Older blog entries for shlomif (starting at number 133)

Ceritification

I certified Liedra to Journeyer because of her work as a Freshmeat editor. To learn how I became knowledgable about this fact - read on.

irc.kernelnewbies.org #offtopic fun

I met Liedra and mulix on channel #offtopic on irc.kernelnewbies.org. We and some other people had a lot of funs. Things we discussed include:

1. The "I Love Lucy" show.
2. My criticism of "The Encouraging Women in Linux HOWTO" (but not too much, luckily)
3. Life as a Freshmeat editor
4. The fact that of any given category you can find a lot of junk there and only a few useful programs.
5. The newly created syscalltrack-webist mailing list and various related procmail issues
6. Functional Programming in Haskell, Scheme/LISP and Perl and why closures, continuations, evals and lambda calculus are not FP. (at least not according to a certain "wli" character. There seems to be an Advogato profile of that, and he is a Linux hacker).
7. "Category Killers" and why some categories are not killed by anything.
8. My idea regarding a Freshmeat equivalent for Stories and other non-programming related writings. Liedra did not read it originally. I talked with a few people and one chatted with me in a private channel and gave me some useful ideas.

All in all, a healthy dose of almost useless conversation. I like IRC sometimes, but it is so addictive that in the days I'm immersed into it, I can hardly get any work done. But who is John Galt?

Women in Linux Update

There is no update regarding the Haifux cabal issue. I did spent a substantial amount of time responding to posts I receive from the LinuxChix-issues mailing list. I found out the HOWTO was originally intended for men, and a similar HOWTO for women is in the works. I'm encouraged to hear that. I'll post a summary and new conclusions after my INBOX will no longer be filled with incoming messages.

In any case, the discussion brought some very interesting issues. For instance, can an active member of a LUG ask a fellow woman LUG member out after she has been to ten LUG meetings and got to know everybody? Someone there, actually claimed he can't. My reductio ad absordum was naturally asking: where else can I ask a girl out? Maybe not even in a bar...

Women in Linux Cont.

I was contacted by a few members of LinuxChix. One of them told me the HOWTO was directed at men (possibly abusive) and that the equivalent guide to women was in the works. Very well, but I still think that trying to convert the Linux male community at large to a "non-abusive" behaviour is not practical. Especially when the FAQ considers making a pass on, staring, and telling blond jokes abuse. But who is John Galt?

A subtle point that is not understood by many people is that a private person or organization is legally allowed to be racist and even discriminatory. The Roman-Catholic church restricts priesthood to males, and there is nothing legally wrong with that. If a person feels it is discriminatory he should move to another church, become atheist, or fork a pan-sexual Catholic church.

Another esteemed member of LinuxChix pointed to the fact that I said "take some abuse" while I meant "handle some abuse". I fixed it in my diary entry. I guess it sometimes shows I'm not a native English speaker.

I will hint that things have heat up a bit in the Haifa Linux Club arena because of my diary and subsequent transacations.

IRC

I met mulix yesterday on #offtopic at the kernelnewbies IRC server. (quite a nice channel), and added a signature to his E-mail message in the process:

My opinions are crazy but they make sense. Insane sense, but sense nonetheless.

I think I overheard it somewhere, though. Can anyone here report on prior art?

I discussed two main topics there: BitKeeper and why Larry McVoy could benefit from a more liberal licensing scheme. And glibc running on the FreeBSD or NetBSD kernels. Apparently, it is working there, but no-one yet tried to take a pure ANSI C or POSIX program, download its i386 Linux binary over FTP, and run it as is on the FreeBSD machine.

I quoted Knuth ("Beware of bugs in the above code. I have only proven it correct, not tested it"), and the other guy quoted Dijkstra, and we had a lot of fun. I really wonder whether it is possible to achieve full or parital binary compatibility between Linux and FreeBSD/NetBSD this way.

