Life is good, for the most part. And as a technology enthusiast, there are many new and cool things to see online. For example, there’s the new Schools site, part of the Vaya project which helps Israeli schools use Linux; this site uses the up-and-coming Lahak CMS, built on the Django framework, and looks very promising to the eyes of the bidi-lingual webmaster.

However, some things just plain suck. One of them is myspace; today, in an attempt to make it more legible, I found that My Band’s Page implements all of its styling changes by a “style” tag hidden within the “Members” text block. Myspace doesn’t filter this out - nor does it provide any other means of changing the styling. This, combined with myspace’s horrid administration interface, makes editing incredible unwieldy. I’m considering opening another Wordpress site for the band here on this server…

By now I’ve lost count of how long ago my last class was. The strike has begun immediately after passover, and is certainly beginning to take its toll. For one thing, I have no homework deadlines - a rare situation indeed for the Technion student. Furthermore, contemplations are rising about whether or not this coming summer semester will be held, as the current semester will most likely leak into it. This is of special interest to me, as I’m behind on my degree, which is problematic because of my military scholarship. This is shaping up to be the second time in which, while I’ve been authorized by the military to take a summer semester for completion, I am not able to. However, one cannot trivially dismiss this strike; in a country which is known worldwide mostly for its technological exports and frequent bloodbaths, one shouldn’t take the matter of tuition lightly.

A lot of people ask me how to change the default operating system booted after installing Linux. The answer they get in Ubuntu’s case, “Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, it’s self-explanatory”, is often unsatisfactory. Attached is the solution :)

Actual script lost in the mists of time…

Download the file, open a terminal, and run gksudo python grubmenu.py

I’ll try and make a package of this soon, so it becomes a menu entry and that much easier to use.

Why was it down, you ask? Well, it was out here in the lab, because of a shortage of network ports in the server room. From the acpid log:

[Sun Apr 15 18:53:07 2007] received event "button/power PWRF 00000080 00000001"

That is, at 18:53, someone simply pushed the power button. The server promptly closed all processes and properly shut itself down. I’ve moved it into the server room now…

The more I use Python, the nicer it becomes. I’m currently working on a project for a course, which involves somewhat heavy-duty database and algorithm work. Python is my language of choice for it - let’s hope it works out well.

In the meantime, I’ve found a really nice python shell called iPython (available in apt) - it adds a bunch of stuff to the python shell which I sorely missed from irb - autocompletion, auto-indentation, and - it seems - adds a whole lot more.

A very neat find for those of you who want to use Jabber from within the Technion, but with your client of choice rather than a web-based one: Many Jabber servers, including Google Talk, support using Port 443 over SSL. Since the Technion does not block outbound SSL connections, this will work there as well. Be sure to mark the appropriate ‘Use old SSL protocol’ option in your jabber client (that’s what it’s called in gaim and pidgin, at any rate).