Server drawer
A quick look at my partner-approved “server drawer”
Posts by Year
2021
2020
WFH Wifi
My adventures in setting up wifi when working from home, working around limitations of my apartment form factor.
Editing old family videos
Messing with old video from tapes, simple audio corrections, splitting and organizing for the family’s benefit.
2019
Ass-cover
On the importance of blameless postmortem culture, demonstrated via its antithesis.
2018
Mutation testing in Go
Your test coverage might be very high, but it’s possible that your tests wouldn’t notice if you deleted some code. Let’s check for that automatically!
The osutil yakshave
How I had to fix zimmski/osutil in order to write the Mutation Testing post.
2017
The Matzliah method
An attempt at explaining שיטת מצליח, a method to take advantage of people not paying attention.
2016
תקלה ב-TransportDroidIL
(Hebrew) The tale of my now-defunct android app for fetching public transport information.
2015
Seaplane - Github with a non-programmer
When I helped a non-programmer friend with some code for psychology research, and how we avoided using Matlab.
2014
Git While You Sit 3 - “Rename” edge cases
Sometimes, git does something unexpected while merging or rebasing. It might seem like git misunderstood a rename, but it’s far more likely that git did the ...
Git While You Sit 2 - .gitignore
Using .gitignore to exclude build artifacts from your repository.
Lessons learned
Some lessons learned from my role with the previous company as a DevOps engineer and team lead. We discuss tidiness and prioritizing using pre-existing code.
Git While You Sit 1 - Add –patch
Using git add -p to eliminate those pesky printf-debugging statements.
FakeFile
A tiny python library for faking out filesystem operations for tests.
Fun with file descriptor leaks
How file descriptor leaks are causing your processes to stick around longer than they should.
Social network spoiler prevention
A feature proposal for avoiding spoilers on social networks.
Weird permission issues with tvnamer
Distinguishing EPERM vs EACCESS, and how that helps debug file manipulation scripts.
2013
Startup times
Starting new java processes in your scripts considered harmful. Let’s compare “hello world” startup times for different languages.
Asserting string equality
When comparing long strings in unit tests, make sure your assertion failures give you useful output.
Test-driven procrastination
How being lazy and procrastinating led me to adopt test-driven development before I realized it.
Multiple library versions
Working with vendor code in C can get very tricky, especially when you except breaking changes to occur. Especially when you have multiple binaries depending...
Reading, writing and vacations
Vacations are a great time for doing that problematic category of things every management course teaches you about: important, but not urgent. For some peopl...
Translationese
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 c...
2011
The show downloading stack - part n+1
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 excellen...
Developing TransportDroidIL for Android
Here are a few words on developing TransportDroidIL, a small utility to query Israeli public transportation sites more easily using an Android phone.
Home network wiring
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 approxi...
Upcoming features in TransportDroidIL
Hello everyone, TransportDroidIL 1.0 will be released this month. It has quite a few new features:
SMS and why it annoys me
Don’t get me wrong. I love being able to communicate textually with friends, coworkers and family. It’s ideal for a noisy pub; a somewhat-private conversatio...
2010
DD-WRT awesomeness
Since I’ve last posted, I’ve moved to a new apartment. First order of business - get a working internet connection. This is extra-challenging when your prima...
Transport Droid IL
After a couple of days’ messing with it, I’m releasing it: Transport Droid IL! It’s a handy little app for querying Egged’s site, as well as the new Ministry...
Setting up Hebrew Android fonts on your AVD emulator
There are several good guides for installing Gilad Ben-Yossef’s excellent Hebdroid fonts on physical Android devices, but those don’t really work with the An...
Android
I’ve finally gotten the chance to get one of those newfangled Android phones.
My music player has sunk
My Meizu Mini M6 has died a tragic death as a result of being left in my shirt pocket, which in turn was - with the rest of my shirt - in the laundry. I’ve h...
2009
Broken phone screen - data rescue
Last weekend I broke my Nokia 6120’s screen. I have a military phone, which is far cheaper, so I’ve decided to keep it offline. However, being the sentimenta...
Loving the new Totem
Totem is Gnome’s built-in media player, and it really annoyed me in previous versions, and had me switching to VLC. However, the version included in the Ubun...
