Ponderings

04/06/2005 11:24

You may have noticed, "ponderings" is pretty much dead nowdays

I'm adding this entry in order to have a link on my main page to my new IFireBot logs section to allow search engines to find it.

I'm gonna keep "poderings" up until I find the time to write a new index page to my website.

26/12/2003 13:30

An update to the site! how rare is that?

Anyway tihs update follows the recent iAnime meeting, nothing much to report apart form that (well, OK I've done many things and the Anime section really really needs updating, but hack. I don't feel like it.

06/09/2003 18:26

Managing to overcome my general lazyness towards updating this page, I take the time to mention that I am currently very excited about the Anime series Boogiepop Phantom.

This excitement manifests in a quite big and growing section in this site, be warned, however, it does contain numerous spoilers.

24/08/2003 20:54

The problem with being lazy and postponing things is that they tend to pile up, for example, there had been an Anime meeting a couple of weeks ago and I kept avoiding to write about it, and now, there had been another meeting this last Friday...

Quite a sad thing happened over this last week, a young Israeli turist got killed in a car accident in Alaska.

This, of corse happens much more frequently then it should, and it wouldn't have got my attention for more then the 60 seconds it took to read the newspaper story unless this poor kid happened to be the brother of my current section commander in the army, which I'm quite acquinted with.

Now, I don't know the kid that got killed. I dont even know my commander that well. All in all, I havn't been sevring there all that long. The reason I'm writing about it is because of the situation it puts me in, I don't really know how to react to this, what should I say to my commander when I next see him, I guess I'm not acquinted with him enough to be obligated to go to the funeral, had I been, there probably would have been much less doubt.

I guess that this quality of utter cluelessness when in comes to the socially accepted responce to certain kindes of events is one of the qualities of Rei Ayanami that attract me the most, because I find a mirror for them within myself.

28/06/2003 13:38

Once again. no new updates in a while, I think I can safely say "so far for weekly updates".

One could argue that the reason for this is that I currently live a quite rootine and boring life, however, after a deeper thought about this I belive this is not true, as rootine as it is, I still belive my week contains enough events to allow me to generate at least a few paragraphs of text.

The real reason why I don't update my website is this, after spending my whole day in the office in front of a computer, the last thing I want to do when I come home is turn on another one...

As you may note, the subject of the frequency of updates I make to this site keeps coming up, well, I guess it does bother me, if it wasn't, I guess this site would have been deserted a long tiem ago.

Moving along to the real subject matter of this post, this week's major event is me finally and officially getting my diploma, I can proudly state that I am now officialy a Technion certified Computers Engineer.

The graduation ceremony took place on Thursday the 26th, it consisted of 2 ceremonies, one big ceremony, where diplomas were given to students with outstanding record, and a smaller one in which only the graduating students from my faculty and their families were present (which, in the case of my faculty, was still quite big, since the faculty of Electrical Engineering is the biggest in the Technion).

I happen to think the ceremony was quite nice, I got to meet all my fellow student friends, including ones I haven't met in quite a while, and ofcorse I got to have my own 10 seconds of fame walking on the stage to get my diploma (well, not much of a fame indeed, as my name, due to its alpahbetical nature, was one of the last ones, and by the time it was my turn, many of the audiance had allready left...).

23/05/2003 15:42

I havn't been updating very frequently lately, probably because my life have been pretty boring, I get up quite early in the morning (7:00 is early! yes it is!) go to the base, and come back to my Haifa apartment at about 7:00 in the evening, when I come back I'm usually so tiered I don't do anything aside form eating, sleeping and doing the casual mail/forums checking and IRC chatting.

Oz and Elinor left my place about a week ago, and went to live in Kadesh Barnea for a while.

Kadesh Barnea is a quite distant settlement near the Eygyptian border in the middle of pretty much nothing, but its also where Elinor's family lives, I'm planning on visiting them in there sometime, It might be nice to spend a little while in a place so far away from Israel's crowded cities.

I'm kinda sad they left, Its been nice having them around for a couple of weeks, and now I probably won't have the chance to see then for a while, well I guess it couldn't be helped, its hard for a young couple like them to keep a rented apartment im Haifa, especially when there is no real reason for it since unfortunately Oz cannot get accepted to the Technion for the time being.