SCMs for Linux

I was recently contacted by Rick Moen regarding the configuration management :: tools category of dmoz. We discussed whether we should use the word proprietary and commercial and he also mentioned he had constructed a list of SCMs which I may link to. Since the list was in plaintext, I volunteered to convert it to HTML. I did and I sent it to him.

I did not hear from him since until I E-mailed him yesterday. He immediately replied that he had received my page, and modified it a bit since. He gave me the URL and I placed it in Dmoz. Moen used quite a lot of Hebrew phrases in his messages, and I found out from him that he's been studying in the Hebrew university campus and also volunteered in a kibuttz. :-) From his homepage and a Google search I understood he was quite a Linux hot-shot. Man, I'm honoured.

Freecell Solver

Someone contacted me regarding Freecell Solver. He said he wrote his own solver and asked if I want to take a look. His solver was a rather crude C program, which stored the current position in global variables, used a stack of moves. When it recursed into a new position it applied the current move on the state, and when it back-tracked, it undo the move.

This could have been quite smart, but there is one problem. To be solved effectively Freecell and most game AI programs in general, need to keep track of the previously encountered state, to determine (preferably with a good complexity) if a state has been visited or not. His architecture did not have a state collection, and so did not work properly.

I gave him this advice, and referred him to some Freecell Solver documentation where he can learn about it, which is a fairly complete Freecell solving package. As much as I support re-inventing your own wheel for fun, it is usually faster to improve an existing wheel. He said he'll have some reading to do, and maybe will have the mood to contribute to Freecell Solver.

On a slightly different note, I should say that I had a chat with rms about making Freecell Solver a GNU package. He dispelled some myths I acquired regarding it, but eventually concluded that it may not be of wide-spread usefulness enough to justify GNUing it. Hopefully, I'll be able to talk to him some more on the event on Wednesday.

Syscalltrack Homepage

Wow! A lot of talk and a lot of decisions passed either between Muli, Orna and I or on the Syscalltrack-hackers mailing list. So much, that Muli and I decided to start a separate mailing list - syscalltrack-website.

After everything, there was finally some hacking. I changed the stylesheet a bit to agree more with other browsers beside Mozilla. It seems that Konq 3.1.x and MSIE 6.0 have buggy CSS 2 support. The new stylesheet is still valid CSS 2, but is simple enough to be processed correctly there. Maybe I should install Opera to have yet another browser to check on.

I had lesser luck with the screenshot of the console. Since it was compressed as jpeg it now has some compression noise in it, and I had a bad time compressing it as a 256-bit png. Reducing the jpeg quality made it look much worse in natural size. I hope the original loss-less image exists somewhere or that Muli can quickly produce another one. I suggested taking the text, putting it in a <pre> block and using some CSS styles to make it resemeble a console Window. I'm still not sure it's a good idea.

Reading

I decided I did not like "Emily of New Moon" so far, and began to read Daniel Handler's "The Basic Eight" instead. It's a very funny book, which tells about a gang of teenagers in San-Fransisco, and one girl who decides to write a book out of her diary. (or so I understood). Very amusing, so far.

Daniel Handler also uses the pseudonym "Lemoney Snicket" when writing the "Series of Unfortunate Events". I read the first one which was quite OK, but a bit depressing. I decided I won't go on, because the rest of the book are pretty much of the same vain, (sad ending, and this Count Olaf character terrorizing the protagonists).

Women in Linux

I have already replied to kilmo's response to my comment on the HOWTO in private. Maybe he misunderstood what I meant to say, or maybe takes a completely different opinion. I still, however, take the stand that the HOWTO's proposed strategy was deficient despite the fact that some parts of it were good and enlightening.

BTW, kilmo's entry was quite funny, and this time I was more amused than angry.

Update: There's now an on-going discussion between kilmo, ladypine and I. I'd rather not comment on it too much until the final conclusions are reached.

But here are a few clarifications:

1. I did not say abuse or what is interpreted as abuse is desirable or good. I just said there wasn't an effective top-down way of enforcing it. (at least not without trampeling the more important ideals of liberalism.)

