Older blog entries for shlomif (starting at number 10)

New Signature

Well, today I came up with a new signature, which I think is funnier than the previous one. It goes like this:

"If A is A and A is not not-A, does it imply that B is B and B is not not-B ?"

Flame away! My problem is that I insist that all of my signatures be original. It's not that I don't like many quotes by other people, it's just that I am an individualist. And I also want all my quotes to be funny. And I refuse to use a randomizer. And I want to change it once in a while.

s/problem/problems/ :-)

Noise Over IP Project

That's what I decided should be the new name of the IP-Noise project. Just kidding. In any case, we have a fully working IP-Queue/Kernel Mode Arbitrator. It's only show-stopping bug is a division by zero problem, which I'll solve as soon as I meet with Roy again.

Roy and I prepared a list of notes for the final report, and a wish-list (which we are toying with the idea of out-sourcing a subset of it into a next project). Get this: we have to give a final presentation, a final demonstration and hand out a lengthy final report.

The report would probably be in Word. I asked Roy to learn LaTeX, so we can use it in the next project. It's not that I hate Word... It's just that I can't stand using this excuse for a Word-Processor. WordPerfect 5.1/6.0 was very nice IMO, but LaTeX seems nice too. LaTeX has its quirks, but it is by far better than Word.

Oh well, who is John Galt?

Freecell Solver

I released Freecell Solver 1.10.0 onto the world. Freecell Solver 1.11.0, which is also available, also includes support for Yukon. Yukon has a much bigger number of possible moves so the scan takes longer on average, but it was able to solve all the games I had solved on PySol. There are some cases, where I think it can potentially lose, but I have to pinpoint such one. Which means I'll be playing a lot of Yukon now.

Yukon also tends to generate very long stacks, which only only makes the Indirect Stack States<tm> make sense.

I see it's been more than two weeks since I wrote the last entry. Oh well.

I had some time off my University project (due to the fact that I got a little sick and because of the Jewish holidays), and I invested it in Freecell Solver. Now it is solves Simple Simon games par excellance, and you can expect the release of 1.10.x anytime now. Simple Simon tests are more complex than Freecell ones due to the unique nature of Simple Simon, so it had been quite an experience.

If you can't wait, the development releases are available on the site by now.

The presentation went pretty well. Roy brough snacks and Ecclaires which his wife prepared, so it made a good impression on the Lab staff who jokingly said that it set a new standard for lab presentations.

The coming week will feature Rosh-Hashana in Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, which does not leave much point in going to the Technion. Nevertheless, Roy and I decided that I will keep converting the arbitrator to C, and he will work on the Mid-Term report.

Thus, yesterday I finished converting the compiler's interface to C and it works pretty well. I started working on the switcher today, but did not finish yet. In any case, I have an entire week for this. I also made a diagram of the packet handler in Dia, but I have to fix it a bit because it came out too large.

I have a test the Sunday after the next in Image Processing and Analysis, so I am preparing for it too.

I downloaded a couple of fortunes yesterday, namely the ones from the Jargon File and some collections I found in a site I spotted on Freshmeat (from the Simpsons, Disc-World, Forrest Gump, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Star Wars).

In the R2L front, I am still quite stuck with the KDE applet. I'll try to dedicate some time this week to work on it. I have yet to write a SPEC of the MAYBE simulator internals, too. And I plan to add support for Simple Simon to Freecell Solver. So, I still have some things in my task list.

Roy (my partner for the IP-Noise project) and I spent the weekend working on the project. We finished writing the perl arbitrator, and started converting it to C. We are giving a presentation about it this Tuesday.

I've been playing "Simple Simon" in PySol a lot lately. I am thinking of adapting Freecell Solver so it would be able to solve "Simple Simon" games too, but so far the code is in very preliminary stages.

There's a meeting of the Haifa Linux Club today. We're going to have a short lecture about KickStart, and then discuss the R2L project, the Welcome to Linux series and other such stuff.

