Pictures from the anti-rehearsal for the play "Caramba's Revenge", in the Haifa English Theatre, where I will perform as Ronnie.
Thesis Lecture
My thesis lecture went fine. kilmo, mulix and Oleg came to show moral support, and maybe even listen to know what the noise was about. Now I need some steam to finish that thing, and on to the next project- renting a flat and moving.
What do YOU think?
Last Wednesday, just before his lecture, I told Moshe Bar that I have searched the web for any peer reviewed article of his, but in vain. No article nor thesis were to be found. I asked him where he had done his Masters and PhD. He told me he had them in Tokyo and Milano, respectively, and promised that if I e-mailed him, he would send me copies of his thesiss.
I did email him:
Hi Moshe, I am the one who talked to you yesterday, regarding your academic work. You said that I should e-mail you, and then you would send me your Masters and PhD thesiss. Also, if you could name the institutions in Milano and Tokyo, it would be nice, as I found out that there are several honorable institutions in Milano.
But I got no link in reply. Instead, I got a question:
*This message was transferred with a trial version of CommuniGate(tm) Pro* Are you writing my biography or what?
M
And then, nothing but silence, though I replied once:
No, I was just interested. As it happens, I have already heard you lecture on three different occasions (yesterday, and in two IGLU events), and wanted to read more of your academic work.And twice:
I guess I forgot to mention that I am an MSc student at the Technion, and that my thesis is about cluster scheduling. As my bibliography includes references to MOSIX, Linux, Condor, REXEC, Libra and even bash, I was interested in your academic work.
Maybe I should not wonder, why he claimed on his lecture, that pvm, mpi, linda and the likes of them, are only used for code ran once and then discarded. I, at least, would never bother to make any code parallel using one of those special libraries, had I intended to discard it.
This is the day of the demolinux. Last week, Eli Billauer gave me a demolinux disk, which I did not know what to do with. "Keep it", he said. I could not think of anyone who would like Linux ran out of a CD, instead of from the HD.
This afternoon, it finally hit me: My father does not allow me to install Linux for my sster in a dual boot, nor to give her a computer with Linux installed on it. I can give her the demolinux CD, and she will be able to play with it at home, instead of via putty on my ADSL-connected computer, which will not give her X.
When I got to my parents, I found out that their other OS has crushed and will not go up. How lucky it was that I had an operating system on a CDROM! And what a magical operating system it was, that enabled me to access the partitions of other OSs, and let my sister back-up her stuff!
Eli Billauer gave me a tip, which enabled me to complete the chain of operations, and produce a proper pdf:
dvips -Ppdf -G0 thesis.dvi ps2pdf thesis.psMy seminar will take place this Wednesday, unbelievably. Finally.
rms and Ted Ts'o In IBM HRL GnuLinux Seminar
On the evening before the Haifa seminar we (35 of us) went to Herzlia to have dinner with rms. Even though his plane was extremely late, he showed up, and was greeted with a great aplause. To my surprise, he did not look at all like his pictures. After we set some order in the crowd, and created a queue for asking his questions, and everybody finished eating and were able to sit down and listen for a change, some very interesting questions were asked.
For example, Stallman was asked about the GPL liscence in research, with regard to mosix. He said that there is no point in research selling out: since it would not increase the amount of money invested in research, it would only bring a temporary advantage to the first who sells out.
The two highlights of the seminar Indeed fulfilled what they promised. Ts'o's leccture was extremely interesting, and he is a great lecturer as well (I even took notes regarding how to make a lecture good, based on his lecture. I hope this proves helpful in my seminar).
Stallman, leaving his shoes by the side of the stage, had a very inspiring speech. He had a few points, in which he asked the audiance for participation. For example, he asked the people to call the operating system GNU/Linux, in order to stress the freedom, instead of the open source or the kernel.
Yesterday Dan Kenigsberg gave a lecture about Hspell. It was a good lecture, which interested a couple of rare birds such as people I work with who enjoy the beauty of Hebrew, as well as my sister. I, on the other hand, enjoyed her questions: what is GPL? what is a hash function? I wish I had been exposed to computers in such a way as haifux, instead of learning basic and pascal, and not knowing what I could do with them.
I hope I can contribute to Hspell more than a couple of odd words, but for that I will require a dictionary at home, which surprisingly enough, I do not have, and ...oh, right- time!
How to use open source tools to create a scientific presentation?
I had my doubts at the beginning, when I considered creating a presentation without proprietary software, but then I started doing it, and discovered that it was feasible, and even easier, to use those tools:
\special{! TeXDict begin /landplus90{true}store end }
Of course there are plenty of other open source tools to make presentations, but LaTex outdoes most of them, I believe, when it comes to equations. Now all I got to do is finish writing the slides, for my seminar on the 15 of January.
Once, I used to be a bookworm. Nowadays, I am a bookcrosser. hopefully, I will get more time to read.
Released a couple of books with mulix this morning.
Asked Lital for a logo for HaMakor, the NPO for open source in Israel.
RMS intends to come to Israel, and already people are fighting over the right to get him free beer. I never managed to understand the direct link between Linux and beer. Someone raised the idea of interviewing him to an Israeli Linux website, but then nobody came up with questions they would like to ask him, that have not been thouroughly discussed before. I wonder, if we have nothing to ask, how come most of us are dying to see him?
valgrind
I got to the unlikely point of getting the wonderful valgrind to ask me to bug-report. The cause of the mess was the portland group fortran compiler, which made a mess inside glibc.so. g77, as well as other fortran compilers I know, behave quite the same on that specific error: when printing a number with a too short format, they print stars (******) instead. pgf90 chose to segfault. And valgrind went mad.
On Friday we had a "founding" meeting of the Israeli NPO for open source and free software. The voting process, which was much discussed, was rather fast. Every one agreed to nominate mulix, gby, sun, Katriel and Doron. Then everyone agreed that I and two other guys would be in the overseeing comittee. Then we had a break, and sun wished to tell Haim, the lawyer, that we used to be married. Haim just laughed, and dismissed the subject. Then nyh noted that mulix is my boyfriend. This fact now made Haim's smile turn solemn. He said that had he known that, he would not have let us run for those contradicting posts.
Later on, after pondering the matter, I resigned from the overseeing committee.
Revenue of second price auction
a second price auction gives the best revenue for the seller, when there are a lot of bidders: then the revenue approaches the maximal value that anyone is willing to pay- the first bidder's value.
However, if the seller inflates the minimum price to a point abov e the second bidder's bid, then the seller is taking a risk: in his greediness, he might lose the second bidder. After all, he does not know for sure that the first bidder would come. If the first bidder does not come, then the seller would sell nothing at all!
Match making
You are right about the match making: they are really a choice between Pareto efficient statuses. The loser case is still considered a Pareto efficient case, since if he stays alone, and nobody wants him, then he cannot collaborate with anyone to change the match.
Pareto efficiency Which is not Efficient
I will now actually come with an example from my soon-to-be thesis. Imagine you have a computer, and two tasks you wish to run on it. Imagine each task takes two hours. Now arrange so that at first you execute an hour of each task, and then, after 2 hours, you run the rest of the tasks. This allocation is Pareto efficient, since no one job owner can change the schedule alone. On the other hand, if the two job owners collaborated, and used the first two hour slot to execute the first task, and the second for the other. You might eve do it such that the one which finishes last anyway would finish last in this new schedule, as well. This way one would finish in two hours, and the other in four, instead of one in three and the other in four.
Finding the globally optimal solution is not always possible by neither heuristics, nor achieving Pareto efficiency.
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