2. I did not mean to offend any woman Linuxer, or any other woman. My critique was strictly directed at the contents of the HOWTO. I by all means support the woman liberation movement, and hope to see many female hackers become active in the Linux community.

3. I believe abuse, similar to the one described in the HOWTO, can be encountered in other fields where women have achieved greater in-roads. It is possible that in the Linux world it is more dominant, due to the fact that as of today almost everybody are men.

4. A person needs to learn to handle abuse, both racist and personal. Blaming the male Linux community at large for "abusing" the few women who are trying to join it, is not going to be effective. (even statistically). Similarly, an afro-American trying to advance in the U.S. cannot blame the white community at large for any abuse he may take. It is much easier to adapt oneself to reality, than to expect reality to adapt itself to you.

5. "Abuse" is by no means discrimination. I think I can safely say that among the voluntary Linux communities, discrimination against Women is virtually non-existent. And like I said, women should learn how to handle some abuse.

6. I believe that some parts of the HOWTO were correct and enlightening. I just criticized its general strategy for trying to solve the issue.

I sent an E-mail to the issues Linux-Chix mailing list with a reference to my original diary entry. I received the regular reply of a post from a non-subscriber that needs to be verified by the administrator. <sigh /> In any case, this issue has strengthened my desire to write an "Howto become a Hackeress" document, that will complement ESR's "Howto become a Hacker" and the "Encouraging Women in Linux Howto". I am not a woman and do not claim to understand them, but I'm as good a person to start with it as any.

My stories

Right now I'm flooded with ideas regarding two of my stories, or rather story ideas. One is "The Blue Rabbit's Log" which is a trilogy of movies that parodies Role-Playing Games. The other is "Who the hell is Qoheleth?" which describes some days in the life of the guy who wrote Ecclesiastes (which is "Qoheleth" in Hebrew). The latter now acquires flesh and bones and I have many situations present.

However, I need to do some research regarding life in Damascus the time it was written. According to this page it was written in the 200's BCE, which means somewhere between 299 BC - 200 BC (that's negative dates for you). Hmmm. Better start looking at history books and resources.

Update: changed a renegade "take abuse" to "handle abuse". a fatal typo...

Advogato

It seems the CSS styles of Advogato mis-behaves with the MSIE 6.0 (6.0.2600.000) that I'm using now. Is it an Internet Explorer bug or is the stylesheet wrong?

The problem is that the font size of links is reduced considerably when pressed upon. Can anybody of the Advogato webmaster look into it?

The Women in Linux Howto

The women in Linux HOWTO has one main deficiency: it expects men to alter their behaviour so they will not completely repel Women who desire to become Linux hackers. It even makes a bolder claim: a LUG with otherwise liberal and enlightened members should not even have a minority of sexist men or such that externalize some chauvinism. Achieving a 100%-chauvinism free environment is not something that can be honestly accepted to be accomplished, since those few chauvinists or people who seem chauvinist may otherwise be competent hackers and/or people who are in fact fully liberal at hearts.

Same thing for men trying to hit on women they encounter in LUG meetings, etc. A LUG can try to supply a woman-friendly environment (top-down). In the last Insta-party I wanted to get a medium-sized shirt for my sister and was told there are only shirts sized large and above. There was a hidden assumption that women are not going to attend it.

Now, there many areas in the past that were dominated by men and women were banned from participating even legally. At the time of Shakespeare (not to mention Greek times), women roles were played by men. Women were not allowed to be Phisicians and Scientists up to the 19th and 20th century. However, a few brave women (and men who supported them), slowly became proficient in these fields, and made it perfectly OK for women to be successful actresses, novelists, doctors or scientists.

No such restriction exist in the Linux world today. While the computer world is dominated by men, there is nothing that prohibits women from becoming competent IT workers. I had the fortune of knowing and working with some very competent female engineers. I have met only one who I am confident in labelling as a hacker (and someone else who I'm not so sure), but I don't hold lack of enthusiasm against them. There are plenty of male IT specialiasits out there who do not like computers either, and that's OK.

