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Shallow and Pedantic

A person/tech/code blog of a coder/techie/person. Like calculus in a kiddie pool, the author of this blog is known to be quite shallow and pedantic.

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: 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.