Older blog entries for ladypine (starting at number 51)

This past week has been most eventful. I had a surgery done on Monday. I was foolish enough to think that if it was over fast enough, I will be able to attend Guy's lecture about memory allocation. After two days of bandage and not being able to move my head properly, I am now a free neck. And a body attached.

My exam was finally compeleted. I got 90. Now the notorious corrections, and I will be done with that.

My sister Shunit is the winner of the Zionut contest in her school. She is now the proud owner of a new webcam. They did not give practical prizes in my days...

Ranny has his annual birthday party, and I am not to buy him hamsters. the last ones ran away through the draining pipe. But fish are known to run away as well.

Muli and me are searching for a place together now. We are currently inspecting a flat with a fish pool in the back yard. And some frogs.

Installfests

I have written an installfest howto, intended for the concurrent installfest (installation party) organizers, with a stress on Israeli ones. It seems like the average installfest nowadays is mainly about people who know Linux, who help or do the work for people who are not familiar with Linux. 5 years ago, an installfest was an event of communication: a strong server where people who knew what they were doing got to plug their computer in and download quickly the whole OS. No PR was needed: the assumption was that the difficulty was in getting Linux, not in overcoming the fear of abandoning the "safe", partially functional other-OS with its known bugs.

kilmo gave a good lecture in haifux which made some order in the mess in my mind regarding boot loaders, partitions, cylinders and head. One might expect each head wear a cylinder, right? well, in each cylinder there are 256 heads, it appears. And I almost fell to believe that HardDisks nowadays are made with 256 real heads accessing the data at the same time. Quite an imrovement, I thought, since I read of two heads per disk in 1997...

Hardware has never been my cup of tea. Actually, I see it as the final stage of the "Computer Concept":

Write a program which computes something: the area of a triangle, for example. Assume the CPU will do some magic for you.

Have the program interact with the user, have it print to the screen, or even to a file. Assume the filesystem and shell will do some magic for you.

Have your program actually DO something in the computer world, such as access files, remove them, open sockets and pipelines. Assume the Operating System does some magic for you.

Compile your program while taking into account the architecture of the machine you are using. Assume the Virtual Memory and the Hardware will do some magic for you.

Stop being childish. There is no magic. Understand how the magic you once had to assume really works. tk, the danger in being named by a number (an ID number instead of my name, in that case) is that any "word" which contains 9 digits is valid. Hence, there is no possibility to correct mistakes in that kind of encoding. There is a limited error detection capability, since the last digit is computed from the others. The only problem is that few people know how to compute it. I do not. And yet, I finally made the Technion clerks (after several months of trying) change my name to what it really is. Now my name finally matches my number, which was the sole solid identification manner so far.

I am not a number, I am a free person!

The play is over and done with, no more make up on my shoulders, and no more driving mulix nuts with phrases from the play every now and then. Not that I would not miss that.

Next events: thesis exam tomorrow, and on Wednesday and Thursday an insta-party by haifux. mulix and me hope to be signing people up to Hamakor on the event. Also, Hamakor should be printing Red-Hat 8.0 disks for the event. Venture Capital for free software and open source.

I have indeed finally managed to submit my thesis, after a 2-hour LaTeX-macro struggle to add three more words in the proper places, both in the Hebrew and English version. Now that I really see the end (one more week to go. Should I not be studying harder?) I am starting to think about moving my homepage to another server.

I have been making so many plans for the moment of freedom. I wonder whether I would really live up to them. Or would the time just melt into nothing in my hands? mulix says I am a deep sea fish, who lives well under pressure. I guess I will find a lot of other things to put that pressure on me, though I have no idea what they would be.

sun has just finished lecturing in haifux about secure programming.

We just had our opening night for "Caramba's Revenge"(embarrasing pictures available). Almost everybody remembered almost every line, and the prompt was very quiet. All my family came, as well as Guy and Mirit, and of course dear Muli, whom I have taken for a "behind the scenes" tour later on. Miraculously, I even felt well all along the evening.

Congratulations for making it to the kernel MAINTAINERS, mulix!

I have almost managed to submit my thesis. I will try to cut through that stupid red tape again tomorrow. I never thought I would be so happy to get an automated email saying my user is no longer valid in the library, from nyh's lib-agent.

Happy Birthday, nyh!

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.