Zero Padded

301 Moved Permanently

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 20:41:21 GMT

It's not like I blog all that much, but recently LJ feels a little outdated for me. I'm trying some alternatives, mainly this one here on wordpress.com. So, you know, adjust your RSS readers or whatever (friend list? what's that? is that like RSS, but from the 90's?).

New York: Random Pics

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:05:22 GMT

Random NY Pics

So here we are, with the last photo album from my trip to New York. This one consists of anything that didn't go into other albums. It still has some nice pictures, and I tried to include the stories behind them (where applicable). Enjoy!

More pics from New York: A Week with the Bukhman Bunch

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:02:15 GMT

A Week with the Buckhman Bunch

I finally got a card reader so I could get a hold of the rest of my pics. Without further ado, here are some photos taken on a week when Sergey was in town and I hung out with him, his brother Michael, and his (Michael's, not Sergey's) girlfriend. Together, they are affectionately called "The Bukhman Bunch" (but not to their faces).

I'm back!

Fri, 08 May 2009 11:39:31 GMT

I'm back from New York, safe and sound. It's been an awesome trip, and it really got me ready for the next phase.
I have a lot of photos I haven't posted yet, so expect a few more trip-tagged posts in the coming ~~days~~ weeks.

New York: A Trip to Staten Island

Mon, 04 May 2009 23:34:57 GMT

A Trip to Staten Island

I've been told there's a free ferry ride to Staten Island. Not wanting to miss out on the free ride, so to speak, I got up early (I think it was about noon) and took the subway down, down to the southern-most station, appropriately called "South Ferry". This is my story.

New York: The City Takes Me Down to Brooklyn

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:46:33 GMT

So the other day I was trying to get to SoHo (that stands for South of Houston street, incidentally. I didn't know that). However, I took the express subway instead of the local one, and only found out about it when the train passed my stop without even slowing, and then emerged from the dark, cool tunnels below Manhattan onto what had to be, judging from the map, the Manhattan-Brooklyn bridge.

Botanical Brooklyn

Now, I could either be anal about it, get off at the next stop and back on the opposite direction, or I could accept the fact that the city is taking me where it sees fit and just go with the flow. I chose the latter and ended up in Brooklyn for wonderful day that I'd never have planned.
The story continues in this photo set. Enjoy!

New York: Greenwich Village

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:07:22 GMT

Rainy Day in Greenwich Village

I have too many photos and too few blog posts about them. In a vein attempt to close this gap, here's some photos from a rainy morning I spent in Greenwich Village at the beginning of my trip.

New York: The Museum of Natural History

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:31:21 GMT

I'm sick today. Caught a flu or something. Anyway, I'm too lazy and fading to write a full-length post, so I'll just share some more pictures with you.

Muesum of Natural History

This set is mainly from the American Museum of Natural History, which is just on the western rim of Central Park. It has a few more pics of the park, if the last post wasn't enough.

New York, Day 1: A Musical Tour of Central Park

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:36:30 GMT

So, four days into it, how do I find New York? Pretty great, thanks. inuwashi kindly agreed to host me for the duration of my stay, so I'm staying with him, his two cats, his flatmate and his (the flatmate's) girlfriend. It's pretty crowded in the evenings when everyone's home, but we manage. They're really nice people (especially the cats) and it's actually pretty nice to come home to some sort of company at the end of a day full of solo traveling.

A Musical Tour of Central Park

I spent my first day hiking in lower Central Park, pretty much by sheer fate. See, although I had about 20 hours of flight, I couldn't bring myself to read the NY guidebook until I was actually there. So on the first day I just wanted a quiet place to orient myself and make a few phone calls back home. A ten minute walk brought me to the outskirts of Central Park, which was just what I needed.
While making the phone calls, I noticed a street jazz band playing in Columbus Circle. Thus began my musical tour through central park, with a short stop by (almost) every one of the numerous street musicians there.

This photo-set has the rest of the story (with captions!), where you can also comment on individual photos. Enjoy!

New York, Day 0

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 22:22:27 GMT

I recently had the privilege of spending close to 24 hours flying from Israel to New York, and I thought I'd share some of the experience with you guys.

Making New Connections

I booked a flight plan that included a connection flight - Tel Aviv to Barcelona and Barcelona to New York. I thought I made a pretty good deal. So when I got to the airport and the nice lady at ticketing said "oh, you know you have this surprise connection flight in there?" I replied "of course, I get to spend 4 hours in Barcelona".

Wrong answer. The real answer turned out to be "yeah, I get to spend 4 hours in Barcelona, then get off the plane in Madrid, spend another couple of hours there, and get back on the same flight, only it's a different seat, on a different plane, where only the flight number stays the same so it registers as a single flight rather than two". What can I say? I love surprises.

Of course, that makes the computer system at Ben Gurion Airport confused about the flight number, so it spews out two tickets, both of them to Madrid, and you have to change one of them once you actually get there. That great, because otherwise I'd have to spend those four hours reading or resting or something horrible like that, instead of looking for an Iberia representative, explaining the situation, getting answers in Spanish-laden English, and going through check-in again with the new tickets. What can I say? I love adventures.