If Women feel that the Linux world is dominated by men far too much, they should be willing to take some abuse, be eager to learn new things, being made pass on often, and put up with whatever chavunist behaviour their male peers may exhibit. Once a substantial percentage of the hackers in a LUG is female, you can expect the behaviour of the abusive members to be frowned upon by collective rejection. Until then, you'll have to cope with some abuse.

I'd like to thank Chen Shapira (a woman) whom I talked to about that FAQ, and enforced this conclusion that contradicts my initial reaction to it.

Recent Note: changed "take abuse" to "cope with some abuse". Long live the small difference...

<h2>4-Jan-2003</h2>

I left you at last year, Dec 30, or maybe it was the Israeli Jan 1. So here's what happened so far.

Syscalltrack Home-site

I posted a request-for-comments for the Syscalltrack web-site on webdesign-l and received some useful comments. The web-design people are really professional, and the posts there are of very good quality.

Once thing I noted there is that they are recently littered with posts about trying to get CSS2-based layout to work. This makes me happy that I'm using table-based layout for all my site.

In a private E-conversation with Muli and Orna, it was made clear that Orna is our official web-master and has the final verdict on everything, and that I am just a web-technician. I also noted Muli that I might resume my efforts working on the Perl+Lex+Yacc configurator. But like I said to him, I could not promise anything as I have many other things to do.

Freecell Solver

I also worked on a detailed and elaborated to-do-list for Freecell Solver. The original TODO list found in the main distribution and in the CVS is very brief and may only be understood by myself. The reason I did was in accordance with what ESR says in Homesteading the Noosphere: "If one does one's braggin through the code, and then says 'Well shucks, it doesn't do x, y, and z, so it can't be that good", patches for x,y, and z will often switfly follow."

Whether it will indeed happen with Freecell Solver remains to be seen. A problem is that I feel that Freecell Solver is a fairly complete package that satisfies the need of most "hobbyist" and "professional" Freecell gamers. It will remain satisfactory even if no added-features development takes place (just like Perl, gcc, gvim, Mozilla or many other "complete" packages).

Many times when developing it and releasing a release version, I felt that "damn, after I release x.y.0, all I'd like to do with it is purely speculative, so I can just leave it at that." But I kept discovering more and more things to implement. I guess a project never ends, but I still can't see anything pertinent I'd like to add to FCS after I integrate Patsolve's state ordering. Except maybe Patsolve's mixed bfs-dfs scan and what Bill Raymond wrote for his solver (should he agree to convert it to the new Freecell Solver architecture).

Quad-Pres

Not to much in this direction. The autoconf-based installer is working and functional, but the functionality is still limited and the user documentation is non-existent. I think I'll now begin to write some lectures and use the quadp command line interface exclusively (in accordance with the using your own dog-food principle). That may give me motivation to improve it further.

I also have some craving to write my lectures using PerlPoint, because it is very brief. Maybe I should find a nice way to integrate it into Quad-Pres to create an hierarchy of pages. It has an API, but what could be a problem is that the HTML it creates is quite non-standard and does not match my conventions, and it places all the slides in one directory with names like "slide0003.html" regardless of their organization. But when there is a will, there is a way. The worse-case scenario is that I'll fork the code, or update the new version in CPAN.

I should also check other presentation tools (there are dozens of them around) and rob good ideas out of them to integrate into Quad-Pres. But first, I'd better release Quad-Pres 0.8.0 and then make other changes I have in mind.

Other Hacktivity

I started worked on a summary of a lecture about Vim. It's not just as much as the summary as is the full lecture without the fancy HTML formatting.

Reading

I read Programming Perl and finished the chapter about Perl Culture. This brings me to chapter V (which is the final one) which only contains reference to many elements of perl: special variables, functions, pragmatic modules, modules in the standard distro, etc. The perl meeting is quite close, so maybe I'll just browse through looking for interesting parts. After all, it is present in the man pages, and in Perl what you don't know, can't hurt you much.

