I finally was able to talk with Chen Shapira on the phone. The following conclusions were reached:
Bitkeeper
I took Muli's suggestion and notified Larry McVoy of my intents and linked to my "corrected" article. The only thing I can say was that Larry was completely mean about it, and forbade me from contacting him or any of his employees about such issues. <sigh> I apologized and said that it was perfectly understood and that I would refrain from licensing issues in the future.
Larry McVoy is bad news. And I'm planning to teach him and the world at large a lesson.
No Internet Connection
My parents decided that E-mail could have a bad influence on me (it could, but I think I should boldly face it). Thus, I am spending a few days without using the Internet. That means:
While I enjoy my relative freedom from my Net-responsibilities, I think this whole thing is too draconic. And not a good strategy, psychologically.
Things I have to look forward to
Sunday - Meeting with Roy tomorrow's morning and then him, my mother
and I having a lunch in Nando's.
Monday - a Haifux meeting about strace and ltrace. My parents said
that they would consider letting me attend it.
Tuesday - a meeting with Dr. Tony Shachar (who might inject a little
sense into my parents)
Otherwise, I feel like a prisoner here, without Internet connectivity, with doing cognitive exercises to kill time (they are actually quite fun), with telling my parents about Neo-Tech, and with my only joys being the walks and bicycle rides. (and my talk with Chen Shapira).
My parents claim they are doing it out of love.
Cognitive Therapy Resolution
I am going to do one cognitive exercise each day, before I read the E-mail. Then I am going to do a few more after I do read the E-mail. I have an approval addiction and needs to get it out of my system.
I wrote an "approval liberation" paper that sort of tells the world why I don't care what its people think of me. The only one whose opinion I should care about is myself. And I value myself greatly. I keep surprising myself with my intuition, creativity, honesty, integrity, productivity, and most importantly - humility! Oh well, I mock the latter in this paper.
Mark Veltzer Rocks!
Mark Veltzer sat with me yesterday on the IRC and guided me step by step through my first steps in Aegis. It was very nice of him and I'm sure he had more important things (non-altruistictly speaking) to do. Aegis felt very slick so far. I still have to make my first real change.
I'll certify him as Journeyer here, and maybe even as Master when I'm in the mood.
Code talks, but Advocacy talks too!
Many people are anxious to see some code come out of the "Better SCM" ( formerly known as the "Better CVS") movement. But my intention for the while is with Advocacy. It is well-known a developer has to design and write a specification before he actually sits down and code something.
In the Open-Source world, unfortunately many programmers are trigger-happy, and prefer sloppy code over well-thought one. I agree with Eric Raymond, that it is better to write the first version by yourself instead of starting a mailing list and expecting the project to form out of thin air. I do intend to contribute code eventually, but I also intend to synchronize efforts between the projects, offer ideas and critique and try to get things moving.
Advocacy talks! and this is what Advogato is all about!
Job Auditions at Mercury
I was invited to Mercury Interactive, to take job auditions the past Sunday. I expected a job interview and was looking forward to working there since many friends of mine work there, too (Chen, Omer Mussaev, Adi Stav and Gabor Szabo). The job is about Perl and Unix - too things I like and know very well. And Chen or Omer can give me a ride there.
Omer took me there, and it turned out I had to sit in front of a computer filling out psycho-technic and psychological (= California) tests. I felt that I did quite well on the psycho-technic tests, but have mixed feelings about the Psychological tests. In any case, I expected Mercury to have Job Interviews, with more interesting tests and questions. But maybe that's the way it is in some corporations.
Between the individual tests, I took some breaks to eat, drink and go to the bathroom. The tests were over at midday, and I went to see Omer and ask him what to do next. After I found him, he told me that he was about to leave only at 10 P.M., and that I should return home by bus. I had to take a bus to the Tel-Aviv Central Bus Station, where I ate Shuarma, and from there took the 27 bus back home. I was very tired, so I went to rest, and ended up using the computer in the evening.