My show downloading stack
I love watching TV, and hate it. Regular show schedules are horrible, commercial breaks are annoying, and the ability to rewind is very important. I love Hot...
Timezones are fickle
Creating a manual “always-daylight-savings” timezone is hard. Let’s peek at just how messy timezone logic gets.
Using git for code review
At my workplace, I’ve recently been using git for code review purposes. I work on code in my own git clone, and ask a peer to review it. It works somewhat li...
Hardware doesn’t like me
Whenever I try messing with hardware at home, inexplicable failures ensue. Especially when trying to help others; no good deed goes unpunished.
2008
Whatever happened to black & white LCDs?
I had a Game Boy once. I could play it just about anywhere, and battery life - for the time - was great. I lost it at one point, and replaced it with a Game ...
Another SSH trick
Ever have a machine you can only ssh into through another machine? It’s a very common situation in the Technion. Here’s one way to get around it: Assume you ...
Automatically starting rtorrent within screen
These days I don’t stay at home often, but I do have an RSS/BitTorrent combo fetching me all kinds of neat stuff for me, so I can have it ready for me on the...
Quick time tracking hack
Gnome 2.24 adds a new Time Tracking feature, which I would have found useful. I don’t have Gnome 2.24 at work, but I do have a Unix-based operating system… H...
Delegating methods in Ruby
Sometimes, when constructing a compound object, we are interested in exporting functionality while retaining encapsulation. For example, suppose we have a Se...
Tracking TTime
Ditz was lost in the mists of time, and I guess if ttime were maintained, issues would be tracked using Github.
Three things I didn’t know Ruby does
Edit: I was misled!
Security project
This site gets indexed by the almighty google. This link is part of a security project I’m doing for my CS degree.
Gettext oddities with Ruby
I was having a lot of trouble with gettext in Ruby, mostly due to lacking documentation. Here are some useful things I figured out while writing TTime. I end...
That “Life” category there
I has it. Sorta.
Been working on TTime
I’ve found myself working on TTime, the Technion Timetable Scheduler, quite a bit lately. Lots of cool stuff went in:
Tunelling even more stuff over SSH
Today at the CS department of the Technion is a particularily Bad Network Day (TM) for laptop users; none of the wired connections at the farm work, and wire...
Valgrind Fail
I neglected to post this here somehow, it’s about a month old by now…
Scheduling
So, I see I forgot to post my schedule for this semester…
Things I learned today
You can use git on a VFAT disk (for example, a USB key) without all of the annoying mode issues, by using the following setting in .git/config:
Deskbar and Firefox 3
Deskbar has a really neat plugin which allows you to search your browsing history and bookmarks. Firefox 3 has switched the storage format to an sqlite-based...
Hebrew spell-checking in Pidgin
This one took me a while to figure out, which is reason enough to post it here.
Faster Languages
Due to an exercise in an AI course, I’m forced to confront an old nemesis - C++. Part of the reason is that the exercise contains a time-limited tournament, ...
My alarm clock
YNet was running a story on how to use your computer as an alarm clock. Here’s what I do, for our commandline junkies :)
Nokia 6120 Classic
I’ve switched to a Nokia 6120 Classic, and I’ve switched my carrier over to Orange. I’m very happy with it: The price is right, at 0 NIS a month (if your mon...
Egged Getter 0.1
The Egged Getter has been lost in the mists of time. However, it’s code has largely been integrated into TransportDroidIL. An old version of the Python co...
2007
Sour chewing gum
On an online board, friends posted a photo from a party a while back, as I’m chewing some extra-sour chewing gum:
Means of control
New URL - not interesting. You’d notice by now, as you’ve been redirected. Guess my new E-mail. OpenID - interesting, but I don’t have anything particularily...
Vacation
The most recent events in my life which I would consider to be vacations would be the second Lebanon war and my basic training. I love the Technion, but I th...
Computability - Typed Lectures and Tutorials
All links in this post have been lost to the mists of time. I’ve kept it here out of pure nostalgia.
