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Shallow and Pedantic

Bass guitar

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.

Really liking the whole Python thing

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  ↩︎

Here's hoping

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 ].

Internet in Haifa Bay Central

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.

Why Vista worries me

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.