Life
Is good. Even very good. I get to bike twice a day, have all the time to do things I want to do, rather than things the Technion expects me to, and am positively carefree. My thoughts are still very occupied with Studies and I have all sorts of ideas on how to get my diploma quicker and with less frustrations. Besides that, I'd like to attend the O'Reilly Open-Source Conference, and even submit some lectures to give there.
I'm eating interesting food, but I still try not to eat too much, because I still have a little extra fat on. Mom said I'm not as fat as I used to be, so it's good. Nevertheless, I'm still happy with my body - while having a little fat or otherwise.
I have several places where I can look for work: Harmonic Lightwaves (did not query there, but I should), Check-Point (heard they are looking for Linux experts), Qlusters (after I get an answer from Muli about his work there and why he had quit), and naturally the Computer Jobs in Israel site. But naturally, finding a workplace is not something I desperately need, as I have lot of other things to do besides. Still, a positive income would be nice.
Another important thing: I intend to get a girlfriend now. I thought about asking Michal to fix me with one of her friends. I also thought about going to pubs and starting conversations with females I find attractive, in hope to discover they are single, and agree to go on a date with me. (you could say I'll try to hit on them, but I don't see hitting on someone as something morally wrong.) That's one of the reasons people go to pubs.
In any case, I remember the time Eli (Ardity - my neighbour), Nir and I, and a girl that studies EE that took the elevator with us, discussed the merits of Ayellet Tal (a Technion lecturer). We went out to buy some food and the girl returned to the Technion, and Nir claimed she was trying to hit on me and I should have followed her. It gave me an ego-boost to learn that. But maybe he was just misinterpreting her and she just engaged in the conversation. But in my psycho-sexual state I could not spot a hit attempt from a girl even if it hit me in the head in a speed of 100 meters per second. And I'd rather not assume any conversatation a girl has with a man is of the flirtatious kind.
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.
Job Hunting
I received a message from my IBM contact person that they are only looking for students with higher grades, and it's a management policy. Hmmppf. He said that from what he saw in my C.V. and on my homepage, I was very suitable, but the management was deterred by my relatively low grades. But who is John Galt?
Leah at Harmonic told me that momentarily they are not looking for employees, whether students or full engineers, so I can't work there either. I have yet to hear from Mercury, and have sent my C.V. to Raz systems, which may be able to offer me a part time job or commission a few projects to me. It's still too early to give up.
Private Lessons
I am now giving private lessons to Eli'or, the son of Sarah which is an acquaintant of my friend. I had one lesson with him a week ago (which as I found out was considered a test lesson) and one today. It turns out he has a photographic memory and so is very good in History and stuff like that where he memorized the entire book. :-). But he has problems with physics partially because you need to know where to apply the equations and laws. Memorizing them can only get you so far.
He is still a very bright kid. However, his teacher expects them to solve a relatively long test within 90 minutes, entirely correctly. I told him to ask her what she'd like to see in the test, and on what she will take off points. Solving such a test perfectly within this time limit does not seem like a reasonable thing to expect out of students, especially considering the fact that most students are far below his level.
I was not too much impressed with his test, though. There are too many missing things, typos, and generally bad style there. I should probably tell him to reach a good paradigm of solving, before he touches the paper, and then solve consistently and correctly.
Since I'm a big "high" now, I gave him a few anecdotes during the test. (like Fermat's Theorem, or things I read in the book, or phrasing a sentence in pure symoblic logical notation) and afterwards we discussed politics, ethics and Linux. He seemed quite thrilled to hear of the Neo-Tech definition of what is moral and what is immoral and then I told him about ammoral actions. He asked me to show him what advantages Linux would give him and I brought him to my home PC and started showing around, but then he had to go. He did get quite excited from the look of KDE 3, and I managed to explain to him about virtual workspaces a little.
I gave him my E-mail address and homepage and hope we'll exchange some URLs we mentioned in the conversation. He gave me 70 NIS for this session, but said he would like to take bi-weekly meetings in which we'll cover the entire material for the Bagruth, but said that 70 NIS was too high. Still, it's going to be a lot of work.