One interesting thing I discovered about the book is that it is written in Perl POD. POD is nice, but I never expected one can write serious books with it. (that's what DocBook is for). Apparently it is possible, but I think I'll stick to DocBook for these things because it is more flexible. I'm still going to use POD for man-pages and such small-scope documents.

I also saw that there is a module in CPAN to convert POD to DocBook (and the other way around). This is very cool, and should prove useful.

Life

Our united-states friend Ron and Carol Sekura sent us their new years greeting along with their usual summary of what they did in the past year. I discovered this yearly summary is a common convention among Americans. We usually don't do it in Israel, but I wonder what I would write in mine:

<<<
At January 1, I was hard at work finishing the winter semester, and also tying the lose end-points with Roy Glasberg's and mine IP-Noise Simulator project. We eventually were able to finish on time, and our project got a perfect 100 score, and it was considered to represent the Com-Net lab in the Technion-wide project excellence contest. (eventually another project was chosen and it won)

The spring semester came with many interesting computer-related subjects, that I constructed especially. They all turned out to be very interesting. Also, nother project of creating a web-interface for managing seminars Technion-wide. Roy and I did not have a lot of time to work on the project during the semester. After my tests were finished (which I did pretty well in them), we set out to work on the project together, thus "ruining" the summer vacation once again.

The project was finished, and we eventually were graded 94. Now started the winter semester, with many courses. My problem was that I kept changing my schedule, and eventually decided that I'd better take a year off because I've been studying consecutively for too long. After spending some time without scholastic responsibilites, I felt freshened up again to resume my studies, and so notified that I will return next semester.
>>>

Hah! and their cards are filled with trips and family visits, and other entirely recreational stuff. But this is the life of a Technion student, who is a computer nerd and does not have a dime for himself besides what his parents give him. Not that I think my life aren't exciting: by all means what I do in the Internet, and with my computer is very enlightening to me. I don't think you have to travel a lot in order to accomplish a lot.

Besides, I did not mention the numerous Haifux meetings, the Welcome-to-Linux series, my hacks and endeavours, etc. I don't know how many people who are not computer geeks would find them interesting.

Biking

There were a few good days which I took to bike in the afternoon and possible take a walk in the morning. It rained very heavily yesterday, though. Still, in the early afternoon it stopped and there was some sunshine, so I biked to the end of the University road and back.

Advogato

Both of Chen Shapira's profiles are now certified as Journeyer. I'm the only one who certified here as Journeyer and the other people who did certified her as Apprentice. If I understand the Advogato trust-metric correctly, in order to be a Master you have to be certified as a Master by someone who already is one. If a Journeyer certifies you as Master, you will remain a Journeyer. (as is the case with me and mulix, <jealousy>who has much more Master certifications that I do</jealousy>) Likewise, for being a Journeyer, (certified as J by other J's or by M's).

Still, I'm surprised that Chen became a Journeyer with only one certification. I'm not sure this trust-metric is of any good to Advogato, besides turning it into a tightly linked Hypertext net. I also think that my certification was not always based on one's contribution to the free software community, but occasionally on his skills and knowledge as a programmer. I'm also a bit distressed by those people who certified me as Apprentice, or those people I personally know, which I certified, but did not certify me at all back.

Generally speaking, relying on approval of others for self-esteem, is a bad idea, as is known in Cognitive Psychology, and a person should strive to be independant of the bad effects of people disapproving of him or her. This trust-metric is a nice game, but should probably not be taken seriously. What matters is how I percieve myself, not how others approve or disapprove of me.

ADSL Router

My family is connected to the Internet using an ADSL connection, which we are quite happy with. Recently, however, we bought a new laptop, so we needed to connect them both to the Internet at the same time. My father bought an ADSL Router, but then found out that it won't work with the PPTP protocol used by the Israeli phone company. Luckily, he found out we can install an upgrade for the modem for some cost that will enable it to do so.

