1-May-2003

Browsers Incompatiblity

While working on the Perl Beginners site, I discovered an incompatibility between MSIE and Mozilla and between Opera and Konqueror. Apparently, when specifying "background : none" in the CSS stylesheet, Mozilla makes the background transparent, while Konqueror and Opera only modify the background-image if existent. After I changed it to "background-color : transparent" it resolved itself in both browsers (and still displayed fine in the others).

For more information refer to this discussion in the Opera Forum and this KDE bug report.

Haifux Meeting

Eli Billauer gave a nice lecture about IP Masquerading using IP-Tables this Monday. I met Orna there, and gave her some money to join the Hamakor Amuta. (Muli confirmed he received the money from her, and will pass it to the NPO's treasurer). I also met someone who started using Linux not long ago, and asked on GNUbies-IL what can we recommend as a Linux replacement for Front Page or Dreamweaver. I asked him what exactly he would like to do, and only then replied. In the meeting he said that "if I ask you to recommend a car, you should not ask me 'What kind of car do you want?'". I told him there were many kind of cars... In any case, I told him a little about the HTML writing tools and we had a nice discussion.

Studies

I met with my partner yesterday to prepare the Micro-computers exercise and we finished it in a couple of hours. Yesterday I also had to give in the Mamat exercise, which forced me to stay a bit late to print it, because the printer in the UNIX farm had a problem. We still have some time left to prepare the Financial Management one, and I'll probably sit with my "Software Systems" partner on the weekend for the project.

Yesterday I studied in Micro about the FPU and MMX instructions of the Pentium processor. It was quite interesting.

14-May-2003

YAPC

The first Israeli Yet Another Perl Conference took place on Sunday. I had to drive to Haifa on Saturday's afternoon. When I wook up on Sunday, I realized that I forgot to turn on the Alarm clock, so I only had time to shave before meeting Shlomo Yona. We drove to Haifa University where the conference took place.

I ate before the conference, only to find out that a lot of snacks were served beforehand. I gave a lightning talk about "Meta-Data Database Access", and other gave others ligthning talk. The lectures I attended were the Lightning talks, Mark Jason Dominus' lecture about the Perl Quiz-of-the-week, Reuven Lerner's presentation about 5 things every Perl programmer should know, a talk about Designing database bound objects for web applications, "Perl works for business systems", and "Rui - Remote User Interface" by Ran Eilam, who was my Supervisor back when I worked in Cortext. Afterwards, I attended the Thokbook lecture by Martha Greenberg (the only female presentor there), and Mark Jason Dominus' Twelve Lightning talks presentation.

Most of the presentations were really nice and enjoyable. At the end of the day there was an enrollment of presents. My name came in first, and I chose a book about SVG Programming. Every attendee also received a standard bag with some papers about the conference, a note-book and a pen.

At the end of the day, there was a talkers' dinner, and the food was good. Afterwards, I returned home.

Haifux Lecture

On Monday there was a Haifux lecture by Oleg Goldshmidt about "Scaling Way Up". He gave a presentation about building a specialized cluster of 64K dual computation nodes. The lecture was entertaining.

Studies

I met with my "Intro to Software Systems" partner yesterday to sit on the homework. We had a productive session, but he had to go in the middle. Today's morning I sat on what was remaining: a binary search tree node deletion function and one to search it for a node. When I ran the test program, I received a couple of segfaults. One was because of a bug I cannot remember, and the other one was because I did not set up the parent pointers of some modified nodes properly in the node-delete function. Afterwards, there was a bug that the search-for function did not set the iterator accordingly, which was easily resolved.

Today, it was scheduled to work on the Micro-computers exercise. However, my partner could not come because the trains are inactive (due to the strike). When the hour arrived I called him and found out he's still in Tel-Aviv. We scheduled for tomorrow when I return home. There's a new exercise about the Floating-Point Unit, which we'll also have to look at.

Hacktivity

Not too much, but still. I've been working on revamping the perl* man pages, and sent the patches to perl5-porters. I received some commentary and then sent new patches, to reflect it.

