Subversion
I tried to resolve Subversion issue #1093. My uneducated attempt at it received a complete depracation from C. Michael Pilato which followed with a discussion on how to best resolve it. The problem is that we need to efficiently trace the history of a file backwards, which can only be done in the repository level.
So, the final question is whether to perform each such lookup for every remote operation that need to do it (which would require changing the protocol in many places), or assigning a separate command to perform the lookup. The second option is simpler and would require fewer modifications, so we'll probably go with it.
Talk with Ya'El (Orr's ex-Roommate)
On the way to the Technion on a Thursday a week and a day ago, I met Ya'El, who is Orr's former roommate and someone who studied Game Theory with me. We talked when we were waiting for the Haifa local bus, and on the bus about various stuff. (details are in my private diary). But it was a fun talk and I enjoyed it a great deal. One thing she told me was that she did not take any programming courses except the required ones, because they were too much work. One would thing one would study Computer Science to become a programmer, but she was more interested in the theory.
I discovered something interesting about the buses that day. Even though, there's a previous inter-city bus that comes 45 minutes earlier, the bus from there to the Technion just leaves, and so I don't get to the Technion earlier. And using the other bus I get to the Technion at 10:20, which is in the nick of time. Oh well.
Transcribing Thermodynamics into LaTeX
My mom suggested that I transcribe the Thermodynamics material into the computer, so it will be more organized and that I'll review it further. So, I fired my favourite Hebrew LaTeX editor (he2) and started transcribing it. So far, I did two lectures out of three. In any case, it's progressing quite slowly because all the formulas slow me down considerably.
For your enjoyment, I give you a group of macros I wrote for one body of equations. Note that my code could still use a lot of modularization.
\newcommand{\parens}[1]{\left(#1\right)}
\newcommand{\halfN}{\frac{N}{2}}
\newcommand{\hNpm}{\halfN+m}
\newcommand{\hNmm}{\halfN-m}
\newcommand{\tmN}{\frac{2m}{N}}
\newcommand{\osomething}[2]{\parens{1 #1 #2}}
\newcommand{\otmN}[1]{\osomething{#1}{\tmN}}
\newcommand{\ox}[1]{\osomething{#1}{x}}
\newcommand{\exprone}[1]{\parens{\halfN}\otmN{#1}\ln\left[\parens{\halfN}\otmN{#1}\right]}
\newcommand{\exprtwo}[1]{\parens{\halfN}\ox{#1}\ln\left[\parens{\halfN}\ox{#1}\right]}
\newcommand{\exprthree}[1]{\halfN\ox{#1}\ln\ox{#1}}
Telux Meeting
On Sunday we had a Telux meeting. Eddie Aronovich gave a nice intro to the advancements in RPC technology from RPC through CORBA to Web Services. One highlight from the lecture was that he prepared it on his laptop in Linux, and then discovered the screen had a problem there, so he had to switch it to Windows. So he converted the presentation from OpenOffice to PowerPoint. Then we told him OpenOffice was available for Windows... ;-).
But it was a lot of fun.
Israeli Perl Mongers Meeting
We met yesterday for the monthly meeting of the Israeli Perl Mongers. Before the meeting there was some food and a lot of interesting conversations with many people. There was someone there named Jason who came to Israel from Australia. When people asked him why he came to Israel, when all Israelis would prefer to be in Australia, he said it was more interesting here. ("May you live in interesting times"). We also discussed many of the books and other stuff.
Then came the lectures. Abraham Bernstein gave an overview of the things Tcl excel in. The lecture waThe lecture was very interesting. There was something there I did not understand about how to write an interpreter with Tcl. Then Gabor Szabo gave a brief overview of the Phalanx project which aimed to provide good test coverage for 100 of the most popular Perl modules. Afterwards, Ran Eilam gave a very entertaining and funny lecture about "Extreme Programming". He compared the common way that software houses manage themselves, which yield the "Big Ball of Mud" syndrome, and how Extreme Programming solves it.
A funny story that he told was that a manager once told the programmer to create a prototype of a software for a deadline in which he needed to demonstrate the software. So the programmer wrote something whose internals were lacking and gave it to the manager on schedule. After the manager returned from the meeting, the programmer asked him how did the software perform. "Great!" said the manager, "we need three more features by Monday".
During the break, I also talked with some people like Oded Resnik, and Eli Marmor. I took with me two books from the library: "Writing Perl Modules for CPAN" and "Extending and Embedding Perl".