He did it after he returned home a couple of days ago, and today's morning he decided that we should install it. After re-connecting the various cables to their appropriate places we booted Windows 98, pointed Explorer (my father insisted on not using Mozilla) at the Modem's web-based configuration screen, and configured everything. It did not work at first. However, after I browsed into an IP address (of vipe.technion.ac.il), the DNS started working and then everything worked. The situation repeated itself at the laptop, which we connected through the phone-network adapter.

Then, I decided to connect Linux the same way. I booted into Linux and tried connecting. I realized after some RTFMing that I can do it using the Mandrake Control Center. However, it refused to connect. I started trying a plenthora of ifconfig, route and all commands but to no avail. My father left, and about half an hour ago called from his cell-phone and asked me if I used the other Ethernet card. Apparently, he used the first Ethernet card (a dmfe one) for connecting straight to the ADSL modem, but connected the second to the router. And all the time I was trying eth0... Hmmpf. Afterwards, a few linuxconf keys to configure eth1 as DHCP - and voild - Internet is working flawlessly (I'm using it now - ;-)).

I could not understand how Ethernet, DHCP and TCP/IP could not work in Linux as well as in Windows, because they are all open, well-documented standards. But naturally they need a physical cable to operate on. Without bread, there isn't a Torah.

Now all I have to do is configure Samba so I can transfer file to and from the laptop. Long live modernization.

Hacktivity

Freecell Solver-wise, I busted the warnings I encountered in the KDE compilation inside the CVS development version. Then I worked a bit on Kpat Integration, and made sure the solver instances are recycled.

I also worked on the Syscalltrack home-site. I sent a message to a web-design mailing list I am a member of to find out if the various versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, view it with the proper top vertical alignment. I already received several inputs that they did, so I assumed the report I got was singular.

After that, I got a green light to merge my CVS branch into the HEAD, but was told to watch for a change that mulix did to the HEAD involving the logo. I applied his change, and then used the cvs update -j command to integrate my changes. There were some conflicts there, which I resolved manually. And then I re-built and uploaded the site.

Reading

In "Programming Perl" I finished the chapter about Security, and am now in the middle of the chapter about idiomatic programming, which is very interesting.

Life

There were more trouble with the bicycle. As much as I tried to pump air into them I could not, and I tried two different pumps with both wheels. When my dad returned home, he again was able to pump air there, and said the trick was screwing them till the end, and pumping very hard and till the end.

I did manage to walk at quarter to four. In any case, since I jogged the day before yesterday, then yesterday my feet muscles became sore, and they might be sore today as well.

It rained tonight, and the weather forecast said there are going to be local rains today. I don't know if it would be a good idea to go biking today.

Dmoz

Cleanup is complete! The "CM :: Tools" category now has 4 pending links and they are all inside the CVS sub-category which I cannot edit. Now I can focus on other things, and just login into dmoz occasionally to see if new links were submitted.

Hacktivity

Yesterday I worked a little on Quad-Pres (turned exceptions into classes and wrote a TODO list). I also worked on getting a Freecell Solver command line preset into kpat and wrote two scripts to do that in the process. Then I discovered an incompatibility of the command line interface: it changed a char * argument, which I passed from a global constant. I changed its code in the KDE CVS and now it is working. In any case, I think it is a good idea I change the relevant places to const char *.

Reading

Since I last updated you, I read several Camel Book chapters. I'm now in the middle of Security. Besides that I also started reading the Namesys Future Vision paper which I've been referred to by several people. I admit that I did not fully understand it. And now I also read the latest Linux Weekly News edition, and several documents that were referred there.

Life

My bike broke when I drove it on Saturday. Apparently, the chair fell down and blocked the handle that enables to lower and upper it. When my father came home yesterday's evening he was finally able to fix it, and brought the chair to its right height. Now I can ride it again.

He did notice that I was out of air. The problem is that I don't think the current air pump I use is very good, and I have troubles using it.

dmoz Cleanup

Throughout the last couple of days, I settled out on cleaning the "Configuration Management : Tools" dmoz category. Now I'm left with 17 pending links. Man, this takes a lot of time, but I'm almost finished with it.