I've spent the time today writing a little about the many parties we've had lately.

I aought to mention that yesterday was lphnt's birthday, I still have no idea what should I get him, I'm having a creative balckout on that matter.

Its funny how cheap PCs have gotten this last year, my dad just ordered a new PC a week ago for as little as 1500nis! And Eyal told me he managed to get a pretty strong 2nd hand PC for 700nis!

On a related matter, the My computers section is pretty much obsolete, well I guess it wasn't that interesting anyway.

02/05/2003 21:23

After a couple of weeks in which I couldn't take care of any of the things that have been troubling me due to the holydays, on this week almost everything got sorted out almost automatically.

I've finally recieved my "Kamaa" army rank (vaguly translated is Academic Porffessional Officer) and alltough the formal rank markings havn't been given to me yet, I was already able to get an Officer's Card issued to me which allowes me to prove my rank and therfore enjoy the priviledges given to army officers.

On Wednesday I was sent to do "Mavdakim" (Officer's tests) which, after passing them, will in turn allow me to undergo "Kakatz" (Officer's training course) and become a fully flegged army officer, and not just a proffessional one.

On monday Mickey tryed to inform me that Gershon Elber our instructor for THE PROJECT II had finnally released our project grades, the message was delayed for a couple of days until I found the time to enter the #ianime IRC channel since I was having problems with my email address (see below).

Since the grade for THE PROJECT II was the last acdemic grade that was still pending, I can now say I have officially compleated my academic degree and am now a fully flegged Computers Engineer.

The (Beutiful, in my oppinion) site we've made for THE PROJECT II can now be found online in this address.

Since Oz and Elinor had to clear out of their apartment in Haifa on a rather short notice (They have been planning to leave Haifa, but they didn't think they'd find new people to take their place so fast), they moved in to the vacent room in my apartment until they can leagally quit their jobs in Haifa, I suppose these are going to be an interesting couple of weeks...

The 4t3.com domain name under which I have opened my dynamic subdomain that I've used to point to my mail server (E.g. get all my email) was appearently sold out of the control of my Dynamic DNS Service Provider and set to point to a new IP address, this, in turn, invalidated my email address and forced me to switch to another domain (This is ironic since I've started using a DYNDNSSP and running my own mail server in order to avoid email address changes when switching ISPs), I suppose that in the time it took me to sort it all out I've lost quite a bit of email messages...

I took this opportunity to also switch my DYNDNSSP to a new and more reliable one.

26/04/2003 20:18

Damn, no update in more the a month... since I've returned to army service on the 1/4 it has been keeping me busy most of the time and dead tired on the rest of it...

During this time however, there was a party at Oz and Elinor's place on the 4/4 about which I havn't fount the time and energy to write, maybe when the pictures we took will get developed...

Aside from that, we've orgenised an IAnime meeting this last Friday, about which I have found the time to write appearently...

Appearently this site have seen some offline time lately, probably due to bandwidth outage, allthough I can't imagine how could that happen, since there is nothing heavy on this site and I probably don't have that many visitors anyway... Maybe it was some mistake on the ISP's side...

24/03/2003 18:25

Its no surprise that Era knew that movie, he gave me the link for it...

Anyway, it was called "Kung Pow", thats why I couldn't find it.

24/03/2003 17:48

Well, didn't have time to write the last 3 weeks, I was very busy finishing both THE PROJCET and THE PROJECT II which came out really cute and was quite fun to write actually (Well, porbably all computer graphics projects are).

I made what I think to be a really cool website for THE PROJECT II (Its one of the project requieremets, like it was for THE PROJECT) but unlike with THE PROJECT where I had direct shell and FTP access to the webserver, so I knew where and when it was online, this time I had to submit a compressed file containing the site, so I have no idea where and when will it go online, I should probably find out and link to it.

Well its nice to have it all behind me now, Gershon Elber, our instructor for THE PROJECT II has been having some truble compiling and running it, I guess he thought it had compatebility problems, so we sent him a list of 11 (!) computers we tested it on, I guess he managed to sort out his problems after that since we havn't heared from him.