European Web Terminals FTW

Since I had lots of time to spend at various spanish airports, I thought I'd go online and see what's up, and maybe tell the world of my plight . I spent a Euro on 10 minutes of internet access in a web terminal which had the worst possible interface imaginable. It boasts "a powerful web browser" which turns out to be a stripped-down version of Internet Explorer 6 with the ability to open multiple windows removed (yes, it's that powerful). And for some reason they didn't want to use a real keyboard, so it's got lots of clunky metal buttons arranged in a QWERTY layout, most of which require moderate exertion of force to be pushed.

Oh, and since it's a dedicated web terminal, it has some important web keys, like the ":-)" key and its almost-as-important sibling, the ":-(" key, and of course the always needed ".com" key. Seriously, I still don't know why these don't come built-in in all standard keyboards these days. They were incredibly useful. So useful, in fact, that I hardly noticed the lack of a CTRL key (why would anyone remove a CTRL key, you ask? My guess is that they found out you can still get a new browser window if you press CTRL-N, and decided to deal with the problem at the root. Another option would be because they needed to make room for the '.com' key, obviously). That's Europe for you. What can I say? I love challenges.

The Importance of Not Coming

The really nice thing about Iberia airlines is that they go to great length to make you feel comfortable. For example, when you board the plane and wait for all the parents to shut their whining babies up, you can enjoy the soothing voice of Norah Jones in "Don't Know Why I Didn't Come" -- a generic easy-listening ballad about relationships or whatever. When it came up, the teenage girl in the seat behind me said "oh, that's a sweet-ass song!", which made me smile for no reason . Seriously though, it's a really good song, like most of Norah Jones.
In addition to that, during the 30 minutes of landing (I never knew it takes so long to land a plane. That explains my early frustration with flight sims), which are known to be nerve-wrecking, Iberia plays relaxing landing music, and mainly Norah Jones' "Don't Know Why I Didn't Come" -- a quiet blues ballad about the impossible love between a woman and the man she impossibly loves, or something along those lines. It's a pretty decent song, I guess, but they could have done better.
Oh, but it doesn't stop there! During the flight, as you know, there are plenty of stressful moments, most of which involve crying babies and the smell of diapers. To get you calmly through these hard times, Iberia provides channel 10 on the airplane's internal audio entertainment system, which, as far as I could tell, plays nothing but "Don't Know Why I Didn't Come" by Norah Jones -- a subtly erotic classic female blues ballad, presumably dealing with the universal theme of women having trouble experiencing orgasms. In my opinion that's a rather tasteless choice of music, but I got used to it by now. What can I say? I love consistency.

Something Positive For a Change

Enough with the cynical attitude already. Here's something I really liked. My last flight was on an Airbus something-or-other, which has a camera mounted at the top of its tail, looking down on the body of the plane. During takeoff and landing, they feed that image to the internal video monitors, so you get to see the plane rising off the ground into the air and then touching down again. It's really an impressive sight, and it makes you appreciate the miracle of human flight . This really made me smile despite my best efforts to appear cold and heartless to my fellow passengers. The emotional effect is amplified by the musical accompaniment, which was a beautiful, sexy blues ballad by Norah Jones.

So, that was my trip. I left home at 03:00 at night and reached my destination about 26 hours later (about 23 of these were spent in airports or on airplanes, where they won't let you carry a deodorant, because everybody knows deodorants are the main instruments of airborne terrorism). I've only been in New York for one day, but so far it seems to have been worth the trip (and the loss of personal hygiene). I'll share some more when I get interesting stories to tell. Meanwhile, stay tuned for pictures.

Avish, New York City, USA

Pre-Trip Status Update

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:02:51 GMT

So. Y'all must be asking yerselves, "I wonder what happened to Avish in the past six months or so?"
Well then, here's a short status update:

Shifra, the subject of my last post, is doing great, and is now accompanied by a brand new GPS navigator, which is the single most useful birthday present I ever got (thanks darling!).

In more important news, I completed my 7-year long army service (it's about time!), and went looking for a job for the first time in my life. Surprisingly enough, I found one, and it seems to be made entirely of awesome (knock on wood). I'll be starting mid-May. Thanks to the awesome people at my new job, I'll have this hanging in my office when I get there. It'll be a nice addition to the xkcd Online Communities Map they already got. Yes, that's how cool my new job is.

To celebrate my newly-found freedom, I'm letting my hair grow long again. It's currently in its "ohmygod that's hideous" phase, but I have faith in it, and I know we'll get through it soon enough. You'll see. I'll be the ugly duckling turned beautiful swan, only with a long-haired Avish instead of a beautiful swan.

Oh yeah, and I'm going to spend the next three weeks in New York (woot!). Yes, that means I'll be travelling back in time! Seven hours into the past, to be exact. Since I expect to gather some experiences worth sharing, this dusty old journal might get a surge of sudden activity. Then again, it might not. We'll see.

See you on the other side! If you got any "news from the future" you'd like me to carry into the very-near-past, I'd be happy to deliver your message. No living things, please (TSA regulations, you know how it is).

