lots and lots of signs with serious warnings not to disturb the endangered bats who deserve their peace so I gave those a miss. What I found however, was a really magnificent scenery in a dry Wadi that looked as if only recently had been dug by tremendous floods and mud slides. The gravel was still packed into bizarre and fragile patterns like after a heavy flood that probably reshaped this area again and again in the rainy season only a couple of months earlier. Surely I haven't been the first one visiting this particular place: On one side of the Wadi entrance, further up these cliffs, I found this odd and interesting looking graffiti:

This certainly doesn't look like your typical street tag in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv but ancient and archaic. I must dissapoint you though, because considering the paint and the fact that the graffiti is still very well readable, this cannot be very old. Definitely not older than 5 years because the harsh climate here with the strong gusts of wind that blow around these rocks constantly would have definetly rendered it unreadable after more than a couple of years.

But what could it possibly mean? Thise stylized script looks like its using letters in Moavit, Aramaic and/or Phoenician. I searched for a chart so I could translate it, but some letters really irritate me, e.g. the wiggly horizontal line. Joel Nothman who has seen a similar graffiti in Efrat was so kind to help me with the translation of this highly stylized script and came up with this:

It is from the Book of Yeshayahu (Isaiah in English) and could be translated as “For out of the snake's root will come out a viper and its fruit will be a fiery serpent“. The full citation from Isaiah 14:29 is "Do not gloat, Philistia; Because the staff that struck you is broken; For out of the serpent's roots will come forth a viper, And its fruit will be a fiery serpent“. I'm not going to interpret Isaiah 14:29 here, since prophets usually make sense in a larger context and you need a lot of historical knowledge and a background of Torah study to make anything halfway meaningful out of this. In general the snake, the viper and the fiery serpent in Isaiah 14:29 are often associated with the miserable situation of the Palestinians and their corrupt leadership that seems to get only worse and worse. So we can assume that It wasn't exactly a leftist group who left this inscriptions. The second graffiti I found reads “Brith Avraham” and on the side of the low stone on the the ground you can see another third script reading “Brith Ya'acov”:

Now the next mission is to find out, who wrote this. Who is strolling with a bucked of paint through the cliffs between the dead sea and the judean desert to paint graffiti in ancient stylized script on rocks? If you have a hint, please feel free to contact me. Update: The first hints by Chanen suggest that it could be much older than I thought (up to 20 years) and the first suspects are religious Kibbutznikim, Bnei Akiva or Yeshiva students. Also it could have been part of some paper chase game.

Special Sudoku for Busy IT Professionals: Binary Sudoku

I just reviewed the photos I took on Smadi's and Yannay's wedding, two friends who live in Kibbutz in the north. And what can I say, the photos are simply terrible. I guess everything that could go wrong went wrong and there are only a handful of usable pictures.

It's somewhat of a disappointment because it's the first time that I would say that I really wasn't up for the job. I'm glad that they had 2 professional photographers around, so they will have plenty of photos. Unfortunately the photographers were not of the unobtrusive types. But anyway, I Here some of the problems that I found quite difficult to master with my (very) limited equipment:

1. That location was great. The wedding took place at night at an outdoor location. Unique atmosphere and magical atmosphere. Something that you cannot capture easily on film or digitally. They where absolutely no light sources that I could use for ambient light. So I had to do everything with flash. And because there was nothing to bounce the flash from, most of the pictures turned out to be really dull direct flash snapshots. How I hate direct flash. Will not do that again, ever. I ordered another flash, a second hand Metz MZ40-2 and I intent to use it as a indirect slave flash.

2. At one important moment the batteries of my D100 died. Never did that before. Well I guess they hat to way especially for that moment. So I came back from Kokhav Yarden with only a couple of photos. This was really unnecessary, because I had another battery and even my Nikon FM3a as a backup in my car. Unfortunately we weren't driving in my car up to Kokhav Yarden.

3. I was shooting RAW NEF most of the time because using my manual SB-22 flash I knew I would need to tweak the pictures later. Shooting RAW alone can be really slow because the D100 is an old work horse. Also, I had the custom setting NOISE REDUCTION switched on which further reduced the buffer that could now only hold 2 pictures. And that demanded a lot of patience.
   

It was interesting to say how well (or bad) I would to with my aged equipment on such an occasion. Usually it is good enough for portraits and still-lifes. But fast-action wedding photographers is like playing in another league. Last time I did this, I had much more equipment and lighting conditions were much easier. Anyway, I learned a thing or two about my D100 and how to improve results in flash photography.

A short time ago I discarded my old and battered, but beloved installation of wordpress to replace it with a CMS that would allow more diverse content like downloads and galleries and whatnot. I chose "CMS made simple" for this task but soon hit a wall as I stumbled upon a lot of defunct modules. I didn't spare my criticism about this in the forum and on opensourcecms.com and that started an overdue discussion on the quality of the modules for this other wise very fine CMS.

It will be some time until all the dev stuff is cleaned up and all permanently defunct/discarded modules are discarded. If the dev team manages to maintain a good QA of some important modules that would be a major breakthrough for "CMS made simple". Needles to say that this will not be possible without active participation.

Even while i write this blog modules gives me quite a headache. Bugs seem to be everywhere. And a lot of stuff is not fully implemented yet as I am still struggling to get a blog module to do things that I need. As of now categories are not working because some counter is always zero and if I override this, the smarty compiler is throwing errors. If I don't figure it out I may move part of this site back to Wordpress.

On the other hand, I really can't recommend to fuse a lot of huge and different PHP script into one site. It quickly becomes unmanageable and attacks on fresh vulnerabilities usually appear early after a security issue is published. It's easy to find outdated installations of blogs, wiki or CMS - just use Google and look for version numbers. While most renowned PHP projects have a good record, script kiddies are quick - not to speak about serious hackers who always seem to be a step ahead and are able to check sites and servers for unique 0-day holes.

Update: The blog module (blogs made simple) for CMS made simple has too many unresolved issues right now to be usable. I don't know how this thing could work on the developer's server. So I am now reverting to the standard news-module wich isn't that fancy but at least works.