Eyal orgenised a party in his house this weekend, the "formal" reason for it was Lital's brthday, I didn't think about writing about it here till now, it wasn't such a good party anyway, lphnt, Gabi and Lila couldn't come and we didn't drink to much alcohol or anything.

We did watch a funny movie called "Kong Paw" for which I can't seem to be able to find any review online, which is quite weird.

I've spent the last few days fooling around with my mail server (And doing some very stupid mistakes that took hours to fix...), you can do some real cool stuff with exim and procmail...

01/03/2003 13:37

Here is the report about the last Haifa Anime meeting, I'm afaraid this might be the last one, at least for a while since Mickey and myself will be starting our army service soon, and seemingly there is no one to step up and take our place in orgenising the Haifa meetings.

The greate news of this week is that we've finally finished writing and debugging THE PROJECT, all is left to do now is to write a final project report and do a presentation. And I'm going to do something about its webpage as soon as I finish writing this.

26/02/2003 09:46

I don't know if its appearent, but I didn't get around to finishing that last entry I started on Monday.

This week is also quite busy...

Anyway, on Saturday morning I had to go with the rest of my family to a family occasion (my aunt was celebrating the redecoration of her house or something), when we got back, at around 18:00, me and my dad almost immediatly started working on building a new table and bookshelfs in my room.

Its about time we refurnished my room, I had the same old table since I was about 7 years old, and I was running out of room for stuff.

Its even more important when I consider the fact that I might have to move my stuff from Haifa back to Natania soon, this will force me to find a room for at least one more computer (BarakTec) and for my stereo system.

My only regret is that I didn't take the time to take a picture of my old room before starting to refurnish it.

We worked on that table until about 3:00 in the morning, then it took us another hour and a half to put the room back together to a shape in which I could sleep in it...

If thats not enough, I had to wake up early on Sunday (Damn! that was hard!) to go to Haifa (I had to be there by 12:00 to submit that last OOP homework excercise).

About this week, I'm spending it in Haifa, and working very hard with Mickey to get THE PROJECT done.

Were finally seeing the end of it (Man! debugging it took hell of a lot of time...) and we've finally contacted out project instructor to begin the final submission procedure.

I'm allso setting up another Haifa Anime meeting (see events) for this weekend, Busy... Busy indeed...

24/02/2003 16:03

The fact that I've only found the time to write this today indicates just how busy was my last week.

The firs half of the week, up to Wednesday was deddicated to studying for my OOP final exam and to working on the last OOP excercize I had to submit.

Since the exam took place on Wednesday afternoon, and since I wanted to go back to Natania on that evening, after finishing the exam, I was only left with enough time to add the finishing touches to the OOP excercise.

On thursday I woke up late (I went to sleep late on Wednesday) and kinda let the day slip by while failing an attempt to get my hair cut (the hairdresser's shop was closed).

In the evening me and lphnt went to Rinat's palce and watched the movie "Mall Rats" which is a very funny movie, after that, we went to the Kat Balu, where we havn't been for quite a while now, along with Eyal, anf another friend of Rinat's whose name I can't remeber.

We spent the entiere night at the Kat Balu, it was real fun going there after all this time, too bad Olga and Lital who were going to come with us decided not to come eventually.

On Friday morning (after I didnt have to to get any sleep!) I went back to Haifa to give a computers lecture (I do this for varios people from time to time, as a side income), when I got back home on Friday afternoon, I could finally get some sleep, I slept until Saturday morning.

15/02/2003 01:43

This was quite an eventful week.

By the time I got around to writing this, its already friday, and the week is almost over.

First there was the party I mentioned before, a report, when I'll find the time to write it, will be posted here.

The first half of this week was dominated by a File Systems test I had on Tueseday, for which I had to study a little bit.

Then, me and Mickey got into an intensive process of debugging THE PROJECT, I can finally say with a degree of certainty, that it will be over soon, all the parts are finally working together allthough not quite flawlessly yet.

Probably, the most important event I had this week was that I received a letter from the army telling me the date in which I have to report back for duty, and where will I be stationed.

Its kinda funny actually, I'll be going back to the army on April 1st.

03/02/2003 11:17

We had another Haifa Anime meeting this last Friday, here are some details.