10-Jun-2003

Hacktivity

I did some work on making sure Chiq-chaq's output HTML validated. It turned out to be a rather tedious work. While in the Technion, I worked on the List of Mailing Lists Manager, and am now at the stage where, after I'll add documentation, it would be ready for public consumption. It's great that I find time to hack on OSS while studying.

Studies

During the weekend I worked on the Financial Management exercise and almost finished it. Today, I consulted my lecturer and using his help I would be able to finish the rest. I have to hand it tomorrow.

Yesterday and today I worked on the Intro to Soft. Sys. exercise. So far I had a good success, and got two of the tests to pass. Now it's time for the third part.

Haifux Meeting

Eli Billauer gave an entertaining lecture about his Eobj (=easy object) environment for Perl yesterday. It did not convince me to use it instead of the built-in Perl environment, but it was still very nice. Right now, the Haifa Linux Club has a long line of pending lectures, probably up to the Welcome to Linux series. I do hope I can this time convince everybody to have a Linux in Action demonstration mini-series instead of a full-fledged W2L series.

Other than that, there's an Israeli Perl Mongers meeting this Thursday.

16-Jun-2003

Studies

On Saturday my partner for Software Systems and I sat on the fourth exercise and the project and finished them (hoorah!). On Sunday, I worked on the Micro-computers exercise. I had to emulate the Pentium Processor's Segmentation and Paging mechanisms in software, but it wasn't hard. Still, I have no way of knowing if what I did was correct, because they didn't supply any test data.

Today, I sat with my partner on "Intro to Software Systems" and we finished the fifth exercise. That's it, I guess.

Hacktivity

I began to implement support for Hexagonal Planks in the Swamp Puzzles into LM-Solve. After I was through, I tested it on one of the boards, and it wouldn't solve after a complete scan. To find out where the problem was, I decided to code a pseudo-implementation of the plank puzzles, which would tell me what is the first state that the solver did not reach. I wrote it in Perl/Tk on Friday, and using it was able to find the bug. The problem was that a plank could have been set on a place that would cross its new position. So, it had to be excluded from the test.

Other than that I continued to work on Chiq-Chaq's HTML Validation.

Israel.PM Meeting

The meeting went well and the lectures were very interesting. I returned Damian Conway's "Object Oriented Perl" and took home the book "Win32 Perl Programming". I met there someone who told me he learned Perl from my Perl for Newbies lectures. Here's More information about the meeting.

Reading

I finished Damian Conway's "Object Oriented Perl", and am halfway through on "SVG Programming: The Graphical Web" by Kurt Cagle. Nothing more to add.

Hard-disk Games

My hard-disk started making a lot of weird noises again lately. I remembered the root partition was faulty, and sought a way to overcome it. I eventually made my /home partition the root, transferred all existing sub-dirs under /home there, and re-installed Mandrake there. Works like a charm.

I ran badblocks on the old partition, and it could not detect any error. Also, all the old file operations that caused problems are no longer problematic. Weird.

25-Jun-2003

Studies

We presented the Software Systems project on its lesson on Tuesday. The presentation went very well, and the lecturer was impressed from both our project and the project of the other team. We'll have to see which team will win, but even the losers get a score of 95 or so.

Other than that I attended the final class hours for the subjects for this semester, and worked on the Financial Management homework. Evidently, it turned out that its solution was posted for us on its site. The semester is ending, and now the tests period start. I have a test of Financial Management on Sunday, and afterwards a long break (two weeks IIRC) before the next test.

Hacktivity

Nothing much. (that's being in the Technion for you). I worked a bit on Quad Pres while being at home (and discovered that I can use relative paths for the directories in its quadpres.ini file.). Other than that I created a Bundle::Zavitan bundle on CPAN to install all the modules needed by the seminars management project.

Haifux Meeting

On Monday, Shachar Shemesh gave an entertaining talk about WINE. There were a few glitches during the demonstrations, but they were expected. It was fun meeting all the people again.

Reading

In the SVG Programming Book, I finished everything up to the chapter about SVG animations. I covered all the static SVG stuff, and am now starting to read the dynamic SVG functionality.