Older blog entries for ladypine (starting at number 45)

I know I cannot expect much from the press in general, and from web press in particular. Hack, some of them even make up their own news. But if they took the trouble of copying pictures from the Haifa English Theatre site, and diminishing their size, why copy the pictures from some sing along, instead of the rehearsal photos?

Found the root kit and other Trojans page, and got scared. These things are thorough! I even encountered a package which gives credit to the UNIX developers, because thanks to them the author is now able to crack UNIX. (Of course, he calls this hack UNIX).

Gave a lecture at work about compilation, various compilers and arcitechures, and autotools. I thought my point was that autotools would take care of complicated stuff for you, and it is not that hard to take care of them, but I feel I missed the point completely. I am afraid the impression was more of "Oh, it is so complicated, let her do that stuff, we would stay with simple makefiles".

Preparing to serve my thesis next week. Proof reading it. I can see now how boring reading your own stuff all over might be. I almost forgot since the last time I submitted a 100-page-long report in LaTeX. I am using Tzafrir's package ivritex with the iithes.cls class, which is designed for Technion thesises. Otherwise, doing the Hebrew parts on Linux would have been mre than a headache for me- I would have given up.

Next week is the last rehearsal week for Caramba's Revenge. One more week, then a week of performances, then taking the Graduation exam, and it will all be over. I could have been a free man then, had I not been a woman.

mulix and me have just finished seeing Band of Brothers. The person at the DVD store said we were the only crazy people taking it, and wanted to know if the good guys win. Humpff.

Wrote a new story (Hebrew), called Madam Ohana. A few more Hspell words.

I have finally started writing the pref2c from scratch. Its purpose is not to make your old f77 code compile cleanly in C, (unlike f2c), but rather allow the programmer to begin at a better point than writing from scratch, while still not imposing any structural decisions which are native to f77. Afer all, if we are to stay with global memory, why move to C to begin with?

On Saturday I traded mulix: I wrote syscalltrack a script, while he set up Hebrew on his computers. This completed my Hebrew saga, which began while trying to make my thesis have a Hebrew index, using ivritex. It turns out that Culmus have rather nice fonts, though I did not manage to find where they were installed.

This week started with a very nice surprize: I got snail mail from Lozan. A researcher, whose work I was very interested in reading, but could not get a hold of, sent me a hardcopy. A lot of good reading to do!

On Monday we had a haifux lecture about emacs. Later on we went to our favorate restaurant. Favorate means, first of all, that it is smoke free. Much to my disappointment, the barmen was smoking as well as several of the customers. They did not object too much to putting the pollution off, but still coming home smelling of smoke is not my favorate pasttime.

bram, maybe you will be interested in TARK which is still in the "call for papaers" stage, and deals, among other things, with computers and game theory.

I am tired, and it shows. I spent half a day today trying to compose an html page in Hebrew that would be readable in reasonable browsers, while having a Linux machine without internet nor Hebrew nor any decent browser on it, and an other-OS machine with IE.

Rehearsal jokes become as funny to us as prep-math course jokes when I started Uni, or alternatively army jokes in the first days. I bet no one on earth would understand why we all laughed when the prompt, who was standing for an absent actress, actually said her line correctly.

Rehearsal pictures

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.

Moshe Bar claims he has a Phd, but avoids directing me to his thesis!

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.

demolinux

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!

Preparing Slides

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.ps

My 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!