midbar | Entries tagged with reviews

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

Following the post on Hebrew date libraries, I submitted hebcal package to OpenSolaris Source Juicer in order for it to be available in OpenSolaris contrib repository. Currently it was validated and placed into pending repository. After the review process from OpenSolaris community it will be relocated to contrib.

However the package is already usable for those who run OpenSolaris and want to install it from the pending repo (though in general pending is intended for packages verification purposes and isn’t recommended for regular usage since packages there can be unstable).

In order to install hebcal from pending you should add the repository and the package itself (pfexec in OpenSolaris is used for user privilege escalation using profiles):

pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://jucr.opensolaris.org/pending jucr-pending
pfexec pkg refresh
pfexec pkg install hebcal

* * *
When hebcal will be moved to contrib repository you can simply reinstall it from there.

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

Searching for various windows/linux/mobile programs, I found a really interesting resource http://www.tichnut.de/jewish.

Unfortunately, most of programs are not updated for several years (some for more than 4-5 years). But still, User can find something interesting there.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

Sometimes, I have a serious problem at home because no MS Windows is there.
But fortunately, there is WINE. Which sometimes can solve my problem.
Kaluach.com provides only win32 and mobile versions of their calendar. So, I decided to try double-click on Kaluach_3_2_41_24.exe.

Installation past smoothly. In ~/.wine/dosdevices/c:/Program Files/Kaluach3 there is Kaluach3.exe executable. Again double-click on it and voila:

the only problem I got was with the tree in Options and Preferences:

Some words about the system:
OS: Ubuntu 9.10
WINE: 1.1.31

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

At this time, I found two different versions of Linux command line utilities to get Jewish date and chalahic time.
Hebcal.
Pretty simple to use tool. Supports a variety of possibilities to get Jewish date and time.

$ hebcal -L 59,22 -l 24,48 -TSca
3rd of Kislev, 5770
Parshas Toldos
Candle lighting:  3:51

Notable features:
- Omer count support
- Reads a table of yahrtzeit dates from file.
The only minus, to my mind, is that help output is too long for UNIX-way application.
Installation on Ubuntu 9.10:

$ sudo apt-get install hebcal

LibHdate.
This library and hdate application is more popular, then hebcal. But actually it has less features.

$ hdate -l 59,22 -L 24,48 -z 2 -c
Friday, 20 November 2009, 3 Kislev 5770
(18:45)

Actually Shabbat start time is incorrect with hdate.
Hdate has similar to hebcal set of features, but lacks listed above notable ones.
Big plus is that this library is widely used in Linux Jewish software development. About Gnome hdate-applet I have written already.
Installation on Ubuntu 9.10:

$ sudo apt-get install libhdate1

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

Surfing the web, I found a pretty interesting document MoladManual. Originally it was found on this address.

Even though I have used this application for a long time, I found this document very interesting and descriptive.

I want to thank Michael Glickman (http://molad.palmcrust.com/) for a wonderful tool to determine chalakhic time.

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

My old good Sony Ericsson K750 saw a lot of various programs in its life.
One of the programs, which I use sometime is mobile version of siddur.

It is really very simple program, without any special features. But still it is very simple to use.

Menu supports small and large letter size. It is very useful even for me. It’s not that easy to read small letters, and sometimes, you need to see more than 9 lines of the text.
Program remembers the place you left it last time. So, you can read only birkat a-mazon and it will open on this page every time.

To conclude, this program cannot substitute paper siddur version on every day praying cycles, but can be useful in the places, there reading from a book is not very convenient act.

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

Surfing by Internet, I found a pretty interesting resource call KosherHosting.

I looked through the site. As for me it looks suspicious and is created automatically by computer mind to distribute spam and fake links.
What made me to think it?
1. Informational page about services looks like, words Jewish and kosher are inserted into usual Web-hosting bla-bla texts about services. The only difference that made are pages for outage for shabbat (Moderate example, Conservative example).
2. So called “Rabbi’s Blessings” section contains only 2 rabbis with no actual mentioning KosherHosting service.
3. I am no that good in French and do not know Chinese at all. But I know Russian and what I saw in Russian translation, made me laugh out loud. I should give a credit to the developers of this site, there is a note on the bottom, saying that this-page-was-translated-by-computer-so-use-english-if-you-understand. Guys, if I do not understand English, I am not among your users as well, because this Russian translation is not understandable either. I don’t see any purpose to have such translation to Russian.

I’d like to say some words in conclusion.
I am really glad, that there is a service for kosher-minded people. But me personally, I would not use such, because it looks not enough serious for me. So, decide for yourself if you want to use it or not.

NB: this is not a paid advertisement. Please try it by yourself and write a review for me, ok?

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

Previously, I wrote about Luach program (Linux version).
I found a Windows XP machine on work and downloaded Win32 version of Luach

The biggest plus is that this program doesn’t need to be installed. You download self-extractable archive and extract files to any location you like.
Then just execute Luach.exe file and here you are:

Actually, all that I said about Linux version is applicable to win32 one. So, have nothing to add here.

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

Kosherdev.com advised me a program for Desktop to see zmanim time and calendar.
The program is called simply luach and can be obtained from here.