Syscalltrack's Homepage

I started a branch in the Syscalltrack CVS to implement some homepage cleanups. Here is a report I wrote on what I did.

Meanwhile, it was reported that MSIE displays the border of the navigation bar in white instead of black. This turned out to be a bug in the CSS stylesheet in which the text specified border-right : medium solid ; color : black; instead of border-right : medium solid black. I also fixed it in my branch.

KDE 3.1

While looking at the KDE archives, I found out that packages of KDE 3.1-RC5 for Mandrake 9.0 were prepared. I decided to install it. The installation went quite OK, and my new system is stable. Some bugs were eliminated from 3.0.x and some were added (as usual).

Strangely enough, I found old bug reports of the same bugs in the KDE bugs tracker, but then realized they were very old. So I reported them again.

kdegames from the CVS

Having KDE 3.1 installed made it possible to compile the HEAD branch of kdegames from the CVS. Took a bit to install, and the out-of-date makefiles (which I had to run automake with) gave me some trouble. Then the DocBook documents absolutely refused to compile, so I removed their directory from the SUBDIRS of the makefile. And naturally, it takes a long time for g++ to compile KDE code. At the end of the day, however, I had it built and installed.

This enabled me to work on kpat and integrate the changes I wanted their. I removed the limitation for game numbers only up to 32,000, and integrated the new Freecell Solver their. gcc was ran with a lot of extra flags (-ansi, -pedantic, -Wundef, etc.) and it spewed a lot of warnings and complained about many things. Eventually, however, I was able to resolve them.

Then, while trying to solve a game, I discovered a bug in Freecell Solver which forced me to release the 2.8.3 version of it. I fixed it in both CVS branches, and in the KDE integration, and now I'm back on track. What's left to do is to hard-code a nice command line preset into kpat, so it will have less unsolvable games reports.

Life

It was raining on and off the last couple of days. On Friday morning, there was a beautiful sunshine and I went to bike. Then it started raining in the afternoon. On Saturday it was also sunny, so I went to a walk in the morning and biked in the afternoon. Today seems sunny as well so far.

My sister Noa and Dad returned from their trip to England and the States. Noa had a surgery which was supposed to handle her over-perspiration problem. They brought a lot of toys, food, books and other stuff.

Michal (my other sister) meanwhile has homework to do. In her "Intro to Programming" class, she had to write an C function, that removes a specified character from a string. It can be done in O(n) time by keeping two pointers. Today, she worked on her Linear Algebra exercises and I also helped her a little.

Hacktivity

I am an Open Directory Project editor of the Configuration Management category. Yesterday I logged in, and started sorting the pending links. Many of them turned out to be off-topic or such that are already present. I accepted some of them in. Right now I'm left with 87 new links. (I started with 130 or so).

Other than that, I worked on Quad-Pres a bit. It is now in a state where it has a basic working functionality. I also came into an insight: I can release it in a form in which it does not have all the commands I want it to have - just a central installation and the old way of managing the source tree.

I messed a bit with VIPS and Nip which I spotted on Sweetcode. There's also something I did, which I forgot what it was by now. Oh well.

Reading

Still going on with the Camel book. Finished the chapter about IPC and am at the beginning of the one about threads.

Linux Meeting

Yesterday, I attended a meeting which was organized by several representatives of big Linux vendors and users in Israel. I was informed of the meeting by an E-mail message Moti Sadovsky, a Sun executive, which I decided to forward to the Linux-IL mailing list. Eventually, out of IGLU came Gilad Ben-Yossef, Shachar Shemesh, Doron Ofek and me.

The conference room was rather small, and there were quite a lot of people there and so it was settled that we will meet again at the Dan Panorama hotel sometimes around mid-January. We did settle that we did not want the forum to have a completely marketing orientation, albeit some marketing was also good. Other than that it was mentioned that a commercially-supported forum can do a great deal to advance Linux in Israel, and other stuff like that.