Life
After Muli's last Haifux Lecture about Kernel Oopsing, I constantly felt a bit tired. I wanted to lie in bed a lot and had little power to do anything else. The good thing was that my euphoria had gone. I did get to bike once or twice a day, at most days in which it wasn't raining. It became a bit better as I became less anergic and more willing to sit at the computer and do stuff.
I did not go to Meir Maor's Emacs lecture. I read the slides online and it did not seem very interesting, albeit they were quite informative. Maybe I'll go to the next lecture. I also missed a few meetings of the Linux Business Forum, but there is one today and I'm planning to attend.
Hacktivity
The past few days I hacked on Quad-Pres, and brought it to version 0.8.0, where it is centrally installed in the system. Now I'm working on the 0.9.x tree. I wrote an "add" function that adds a file, but it is still a bit buggy and incomplete.
Yesterday, I also worked on Freecell Solver. I added the functionality of the states ordering, and discovered a nasty bug that exists in the 2.8.x tree as well. Better release a new version that fixes it.
Linux Business Forum Meeting
I attended the meeting yesterday. We discussed several questions and each one raised their hands and tried to give some answers. I gave one answer to the question about Linux technical and economical advantages. All in all, I had a good time, and I met a few people I knew or remembered there.
Hacktivity
Trying to temper with ncftpput has led me to discovering a bug in the NcFTP code which I reported to its developer. I also spent some time preparing some notes to the lightning talks for the upcoming Perl meeting. Other than that, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about the IBM Ponder This challange for February.
Life
It was raining a lot in the past couple of days. Today the sun came out for a brief time in the afternoon, but then it started raining again. So I'm staying at home most of the time, and tempering with the computer.
Life
Yesterday was a sunny day. I went biking in the morning. In the afternoon, I was a bit tired and went to bed instead. Today, it was raining in the night and the sky is covered with rain clouds, so it might rain.
Hacktivity
I discovered patsolve's algorithm was a bit more complicated, which demotivated me from implementing it in FCS. I worked a bit on Quad-Pres yesterday, adding some code to dump the contents tree the way I'm used to.
I also worked on preparing my Lightning Talks for the next Perl meeting. Other than that, I was able to solve the Stars and Spirals puzzle which was shown on mathpuzzle.com, so now I have one less puzzle on my mind. I used the GIMP as a visual aid.
Perl Meeting
We met the day before yesterday at InterBit for the Perl Meeting. I learned there about Perl Golf, which aims to write the shortest Perl program that will fullfill a given task. An American Immigrant attended it, so for a short time before the meeting we spoke in English. I returned the "Graphics Programming in Perl book" and took Computer Science and Perl Programming: Best of The Perl Journal. Then the lectures started.
At first Pinkhas Nisanov gave a lecture about a TCP tunnel he wrote in Perl. The lecture lasted for 30 or 40 minutes, and so would not exactly qualify as a Lightning talk, but it was nice, explaining about pre-forking and stuff. Then, Mikhael Goikhman gave a lecture about X11, which also lasted for quite a long time (45 minutes or so). It did not taught me too much new things, except for the fact that he claimed Tcl uses strings to store arrays.
Then we had a break, in which Mikhael, me and a few others discussed some X11 issues (like FVWM, wxWindows, Xnest, an X sniffer he wrote, etc). Then Ido Trivizky gave a talk about Sexegers which are regexes that operate on the reversed string. I gave two talks about LM-Solve and PDL, and some people from CheckPoint raised the issues they were trying to solve with mapping a query object to SQL.
Someone gave me a ride to Tel-Aviv and I arrived at the Northern Railyway Station on 22:00. I then discovered that the 27 bus was no longer active, so I took an Egged bus to "Mozeon Ha'aretz" and from there took a 24.
