Studies

On Wednesday, there was some construction on the Tel-Aviv->Haifa road so the inter-city bus came late on Wednesday, and I had to take a later bus and arrived late at class. Nevertheless, it seems it just started, and I was able to write everything that had been written on the board in my notebook. I then took the material for the previous lecture that was given in the week in which I missed the lecture.

Other than that, I've been a bit busy solving the exercises in Statistics. They seem to be pretty easy once you get the hang of them. Now, I have an exercise about Linear Regression which seems very easy, but the page with the formulas is a bit illegible.

Scanner under Linux

Turns out my scanner (UMAX Astra 3450) works fine under Linux. I first tried it with kernel 2.4.x in which it did not work too well. After trying it in Windows, and then rebooting, it worked well again. With kernel 2.6.x, I needed to compile the USB sub-system and load some modules with various parameters. (which I did not do already, but now I have the right configuration file to do it).

WWW::Form

Ben Schmaus (WWW::Form's head developer) finally commited the most up-to-date files into the WWW::Form repository. I continued the work by first generalizing the "tr_class", "tr_hint_class", etc. parameters to be "container_attributes" and "hint_container_attributes". Then I documented everything that I added.

Following that, I wrote a couple of tests to one of the utility functions in the module, and hope to continue this trend of writing tests. Ben is a bit busy at work now, so he cannot invest a lot of time into it. We are still discussing things via Instant Messaging, which is very convenient.

Anti-MSIE Campaign

I finally started out the anti-MSIE campaign on my web-site, after frustration from Microsoft's abuse of its users, the web-developers community at large, and their apathy towards users of non-Windows systems. Also pay attention to the large no-IE icon at the side-bar. Feel free to join!

Telux Meeting

I've been to gby's Telux presentation on Sunday, about Embedded Linux. He gave some guidelines for error-free development of Embedded Linux systems, and introduced uClibc (a libc that can be customized with just the right functionality), BusyBox (an all-in-one UNIX toolchain, that is also configurable to death), Kaction (formerly Tiny X), and FLTK (the Fast Light Toolkit). It was very interesting and lasted only one hour.

Egged Site

The new incarnation of Egged's (the Israeli national bus company) stopped working with Konqueror, and only a basic functionality half-works with Mozilla. I filled in the feedback form (an E-mail to webmaster@egged.co.il did not work), and got this reply:

"Hello Shlomi. I'm sorry, but the site is designed only for the Explorer browser. I will thank you for your understanding."

This answer is very laconic, and does not address half of my complaints there, nor assured me that they were going to be fixed. I answered him in return, but was not answered. Guess I'll have to find some other means of complaining.