Vacations are a great time for doing that problematic category of things every management course teaches you about: important, but not urgent. For some people, it’s housework or schoolwork which gets drowned out by day-to-day life. For others it’s keeping up with friends and family. Myself, I also like to read and write.

Writing, for me, is usually about practical stuff. Sometimes it’s simply code (most of those projects were written on vacations). Other times, it’s writing to this blog (in one of its incarnations) - which usually has to do with technical tinkering of some sort or other. It’s not that I don’t do enough writing in my day job; but there does tend to be an accumulation of things to write: “I should blog about that”, “I should write that code”, “I should try and get my router to do that”, and so forth. When a few days off come by, and I feel that I have enough time to get more urgent stuff done - it’s quite satisfying to be able to dig into that write-queue.

As part of my M.Sc. studies, I’ve recently completed a small laboratory project in natural language processing. I’ve learned quite a bit from it, and had a chance to use a few of my favorite technologies.

The project was coded in Python, which is not my favorite programming language - Ruby is. However, since Python is more popular at my workplace, and seems to have a richer ecosystem around it (sometimes, at any rate), I’ve grown to love it almost as much over the years. It’s quick, easy, and has fantastic libraries; specifically, for this project, we made heavy use of the Natural Language Toolkit. We used Git for source control and Github for hosting, Travis for continuous integration, and ReadTheDocs for documentation. All of these culminate in the project being handed in as a single link: http://github.com/lutzky/translationese.

I’ve already mentioned my show downloading stack on this blog. It’s changed a bit since - I now use Transmission rather than rtorrent, as it has the excellent transmission-daemon package which has it acting exactly the way I like (without using screen). Also, it now E-mails me when a torrent is done downloading. So while this may be how TV works for you:

1. Notice that a new episode is out
2. Torrent it
3. Wait for the download to finish
4. Watch it

…this is how TV works for me now:

Here are a few words on developing TransportDroidIL, a small utility to query Israeli public transportation sites more easily using an Android phone.

Source control is super important. Mistakes will be made, other coders will want to join in, and experimental features will want to be in their own branches. Git is awesome; it does source control right, gives me powerful tools, and isn’t a hassle to set up - even for a small project like this. Github is also awesome; it makes collaboration with other coders - even just one, in my case - easy, organized, and fun.

I don’t like wireless connections; they’re always second-best, be it in terms of security, speed, or reliability. Here’s how my apartment looks (very approximately):

Hello everyone, TransportDroidIL 1.0 will be released this month. It has quite a few new features:

1. Separate “Source”, “Destination” and “Time” fields. This is much better for auto-completion as well.
2. Automatic location-based detection of “Source”. Hopefully you’ll find the interface for this unobtrusive.
3. Quick reversal of “Source” and “Destination”, for your return trip.
4. A new settings screen, with:
   • Provider selection (currently Egged or MOT)
   • A small attempt at right-to-left fixes for non-supporting devices.
   • A “clear history” button

Everyone loves screenshots: