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).

Check that the RAID it supports is actual Raid. My experience today: Decide that secondary server should gradually become more and more primary Decide that since it has two 160GB hard drives and built-in RAID, we should use that for mirroring Mail (both!) users of the secondary server that it’ll be down for rebuilding Set up RAID array from BIOS, clearing all old information Insert installation CD Notice that installation still sees two hard drives Discover that built-in NVRaid is actually software RAID Disable built in RAID in favor of LVM, proceed to reinstall :(

I brought my Fender Squier Jazz Bass up to my Technion apartment. I hope it won’t have too much of an adverse effect on my studying… playing it (loud) is great for stress, and I’m taking a jazz improvisation course next semester. By the way - if any of you record with one of these, I highly recommend Arour, using a low-pass LADSPA filter. Also, activating both pickups on about 80% does wonders against hum if you connect directly.

I’ve converted my Antigibberish script1 (converts “broken hebrew” into proper hebrew, useful for sent-offline ICQ messages) to Python… it’s quite a nice language, and the interpreter is FAST! I’m really torn between it and Ruby :( Used to have a copy of antigibberish.py, but it’s been lost in the mists of time. It used to do the equivalent of this: iconv -f utf-8 -t iso8859-1 | iconv -f iso8859-8 -t utf-8 ↩︎

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 def factor(grade, params = {}) return 100 if params.empty? # Optimistic, eh? case params[:type] when :pass return 55 when :fail return 54 when :root params[:gamma] = 0.5 end grade = grade.to_f return params[:proc].call(grade) if params[:proc] grade *= params[:coefficient] if params[:coefficient] if params[:gamma] grade /= 100 grade **= params[:gamma] grade *= 100 end if params[:offset] grade += params[:offset] end return grade if params[:idnoclip] [ grade, 100 ].

In the Haifa Bay Central bus station (מרכזית המפרץ), it’s possible to get an internet connection. HTTPS works automatically, and setting the proxy to proxy.technion.ac.il:8080 works for HTTP. I was unsuccessful in using corkscrew to get SSH connections to tunnel over it as well, but perhaps there is still a way.