Using Ubuntu at home, I downloaded firstly deb package. On my Ubuntu 9.10 it got installed without any problems.
After installation, there appears a nice icon in menu:

clicking the program’s menu shows actually the program:

What I have to say about this program. There a some really good points and some which I don’t like.
I will start with critics:
1. Window can be resized only to minimum width 1050px. With my laptop maximum width 1024px – it cuts the edges.
2. Only Hebrew. There is no other localizations for this program. Hope it is only temporary problem, which will be solved in future.

Now, good points:
1. The best thing is such program exists.
2. Simplicity of usage. As for me One-Button-interface is the best thing you can design for User Interface. So, the developers of Luach did their best to make UI simple and light.
3. Wow-effect is not fully obtained, but still program is pretty and smart. All these clicking on dates – look nice.

Linux program version is lower that Win32 one. So, in other review I am going to install Win32 version.

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

I wanted to give a credit to Ulrich and David Greve for their great scripts which help to integrate Jewish Calendar in PHP.
Here you can see the source code and wonderful explanations.

First I used these scripts on Dvinsker.lv site. It took me some time to translate scripts’ output to Russian and Latvian. And I really appreciate the Greves’ documentation on their code.
Then I adopted these scripts for Shamir.lv and Chabad.lv sites.
Now, I work on some new projects, which report not only zmanim, but also Jewish holidays. And these scripts again help in my development.

Great work, guys.

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

Using Linux as a computer OS, I looker for a simple and user-friendly program for displaying Jewish dates.
Google helps as usual and I found HDate applet for Gnome.

Ubuntu has it in main repositories.

$ sudo apt-get install hdate-applet

After installation just add applet to panel. In my Gnome with Ubuntu 9.10 it looks like this.

Unfortunately, not everything is so good as we want. Seems that development finished in February 2008. So, some issue still persist in the program.

Leave Time Zone setting value 0.00. Otherwise it will plus to current time timezone difference.

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

Two years ago, I got an idea to create a Jewish map of Daugavpils (Dvinsk) Latvia. This is my native city and I wanted to mark all the places, which were important for Jews in pre-second-world-war period.
On that time in Daugavpils, there were 43 synagogues and Jewish population was about 30 thousand people.
After some time, I decided to make such map for whole Latvia. I found a support from rabbi Menachem Barkagan and organization Shamir Latvia.

I just started learning php and javascript 3 years ago. So, looking from now, I would do it much better and easier. But still the project is alive and working. So, do not want to change anything there as soon as it is working properly.
Here is the whole map of Latvia with marked cities where are/were Jewish places. Map is interactive and clickable.
Example of City view – Riga.
Check checkboxes to see the markers on the map.

In future I plan to move to JQuery library and use more of ajax technology.

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

It is pretty long time since I started using Mozilla engine browsers in everyday life. And about the same time I got addicted to Jewish way of life. What is Jewish life without correct time schedule (zmanim)?!
I don’t remember how much time past since I found a really great and helpful extension for Jewish calendar HCalendar. I think 3-4 years. And all this time I have only good words for the developers.

The only things I wanted to ask the developers – to add more city search possibilities. For a really strange reason, there is no Riga, Latvia where about 10 thousand Jews are living. But there is Vilnius, Lithuania. With all my respect to Gaon mi Vilna, but still there is twice less Jews then in Riga.

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

I really want to thank kosherjava.com for a wonderful plug-in to display Hebrew date of posts.
I found that this plug-in does not correctly work with the theme selected for this blog jq.
It corrupted date display area fully.
I added to hebrewdate.php the following code to get timestamp from jq date format.

//first we change jq date format to more readable.
if (preg_match('/(.*)\s?

( Error: Irreparable invalid markup in entry. Raw contents behind the cut. )

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

It is about 4 years since I’ve got Sony Ericsson K750 mobile phone.
And it is about 2 years I use Molad 2 program for zmanim detection.
This is short description for the program:

The application maintains Hebrew (Jewish) calendar, including:

list of coming / past holidays for a specified date customized to specified location, including DST

sunrise, sunset, candle light, zmanim

custom events

sedrot for each week

specify explicit date of changeover from a Julian to Gregorian calendar

other custom features (highlighting, enable/disable event, etc)

supports both keypad and touchscreen devices

Work with small screens, but a larger screen is an advantage. Distributed free of charge.
This release suits MIDP-2.0 and CLDC-1.1 compatible devices. Molad2 Legacy Release is available for older models.

Download and information here.

Originally published at KosherDev. Please leave any comments there.

During working on a project, which includes zmanim time detection, I investigated proper way to detect sunset and sunrise time.
There are integrated functions date_sunset and date_sunrise.

//detect current time
$ts=mktime();
//latitude and longitude for Daugavpils, Latvia
$lat=56+58/60;
$long=24+8/60
//GMT offset for current location
$gmtoffset=2;
//traditional zenith for detecting zmanim
$zenith=90+50/60;
$today=date_sunset($ts, SUNFUNCS_RET_STRING, $lat, $long, $zenith, $gmtoffset);

This function will return value in the view HH:MM.