Gabi and Lila have orgenised a party at thier house this Friday, so this is going to be a busy week, finally I get the chance to write about one of these, not Anime related, parties in the events section, there havn't been many of those parties recently.

I hope to be able to finish THE PROJECT this week once and for all, but I havn't yet taken a step in this direction since my File Systems and OOP homework keeping me busy.

I'm a little upset with Mickey, my project partner. He seems to have finished all his tests and homework for this semester, and therfore have a lot of free time, so why doesn't he take this time to make sure we finish our projects? Why does it has to be my responsibility to scheduale the times we work in and make sure all the parts work together? He calims to have finished all the work he had to do for the projects, very well, but doesn't he realise that non of this matters as long as the other parts of the work are not done? I'm sure there are alot of things he can do easily to make my work easyer.

Mickey prefers to spend his time watching Anime and editing Manga scanlations, all of these are very nice and positive activities, but is this the wisest thing to do when you have a couple of projects you have to compleate in order to get your degree? When the dreadful date, in which you have to return to army service (We are both "Atudaim"), looms up ahead?

Why am I the only one that seems to care about all this?

27/01/2003 11:54

Eventually, setting up PPPoE was a breez, here are some details.

26/01/2003 13:30

This weekend might go down the history as one of the worst in the history of the internet.

As I've heared (from Mickey) a successful worm attack against a bug found in Microsoft SQL Servers (for which a patch was published more then 6 monthes ago) caused the fall of 5 of the root DNS servers.

Unfortunatly I wasn't online to see it, this was a bad weekend for my internet connection as well (In fact, I was able to witness traces of the effects of the worm attack this morning when I was(n't) able to connect to the internet from the Technion's network).

It all began on Thursday the 23rd 11:05 in the morning, a malfunction on my ISP's side caused my modem to disconnect and not be able to connect again, since there was a recorded message on the ISP's tech support line informing customers about the malfunction, I didn't take the time to look into it, I assumed that as soon as the ISP will fix its problems my systems will get back online automatically as they usually do.

Hours passed, and I was still offline, but when I called the tech support the message was still there.

It took me until the next morning, when I called the tech support again and fount out the malfunction message was no longer there, to figure out that something was wrong on my side.

One call to BEZEQ's ADSL tech support later, I was convinced my ADSL modem is broken and a technician was scheduled to come on Sunday morning.

Due to all of this, I was forced to spend my weekend without an intenet connection, a fact which made it quite hard to take care of the organisation of the next Haifa Anime meeting.

When the technitian finally came I wasn't around since I had to go to the Technion to sumbit my OOP homework, a phonecall from my dad informed me that the technitian replaced our old "Orchit" modem with a newer "Samsung" modem, and that the home network was still not able to connect to the internet, when I called BEZEQ's ADSL tech support they explained to me that these new modems were activated by a PPPOE tunnel instead of a PPTP one like the older ones, so now I have to reconfigure SickBay.

Fortunately Debian includes a PPPOE client and even a little utility to configure it, I really hope it'll work out, I can't wait to get back to Natania to try them out...

This chain of incidents with the addition of frequent malfunctions on their side had finally convinced me the I sohuld replace my ISP to a Better one.

20/01/2003 16:29

I'm corrently sitting in the #1 lecture hall of the Technion's Computer Science faculty's Toub Building, waiting for a lecture in Object Oriented Programming by Yechiel Kimchi to begin.

The thing to note about this lecture is that this is probably (unless there are complementry lectures) The last lecture of the last semester of my 1st degree.

Yes! Thats it! I'm gonnna really finish my degree soon!

17/01/2003 19:59

Its my birthday today, thought I'd mention it.

If found an annoying bug (or actually a misconception) in SiteCopy.

Appearently it has a problem to deal with a situation where a part of the site was updated by a different program, as it starts throwing "File Exists" errors with no possibilty to ignore them and continue processing, and there is no way to tell it to sycronise its status with the one of the server.

From this reason I've spent all day looking for an FTP directory synchronisation tool like Beyond Compare for Linux, amasingly enough, I couldn't find a signle one.

13/01/2003 23:04

One small thing I neglected to mention in my post yesterday, was that before writing that post I took the time to implement that little mehanisem that will allow me to determine the order in which Pondering's entries are displayed I've mentioned last week.

