As usual lately -- too much to do, not enough time. So I'll be brief:

Linux: it appears the planning of the Welcome to Linux series is a bit stuck. Trying to finalize things, a procedure which requires lots of yelling, arguing and catfighting cannot be done on-line. Even though we have several things finished.

We'll try to return to some real life scratching before working again on-line on the various lectures and the things to be done.

Salsa: we about to go to salsa weekend during middle of October. I need to promote the weekend a bit, and I need to make one workshop (even though not final yet). I assumed that it would take me few hours all in all... Guess what? It requires more.

GSO: grad. students organization is a lair of bad financial and stupid internal-politics decisions. Several months ago I tried to help to the economical unit of the GSO to have a better way (by setting the right watchers, doing an internal check, etc.). So they decided to sell the company, and it seems that all the losts (about 100K$) will not be covered, which is not surprising -- you can't really sell a losing company (if you wish it to continue to exist), so they'll sell only the parts that make money (and of course, get less then they really worth), and will be stuck with the losing parts.

The GSO leaders are eventually nice people, but they do have weird decisions, and very weird way of acting, which makes you suspicious all the time that they are not cheating (Apperantly they don't cheat, they are just dumb-???). Takes too much of my time.

Advogato: nice... but takes my time away...

To all that wondered - no you are not the ones from my previous diary entry.

Actually I wrote this with respect to something else. I now a temporary member in our graduate students organization council, and there are several good people who took the lead to places where they shouldn't (IMHO. they have the right to do so). The question is how to make them do the "right" things without causing them to leave, nor requiring myself to their work...

And thanks for shlomif for reminding me If by Kipling. What a marvelous piece.

The exam to my students went quite bad.

The easy question was not answered by them correctly (even though we put there something from the homework assignments and despite the fact the exam was with open books and material).

The question I wrote was ambigious for most of them, so they wrote very nice answers, which answered something else. buff.

We have started planning the Welcome to Linux series (W2L), and decided on two new concepts:
A) Have all three clubs (Telux, JLC and Haifux) coordinate the series and Linux Days B) Have parallel track of novices and experts.

A problem I've encountered, which I believe is common to many similar operations, is how to tunnel an untalented person to do the work he cannot damage. For example, a person X suggested to pass lectures. I personally think he is quite a bad lecturer, and will cause damage (I'm not the only one who thinks so, I saw him lecture several times, and in these times, nobody said he was a good lecturer, on the contrary). However, there are not many people willing to replace him, and even though I think he will serve the cause of FOSS better in dealing with other aspects of the Linux Days/W2L, I can't tell him in the face - you suck.

Suggestions?

What a month (2):

Had an exam in stochastic processes. It's amazing how you can take a simple problem as the drunk-person problem(*) and make it into something complicated as markov chain(**), Martingale(***) and finally stochastic intergral(****). I enjoyed the lecturer Prof. Adler quite a lot (he also thought me about probability, where he explained me the Poisson distribution using Wombats). Viva Adler! However, the course was quite unformal (understatement), as we replaced the order of limits, and did other forbidden things (the thing in math that you shouldn't do without proving it's ok to do).

I currently write an exam for my course (computer security), which I hope they'll solve fair and square.

In the Linux front: ladypine took much of the effort of handling Haifux's scheduling, etc. However, she is currently in OLS, so I had to do some things alone. She left a very good scripting environment for re-building our site, but it took me several months to understand how it operates.
It seems that the Israeli public is more and more aware to Linux and FSOS as an alternative, even though many still complain on it's lack of userfriendliness. A nice quote which I heard about it in the last couple of weeks was that - "Linux is userfriendly, but it chooses it friends carefully". I partially agree, but I am aware that most of it (espeically for the end-user) is very friendly nowadays.

Research front: my advisor took part of his sabatical in Paris (ENS), and now that he returns I have three different researchs to show him. The problem is that he also put a lot of effort in other research topics, so he doesn't really have time to sit with me... I have 3 papers at him, waiting for comments (two to be sent to Journal of Cryptology, and one was sent to Asiacript. it was rejected from CRYPTO 2004).
What to do with a fellow researcher who quote your results while abusing them? calling them in the wrong title (rectangular instead of rectangle, etc.)?

Real Life: BUSY!

(*) - a drunken person is put on a line which he moves right and left with equal and same probability (1/2). His movement is consdered symetric random walk. (**) - similar to above but with countable number of states, and each state has probability to move to other states. The probability is independet with the past. (***) - a sequence of random variables X1,...,Xn,... s.t. E[Xn+1|Xn,Xn-1,...X1]=Xn. This is the case in (*), as the expected place of the drunken given that in step n he was at Xn is the same place (as with probability 1/2 he is at Xn +1, and with the same probability is at Xn -1). (****) - just like regular calculus, but with additional difficulty - an integral over a brownian motion - you don't really want to know ... do you?

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