About

My name is Near Privman. I'm a software development manager, a father, a feminist, and several other things.

All views expressed on this blog are my own, and do not represent any group or organization.

Popular posts from this blog

Why write a blog?

My CEO has challenged me to explain why I keep a blog. He says he just doesn't get why most people write blogs - where do we get the presumption to think we have something so interesting to say we feel compelled to broadcast it to the world? My first line of defence was that I have no such presumption and I don't mean to 'broadcast' my thoughts to anyone. The blog, I claimed, was just somewhere I can dump text, and then I'm able to refer people to it instead of having to repeat myself. While this is rather true for a couple of posts (writing RTL and my name's spelling), it's a load of bull when it comes to anything else I've written. I've realised long ago that I do have some pretty big presumptions about what I have to say to the world and about how much it would (or should) interest people. I simply want to be heard. To feel that I'm being listened to. I like the attention. It's a very basic human need, so I guess it's no surprise there...
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How to write RTL in Gmail

This is useful for people who write right-to-left sometimes, as is done in Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and other languages. So far I only have a solution for Firefox users, but I strongly recommend the browser to anyone. If you don't like 'messing around' with the computer and refuse to use anything but Internet Explorer, you're probably beyond my help anyway. Wait for Google fix this themselves, or write in English. So if you use Firefox, install the Clippings add-on from the Mozilla site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1347 It's a good add-on. I recommend learning the basics of it for other uses as well. Now download the Clippings export file I made from http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=950ac357b5088b54d2db6fb9a8902bda It contains two clippings - 'RTL embed' and 'RTL end'. Each clipping is a single control character, U+202B and U+202C respectively, which start and terminate a region of RTL directionality. To import the file into Clipp...
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Multiple Accounts in a Single Browser

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Most popular web 2.0 services, whether they provide webmail (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo Mail), social networking (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn), microblogging (e.g. Twitter, Tumblr), or anything else, use cookies to keep you signed in from visit to visit. This is very convenient, and saves you the trouble of having to log in every time you go to their website. Almost of them fail to support keeping more than one account logged in at time from the same computer. This is somewhat understandable, since they don't want a user to remain logged in while others are using the computer (which is why they have that 'Remember me' checkbox, which you really shouldn't check when logging in from a public computer). However, what about those of us who actually know what we're doing, and want override this behaviour? What if I have more than one Gmail account, or Twitter account, and I want to use them without having to log in again every time I switch accounts? And what if I really do trust my ...
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