Now, back to IP-Noise. My partner and I required a C implemntation of a Readers/Writers Lock for the POSIX threads library. We tried searching for it in Google, but could not find anything relevant. Eventually, I remembered the ZThreads library which has an implementation of it in C++. I spent some time yesterday converting it to ANSI C and it seems to work nicely, at least for our needs.

The IP-Noise project is progressing nicely. Roy and I finished writing the parser and began writing the translator and the arbitrator. But there is still a lot of work ahead of us, so I decided to dedicate next weekend for working on it together.

I released Freecell Solver 1.8.0 yesterday. It took a lot of trial and error to tweak GNU Autotools to do the right thing. But, now hopefully everything is auto-confisicated.

I reached a relatively dead end for the R2L KDE Applet. The only responce I received in my post to the kde-devel mailing list was not very helpful. Maybe, I'll respond to it, and wait for an answer and see if it helps.

I'd like to start preparing for the "Image Processing and Analysis" exam today, so I don't know how much time I can dedicate for hacking.

Roy (my partner for the IP-Noise project) and I met with the project's supervisor on Wednesday. The meeting went very well, and I managed to get some input from him on several things I needed to be clarified. He said he was quite content with our progress so far, and that we may have to prepare the dummy midterm presentation soon.

I opened a project for IP-Noise on BerliOS, mainly for being able to use CVS. I imported several useless directory trees into the CVS, but I now think I got the hang of it. I also set up several things at our local box (including a CVS server), and now everything behaves like I want it to.

I'll probably do some work on the R2L applet this weekend, as well as on the perl lecture. Unfortunately, vipe is not accessible due to a Technion network problem, so I don't have access to my TODO list. I think I'll send it to other systems from now on (or will keep it on iglu.org.il).

I finally borrowed the book "Computation Structures" from the Technion's library and refreshed my memory about the MAYBE architecture. I woke up last night at 1 AM (it's so hot now and I don't have Air-Conditioning) so I decided to write a description of the maybe to the Haifux' projects' list. I posted it, but the whole archive has yet to appear in mail-archive.com.

I learned the Web Meta Language (or WML for short) today. I'd like to use it for the IP-Noise project's site and if I see that it is handy enough, for other things like "DeCSS for JavaScript" or the new GIMP's homepage. But, at the moment, the web-site of the project does not look too good, so I have an incenitive to do it first.

But now it's 10 PM and yesterday I did not sleep too well , so I'd like to get some sleep now.

Yesterday I went to watch "Bridget Jones's Diary" in the theatre and also stayed up late and watched "Lethal Weapon 4". Both were pretty good movies.

Otherwise than that, I'm making progress in several of my Open-Source/Open-Content projects. The R2L KDE Applet now looks much better (but Guy Keren still has some demands about it); I finished writing the part about references to functions and closures in the third perl lecture; and I was able to fix most of the bugs in my LaTeX document thanks to help from the subscribers of the Haifux' mailing-list.

Orr Dunkelman has not yet updated the Haifux' site to show my re-run of the Scheme and Lambda-Calculus lecture. Oh well - he's in the U.S.A now AFA he told us.

I will be going to the Technion today, and I should remember to borrows the book "Computation Structures" from the library and write a SPEC of the MAYBE. It's one of the proposals I have for a Haifux' Project.

Last night there wasn't any episode of "The Gilmore Girls" due to some special about Shlomo Artzi. I was looking forward to it, so I was a little frustrated. Tonight, I had a standard Sitcom + "Whose Line is it Anyway" marathon.

But back to my open-source activities. I worked on the R2L KDE Applet a bit. The code looks better, but still needs some work.

Besides that, I managed to get Hebrew LaTeX to work, but I still don't know how to edit it properly with logical BiDi view. Maybe someone will eventually enlighten me about this. I could work on porting gtkbidi to the newest version of Gtk+ 1.2.x. Or I could work on LaTeX on Windows...

Hebrew LaTeX is working thanks to the IGLU FAQ, but I have yet to get gvim to display Hebrew LaTeX correctly. But, one cow at a time...

I have a Qt R2L Plug-in that runs, but does very little. I'll work on it some more, soon.

I'm going out to bike soon and I'm really looking forward for releasing some physical energy after this week.