Due to an exercise in an AI course, I’m forced to confront an old nemesis - C++. Part of the reason is that the exercise contains a time-limited tournament, and the code needs to run very quickly. Another reason is, I guess, the fact that C++ serves as a sort of lowest common denominator in the course (which used, by the way, to be taught in LISP, along with the language).

YNet was running a story on how to use your computer as an alarm clock. Here’s what I do, for our commandline junkies :)

Here’s ~/bin/run_alarm.sh:

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#!/bin/bash

find ~/music/ -name '*.mp3' -print0 | xargs -0 mplayer -shuffle &

MAXVOL=31
TIME=900

for (( i = 0; i <= $MAXVOL; i++ )); do
        amixer set Master $i > /dev/null;
        sleep `echo $TIME / $MAXVOL | bc -l`
done

This basically plays all of my MP3 files, in random order. The -print0 and -0 arguments make it a null-terminated list, as some (most) files have spaces in their names. This process is backgrounded, and the script proceeds to gradually sweep the volume from 0 to the maximum, for a more gentle wakeup :)

I’ve switched to a Nokia 6120 Classic, and I’ve switched my carrier over to Orange. I’m very happy with it: The price is right, at 0 NIS a month (if your monthly bill adds up to over 100 NIS without it, which it does). It’s very small, but has a nice screen and a respectable 2 megapixel camera. It’s “3.5G”, which means it has a very fast internet connection (I’ve clocked over 50kbyte/sec), and the Symbian S60 operating system lets me use it well - it comes with a very, very nice webkit-based browser and RSS reader, and a fast GMail client is a few clicks away.

The Egged Getter has been lost in the mists of time. However, it’s code has largely been integrated into TransportDroidIL. An old version of the Python code has been pasted at the end of this post.

Here’s a little something I’ve been messing with: A simple fetcher script for the Egged (Israeli bus company) site. I’ve made a deskbar applet which uses it, which was fun to do :) (I’m looking for other cool ideas to implement as deskbar applets)

On an online board, friends posted a photo from a party a while back, as I’m chewing some extra-sour chewing gum:

I find this suitable for use in macro form. For example, in the Computer Security course, we’re going to compromise a windows-based server using a buffer overflow vulnerability. Unfortunately, this means we’re going to have to use (as per the course’s demands) Visual Studio 2003. My response (now known as חמוצקי):

New URL - not interesting. You’d notice by now, as you’ve been redirected. Guess my new E-mail. OpenID - interesting, but I don’t have anything particularily interesting to say about it right now.

This, however, is interesting: “10 things christians and atheists can (and must) agree on”, a nicely written piece over at cracked.com. But this isn’t blogspam, I’ll actually share my two cents. (or shnekel, if you like)