Technion Network is Down
The Technion network is down now (albeit it was up in the earlier part of the day), so I can't access t2, vipe and my Com-Net workstation. I called the Technion Computer Center, and they said they are aware of the problem and are trying to fix it. Hopefully it will be up again soon.
Meanwhile, I'm stuck without two E-mail accounts, and since I'm on Linux, I'll have to switch to Windows to be able to send E-mails using Eudora. Or I can use the rather crammy web-mail interface of my ISP. I really think ssh+pine is the most convenient solution. If you are reading this, I suggest you to get used to using mutt in the first place. pine is not entirely open-source and has a poor security record. My problem is that I'm too used to pine and cannot get used to mutt.
Job Hunting
I called Harmonic Lightwaves today, and tried to reach their HR Manager. I left a message in the voice-mail service, but she did not contact me yet. When I called again, I was told she left work much earlier, but should attend work tomorrow as well.
I also sent my C.V. to Check-Point, hoping to get a job there. I had been in an interview there once or twice. It took me a lot of time to find the right address (jobs@checkpoint naturally) because their web-site is a bit unorganized in this regard.
Talked with Chen right now about my Mercury experience and Life, the Universe and Everything. She might be able to pull a few strings for me there, but it's not final.
Hacktivity
Wrote the "nice tries, but" document in the Better SCM site, where I tell why I think Meta-CVS and OpenCM are the wrong way to do things. I also added a page to my lecture about WebMetaLanguage, where I say why static HTML is a good idea sometimes, and why you should use WML to render it.
On the stories front, I added quite a lot of text to "The Pope Died on Sunday" , managed to connect two renegade sections (and the added one) into one. Now that I have a lot of free time, I finally feel that the story is slowly transforming from a sequence of disconnected parts into a whole.
Finally, I discovered a minor bug in Mozilla, which I reported. It has to do with a:hover background colour styles where there's a transparent image inside the anchor, and the background only changes for the bottom line of the image (where in MSIE5 it changes for the entire image). Someone noted, that the way it should be (only the first line should be highlighted, and I asked whether that was indeed the case. (after all the image is wholly contained inside the anchor). Maybe the standard can be interpreted both sides on it.
Talk with Chen
We discussed the mathematics courses we took and the fact we were expected to transcribe long proofs during the tests, and that they were not open material. She said that in Calculus, there was one proof she was excited from and kept talking about, and luckily for her it appeared on the test. I told her I had to remember the general feel of the Taylor Series proof and she said it was completely inhumane of the Technion to do.
We discussed how just being interested in a project usually leads to nothing, and how, in accordance to what Eric Raymond says in CatB it has to be a scratch for a developer's itch. I found out I was qualified for the team that maintains their internal SCM system, and told Chen how dmoz's category was littered with many SCMs I had never heard of before, and how there are many pending links with others of this vain. I told her many people probably wrote an SCM for their own use and decided to distribute it as Commercial software (not even open-source, mind you). She noted the same was true of Bug Trackers, and we started discussing them.
Chen tried Joel Spolsky's FogBugz and claimed it was very limited in comparison to the Mercury offering, which is written in C and scriptable with VBA (an NT-only product). Then I asked her about Bugzilla, and she claimed it has the best E-mail integration of every product of its kind. Oh well, some teams may find FogBugz good enough for their needs, and if Joel sells it, I'd be the last person to deny him of this right.
I also discovered the entire R&D of Mercury is at Israel, and they only have salespersons and the such in the U.S. I believed it was an international company. When I asked her about XRunner (which I heard was the product that made Mercury what it is today), she said it was discontinued and it was very crappy, just the best at its time. She then told me she did not know if there's a good marketplace alternative for it now. I never encountered too much of a need to debug GUI applications like that, so I'm probably not the best man to start writing such a thing as open-source.
Life
I got to bike twice today. I went to do a blood test in the morning but found out there was a line and you had to set up an appointment, so I set one for Sunday at 8 A.M. and went home. My sister Noa dominated the computer for a long time, and in the evening Michal consulted me with Linear Algebra.
She said she felt that they progressed too fast and she cannot process the material properly. I said that I felt that sometimes progress was too slow for me, and I felt that I could with the aids of good material, exercises and human consulting, learned the material much more quickly. Then I noted that even very bright people had to work hard in EE studies to get good grades. So, then Noa asked if the same was true about CS studies, and I told her I believe it was. (lots of Algorithms to prove, interesting material to understand, etc.)
All in all, it was a very pleasant day, and I enjoyed it very much.