Encrypted my Wi-fi
Reading some backlog on this blog, I found the following gem:
On Threading vs. Processing
Writing multi-threaded applications in Python is often a headache because of the Global Interpreter Lock - only one Python thread can run at any given moment...
Tough Question
My girlfriend just asked me what just might be the hardest question I’ve heard all semester; What do I like better, The Simpsons or beer?
Really liking this git thing
I’ve been a very big proponent of Subversion so far, especially as a tool for collaborating on coding homework. However, I’ve recently been trying out Linus’...
Exception handling, decorators, and python
Lately I’ve been working on a project that has me using DBus a lot. After trying to figure out how to work DBus with C, and seeing how easy it is to do in Py...
Two reasons Apple suck
First of all, new iPods won’t work on Linux. Now, while it’s very obvious that the idea is to block competition against other music vendors, that makes it ev...
NaNuchKa
Despite having a critical midterm Sunday, as well as being sick, I could not, and should not have, give up on the NaNuchKa show. Some of the best music I’ve ...
Some things make you feel good
Some things renew your faith in people, in the time you spend with them. Amazingly small things, considering their grand scope. Making things worse is known ...
All hail the cow!
Silly post about a cow called Paradox.
Some music posted to myspace
Recording this morning was excellent! Awesome studio, not expensive at all, and a whole lot of fun. We’ve posted one song at our myspace page, and it seems t...
Some band stuff
This Saturday we’re going to record our material, and hopefully a cover we’ve been working on - Venom’s excellent “School Daze”. We took some photos yesterda...
Myspace sucks
Life is good, for the most part. And as a technology enthusiast, there are many new and cool things to see online. For example, there’s the new Schools site,...
On the matter of a really long vacation
By now I’ve lost count of how long ago my last class was. The strike has begun immediately after passover, and is certainly beginning to take its toll. For o...
Grub menu.lst editor
A lot of people ask me how to change the default operating system booted after installing Linux. The answer they get in Ubuntu’s case, “Edit /boot/grub/menu....
Yasmin back up
Why was it down, you ask? Well, it was out here in the lab, because of a shortage of network ports in the server room. From the acpid log:
IPython
The more I use Python, the nicer it becomes. I’m currently working on a project for a course, which involves somewhat heavy-duty database and algorithm work....
Using Jabber from within the Technion
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 se...
Before reinstalling your server for RAID
Check that the RAID it supports is actual Raid. My experience today:
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 gre...
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 lang...
Here’s hoping
```ruby def factor(grade, params = {}) return 100 if params.empty? # Optimistic, eh?
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.t...
Beautiful ideas
This man has some beautiful design ideas for the Linux desktop.
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...
I know where waldo is
Well, penny knows. But I have proof she knows…
On Vista
Everyone knew this was going to be an interesting one to watch. Die-hard Microsoft fans were sure Vista would be the final nail in the Open Source coffin, di...
Courtney Love on Piracy
This is absolutely antique (2000), but it’s good to hear an artist with a clue.
Pmount-hal + cd
If you’re like me, and don’t use Gnome or KDE, then you probably use the pmount or pmount-hal applications to mount removable media. Here’s a neat thing to a...
I do NOT kick puppies!
I do type mesmerizingly fast, though… :)
I might need these tomorrow…
My lecture slides. Have a peek if you like :)
Samurai Jack - Ingenious!
When approaching a port, the Scotsman:
Waiting for the bus
I’m going home for the weekend, as usual. Unfortunately, the first bus of my route comes by at highly unpredictable times - I’ve had it be an hour late on me...
3D effects for coders?
My new work desktop has a GeForce 4 MX, so I naturally installed Beryl on it. The graphics card has relatively little RAM, so it finds handling my 1280x1024 ...
Software Perfection - Lost in the details
Sometimes imperfections in Software drive me nuts. It’s what drove me away from Windows. It’s what keeps me switching back and forth between desktop environm...
Alright, American Dad!
Just finished downloading an episode of American Dad off Bittorrent. TV has ancient episodes of Family Guy. Took about an hour though… I tells ya, I’d pay fo...
As for Python
Myself, I’m a Ruby hacker. I send everyone within earshot to TryRuby, code my sites using Rails, am surprised that I’m using a php-based blog… you get the pi...