Hacktivity
Yesterday and now I worked on a module for PDL to solve sets of linear equations and to invert a matrix. I wrote the first version in Perl, based on code from the Math::Matrix module, and then converted to C using the PDL::PP interface. Other than that I also came to the solution of a riddle I found on the Internet I was looking for interesting riddles lately, and right now my mother has three riddles that she needs to think about: this one, the stars and spirals one, and the house->river->factory one.
I also spent some time deciphering the Winner of the latest Perl-Golf tournament. I did it by gradully translating it into more understandable Perl.
Reading
I read a few chapters out of "CS & Perl" which were nice, but were such that intended mainly for beginners. Now I'm starting the part about regexps. I also advanced a little in "The Basic Eight", and started to read Simon Singh's "The Code Book", which I'm not sure I'll continue reading now that I have "CS & Perl as a technical book.
Studies
The Technion semester started and studies are now active. For a few days I spent a lot of time resting in bed, but now I think it's more OK. I now have some homework in Micro-computers, in "Intro to Software Systems" (Mamat) and in "Financial Management" (nafas). I found a partner for Micro, and we sat down yesterday (Saturday) to prepare the homework. I also found a partner for Mamat, but we did not schedule to prepare the homework yet. Meanwhile, I'm preparing the homework myself, just in case.
Purim was last week and we had Tuesday and Wednesday off. Because the second Gulf War started, my mother was worried and so I did not go in Thursday either, and had a sort of vacation week.
Riddles
Lately I've been a bit obsessed with preparing the latest Perl Mini-Golf titled "Digits Sum". I concentrated a lot of thought into it. Beforehand, I worked on some of the problems from the Macaleaster College Problem of the Week.
Reading
I pretty much finished going over "Perl & CS", and also finished "The Basic Eight". Noa said something about one of the main characters in the book being invented by the narrator. It's hard for me to make sense of the story this way.
Now I started reading E. Nesbit's "The Arden House".
Logistical Problems with the Haifux Site
It turned out I am no longer a member of the haifuxsite group. I talked with Orr about it and it turned out he did it on purpose as an experiment to see when I'll complain. He also created his own lectures manager (in C-shell), despite the fact I worked on mine and he was aware of it. It made me very angry, and I left Guy's lecture about Linux memory management in the middle.
I sent Orr an E-mail with some contributions. Here's his reply:
From orrd@vipe.technion.ac.il Sat Apr 5 06:41:40 2003 Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 14:32:30 +0300 (IDT) From: Orr Dunkelman <orrd@vipe.technion.ac.il> To: Shlomi Fish <shlomif@vipe.technion.ac.il> Subject: Re: My Lectures Manager + Diff to the Front Page Shlomi, Thanks for what you have sent. I do not wish to send you anything that I have written, you can quite easily guess what it does and how it works. Moreover, after the mail you have sent on 2-AUG-02, I have expected a responsible behavior. On my first trip abroad, I found out that you haven't updated the lectures nor the site, even though there was a lecture due a little bit after I was scheduled to return. So I did the change myself. If you recall the "Sad state of the site" email you was so nice to send us all, you claimed that you should have access to: a) make it better site. b) update it when it is needed. for a) you don't need to have access, do not need to know how the hell I work, or how others work on the site. and as for b) since AUG-02, you have done nothing in that field. There was once a vote on the design of the site. Not too many did care (8 votes), and from the discussions back then in the mailing list, I understood, that as long as you can browse the site in mozilla and lynx (and I must add also IE, as many people do use it, and they are the majority) the site is fine. the current version of the site works wonderfully on 5 browsers (as I mentioned before), and I assume that it works also fine on your computer. I also assume that you don't try on purpose to look at it on a smaller window with less than 800-pixel width. If this is the case, I am terribly sorry - use lynx. I will not change this (maybe to 640-pixel width), but theoretically it will remain as is. And the same goes for the fonts. Unless I get a real complaints saying that the website is unusable due to this, saying to me that this is a complete "NoNo" is equivalent to any other baby talk "GoGo", "DoDo" and "ToTo". I