The most recent events in my life which I would consider to be vacations would be the second Lebanon war and my basic training. I love the Technion, but I think it’s high time for some R&R. With no upcoming tests hovering over my head, homework pressure low-to-nonexistent, and my girlfriend’s birthday Murphy’s-law-bendingly coinciding with her getting some leave, this is a perfect opportunity to try my hand at a real vacation.

All links in this post have been lost to the mists of time. I’ve kept it here out of pure nostalgia.

I’m typing the lectures of the course 236343 Computability Theory this semester. Attached are my lectures notes in PDF form:

Computability Lecture Notes Computability Tutorial Notes

If you also type the notes and would like to collaborate with me, I use a git repository stored here:

Reading some backlog on this blog, I found the following gem:

It’s a sad state of affairs that people go ahead and limit access to their wireless network. I keep mine wide open - מי שאוכל לבד, מת לבד.

Yeah… not so anymore. For about four weeks (just a bit before the semester started), my net connection was working excrutiatingly slow. Now, we’re four roommates here, so we started blaming each other. But then I had a guess - I encrypted my connection with WPA/TKIP, and presto; the connection is now once again too fast for my browser to handle (…which sent me back to Epiphany). Guys, if you mooch wi-fi, please… be nice about it :(

Writing multi-threaded applications in Python is often a headache because of the Global Interpreter Lock - only one Python thread can run at any given moment, which makes multi-threading useful only in the case where all modules but one actually run C code. However, thanks to the impressive new Python Magazine, I’ve stumbled across a package called processing, paraphrasing python’s built-in threading package. Essentially, the package provides an API identical to Python’s threading, but uses processes and pipes (or other mechanisms on non-posix operating systems) instead. What the magazine does not cover is the fact that this can also benefit GUI applications; updating a progressbar in the application doesn’t need to slow down heavy computations being done in a separate thread. To show how easy the integration is, take the following example which shows usage of either threads or processes at the user’s choice:

My girlfriend just asked me what just might be the hardest question I’ve heard all semester; What do I like better, The Simpsons or beer?

I’ve been a very big proponent of Subversion so far, especially as a tool for collaborating on coding homework. However, I’ve recently been trying out Linus’s git. It’s very nice so far, and really seems to be catching on. Some good points:

• Fast as all hell (much faster than Bazaar, although I haven’t given that the proper attention)
• No need for a central server; hell, no need for an internet connection at all, everything can be done over USB keys or whatnot
• No real need to configure any special server; just install git on it
• Very nice alternative to configuring write-control for all of the users
• Very easy branching and merging, finally! SVN really shows its weakness here

One thing I couldn’t find out how to do is limiting read-access to git repositories without special server configuration. It would be nice if git had support for .htpasswd-compatible authentication, those are pretty easy to use.