While this is quite a raw implementation, and it doesn't include any decent user inerface, it'll have to do for now.

13/01/2003 00:24

This new week, brings along my birthday.

I'm not perticularily excited about that, for servral reasons:

First, my birtday, being in the middle of this busy time of the year, is usually surrounded by tests and other obligatory dates, thus I'm unable to celebrate it properly.

Second, I have to spend the week smiling and being nice to relatives I almost never hear from and other people who say "Happy Birthday" to me, some of them are poeple who wouldn't even look my way normally.

Third, and most important, my birthday is the only time of the year in witch I find myself unable to escape gloomy thoughts about who I am, and what have I accomplished in my life...

If there is one thing I want to accomplish this week before my birthday, is to finally finish writing the GUI for THE PROJECT and get this damn thing, which has been the wieght on my shoulders for almost a year now, off my back once and for all.

The problem is that in the meantime I also have to do my OOP homework, which I'm forced to do on my own since my partner was unfotunatly called to army servce.

Another problem is that since today is the presentation date for the latest File Systems homework excercise, a new one will probably be published soon.

06/01/2003 18:58

This page is probably the most painfully under-updated page in "Ponderings". this fact, along with the fact that this is the primary page of this website, make the whole site appear as if it is not updated very frequently.

This appearance is essentially a false one when one considers the quite frequent updates to the Events and Anime sections.

To remedy this situation I have decided to make an effort and prompt at least one update to this page each week, it remains to be seen wither my regularly busy schedule and inherent laziness will allow me to accomplish this.

Another factor contributing to the under-updated appearance of this site is the fact that updates to this page appear in its bottom, a form which does not adhere to the more common format of other "weblog" pages.

Some might remember that previous versions of this site did indeed use the "recent-entry-on-top" ordering for the Ponderings' entries, however, this was changed due to the fact that this was less then ideal for the longer story and report pages featuring other sections of "Ponderings".

The solution to this problem would be to introduce a new feature to the system administrating "Ponderings" that will allow me to specify to which format a certain section should adhere.

While discussing the system administrating "Ponderings" it should be noted that this system was completely rewritten since the How it works section was last updated.

When discussing the updated status of my "Ponderings" one should also note the shameful status of the My Computers section which doesn't even include a single mention of my over-half-a-year old laptop, not to mention a specification of the various problems I encountered with it and the solutions I have found for them.

18/11/2002 16:45

Wow. By the look of things I haven't updated this page in 7 months...
Well, there are updates in other places, a couple on new sections as well...

18/04/2002 03:14

Wow, I haven't written Ponderings for a while, this was expected to happen since a new semester had started, and I didn't have time... and when I had time, I just didn't feel like it...
Well, now I've put some updates in the computers section (you might be interested in SickBay's configuration if you are looking for a way to setup ADSL on linux...)
Now I'm going to write some updates in the Neori section.

28/02/2002 12:17

After I've spent the entire day yesterday on reading newsgroups (especially the excellent heavy metal forum in IOL and sorting through hundreds of mp3 files a friend of mine dropped on my hard-drive (it was quite disappointing in the end but I did get some good songs from Machine Head, Pissing Razors and Slipknot), I decided that today I'll take care of the my-projects/dead-projects section.

I'm also thinking about going to the 'Cat-Balu' tonight.

27/02/2002 00:56

Mark this entry's time and hour, this is the official time that "Ponderings" goes on-line, right after I finish to type this in I'm going to run Ponderings' upload script for the first time.

25/02/2002 13:16

Although I'm in vacation, theres not much content being added to Ponderings this days since I've been spending all my time working on the tools to turn Ponderings into a website (see about-ponderings/how-it-works for more info about this).

When ill finish that ill finally be able to upload Ponderings to my website and then ill get back to writing Ponderings about the Neori Project.

24/02/2002 12:36

Lacking any other use for it, this main page of "Ponderings" will become my blog.
You might ask what do I mean by using only this page as a blog when the entire "Ponderings" system very much resembles a blog.
what I mean by that is that I'll generally put here messages that are relatively shorter then the other texts in "Pondering" and try to update it as frequently as possible.