understand the value of standards, that's why I work on make it complaint to some standard. However, even the ANSI-C standard is not a good standard. When it comes for programming, or anything that human can really interfere with, most of the standards fail in one way or another. Making everything XML-complaint, or DHTML-1.33.xx.sfdf.gfgf complaint seems (to me) a waste of good valuable time. If you disagree, you are mostly invited to send me once in a while an updated (more standard) complaint version of the site. Please recall, that each additional character makes the site bigger, so I do tend to cut edges whenever possible (not everybody are connected through ADSL or cables or LAN). If backward computability is so much important to you (supporting 640-pixel window size), you would probably appreciate it. On Tue, 1 Apr 2003, Shlomi Fish wrote: > > Hi! > > Included are: > > 1. A diff to the main page fixing the main problems with it (chaning the > font, the horizontal scroll-bar, etc). > > 2. My lectures manager (look at all.html for the HTML or the Data.pm > file). Note that I did not yet added the relevant lectures to the Linux > System category. > > Please send me what you did to maintain the site so I can inspect it and > compare it with my own. Note that in the past monthes I had several themes > that prevented me from doing a lot of programming in general and > maintaince of the Haifux site in particular. (like anxieties, chronical > fatigue, and the studies that began). That and I concentrated on working > on my version of the site. > > Regards, > > Shlomi Fish > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > Shlomi Fish shlomif@vipe.technion.ac.il > Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ > > My opinions may seem crazy, but they all make sense. Insane sense, but > sense nonetheless. > -- Orr Dunkelman, orrd@vipe.technion.ac.il "Man is the only animal that blushes--or has reason to." --- Mark Twain Spammers: http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~orrd/spam.html
With all this rudeness, ingratitude and fight over terminology, I seriously suspect that Orr has something against me. That's or its jealousy or some kind of superiority thing. Maybe he's just very possessive of the site management.
Perl Essay
I wrote an essay about the "Usability" of the Perl Online World for Beginners. I sent it to some friends and then posted it to Israel.PerlMongers. Then, I tried to post it to www.perl.com (Simon Cozens, its editor, was interested in what I had to say), but it seems to have only made Cozens angry, and to use.perl.org, where I believe it was a pertinent scoop, but was rejected as well. I ended up posting it to Advogato (see the post), where the discussion became quite off-topic and low quality and to the Perl Advocacy Mailing List. There I finally got a meaningful discussion, albeit I had to explain myself a bit. One very prominent Perl figure seems to be obsessed with keeping Perl an elitist, centralized society, and has made some pretty trollish posts and E-mails to me. Very and balantly trollish. (the standard "fragmenting the community" wave)
Since then I revised it a little and made some personal attacks a bit less blunt, based on input from other people.
Talk with Parents
Yesterday, my mother noticed that I had an anxiety and started talking to me about it. It diverted into meaningless attacks, in parts of which Father became very angry and distrustful of me. We spent half the night this way, without reaching too many constructive conclusion. I think my Euphorias could be handled more gracefully if my parents were not so worried about them. Of course, the best thing would be to prevent them in the first place.
Biking and Running
Gabor as a Dmoz.org Editor
I just became an editor of the Perl "FAQs, Helps and Tutorials" category. When moving a URL I noticed that one of the editors in its history was named gabor. Pressing the link I found it was Gabor Szabo. I tried sending him an E-mail through the Dmoz.org system but got a notice that there was no such editor.
A response to a private E-mail confirmed he was no longer active as a Dmoz editor. That's a shame.
Article to Perl.com
I wrote an article to Perl.com about solving games with LM-Solve. I sent it to Offer Kaye, Shlomo Yona, Gabor Szabo and Omer Zak for review. Offer Kaye replied with a few grammatical errors which were easy to fix. Then, Gabor replied with a suggestion to change the start of the article from talking about "I".
Afterwards, I sent it to the Perl.com editor (Simon Cozens) which had a more substantial advice that required a bit more work. Still, it was easy to fix. He said he would publish it and offered me $200 for the work. Great!