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: 1 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.

This man has some beautiful design ideas for the Linux desktop.

I’ve heard the latest Security Now, regarding the debate between Dave Marsh and Peter Guttman on DRM in Windows Vista. While a few good points were made, the major one - in my opinion - was not. DRM, in a practical sense, is deeply flawed: The idea is to give you your media - say, a WMA piece of music - and a program to play it with - say, Windows Media Player - but encrypt the media.