The Smell of a New Car

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:06:12 GMT

Those of you who don't follow me on twitter will hopefully be happy to learn that I finally got that new car I've been wanting to get ever since I wrecked my old one about six months ago (don't ask).

Well, it's here, it's small, it's white, it's brand new and it does an excellent job at getting me from point A to point B quickly and with air-conditioning. Plus, its cheap-ass stereo fortunately has an auxiliary input jack on the front panel, which means I can plug in my iPod and never worry about commercials or the horrible reception around my home-, er, -town (if you can call it that).
All in all, it's a small bundle of joy. Kinda like a baby, only pricier and with less pooping.

Now, here's the important part: I've been using the "I'm working on getting a car" bit as an excuse to not do anything else with my life. And now that I've done it, I'm free to pursue my other strategic life goals, first and foremost of which being to move out.
Taking up Aikido is also somewhere in there, but that's really a pretty fresh decision, so let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Still Here

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:07:59 GMT

I'm still alive, for those of you who wondered. I'm reconsidering the purpose of this blog, which is a nice way of saying I ain't got nothing to blog about. Also, twitter, you know. But I'm definitely still alive. Doing science or whatever.

ColorWars2008

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:01:06 GMT

Started with an innocent tweet, the war now spans youtube, flickr, and its own evolving website, and is appropriately coordinated in twitter. Hundreds of people around the net are taking part in a virtual, evolving event, shaped by its participants. They do so for fun alone.

Events include badass rock-paper-scissors fights conducted via flickr, and nerd rap battles recorded on a voice mailbox connected to the internet, which are then remixed and reposted. Game ideas are collected from participants and judged based on their fun factor.

Besides being fun and original, the color wars prove again that the internet is still a place where individuals can collaborate to shape their own culture, without being directed and filtered by the media and the big corporations. This has nothing to do with money or profit and everything to do with fun and creativity.

To me, the fact that real companies (like JetBlue) award real prizes (like free airline tickets to a destination of your choice) to individuals they don't know merely for having fun (like the guy who recorded the best nerd rap sequence praising the orange team) is a small victory for the people over the business.

ColorWars2008 was created by Ze Frank. Kudos, dude. And thanks.

Jeremy Miller's First Causes: Reversibility

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:20:05 GMT

Jeremy Miller has recently started a series of blog posts which he calls "first causes". The idea is to try to explain the fundamental rationale behind some codebetter practices. WHY is separation of concerns good? WHY do we want our code to be easily testable? etc.
This is perfect for me, since I'm already convinced of the value of most of them, but I'm having a hard time convincing others.

The current entry about reversibility is highly recommended as a solid foundation for the rest of the series. The previous entry addressed the general concept of deciding what's good. It isn't required for this one, but it enumerates and briefly explains all the practices he intends on covering later on, so you might want to start there.

Currently Cool: ImprovEverywhere Freeze

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 11:55:21 GMT

Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. This time, they're freezing up the grand central train station in New York City. The video is amazing, and makes you wanna join these anonymous heroes.

Linkage via BoingBoing.

My first true experience with (proper) unit tests

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:30:24 GMT

Now, I've preached the unit testing gospel in theory for a while now, but experiencing it in practice is a different matter entirely. Boo has automated tests, but they're really mostly integration tests and I always wrote them after finishing everything else. But today, in an underground coding session, I --

Wrote some code. It looked OK, but I really wasn't sure about it.
Wrote a test for some method. It came out red.
Fixed the bug.
Wrote two more tests, called SomeMethodTest2 and SomeMethodTest3.
Fixed another bug, and realized SomeMethod isn't very well written.
Rewrote SomeMethod. Ran all 3 tests. Fixed bug in new implementation. Ran tests. All green.
Wrote some other methods and their tests.
Felt uneasy about three of my tests being duplicates of three of three other tests, but for another method. Realized I'm actually testing the same thing being done in the two methods.
Extracted that same thing out to its own method and only tested that. The tests for the original two methods got trivial since I was already confident about the hard part; so now I was only testing that they were correctly using that part.
Reflected that understanding by switching from calling my tests SomeMethodTest to DoingThisShouldCauseThat. Dropped some unneeded assertions and moved others to where they belong.
Finished the class with some more methods and tests. All green.
Ran code coverage on it, just for fun. One if statement had the wrong color.
Realized I'm missing another fundamental test. Wrote it. Green and covered.
Rewrote SomeMethod again to be even simpler, guessing about whether I should round something up or down. 3 reds.
Changed code to round the other way. All green. Guess that answers my question.
Reran all 15 tests. All green, all the important bits covered. Checked in.
Emailed the others about the new code and where it can be found. Went home feeling content.

It's like, all those people - they weren't lying, you know? It really does work that way. Unit tests don't just reveal bugs and save time on refactoring; they also point out pain points in the design and can help you (and others) understand what the code should be doing. Another bonus is that they make you feel good about your code while writing it, and to me, that's really worth the effort.
I'm no longer a unit tests virgin, and goddamnit, it feels so sweet (and doesn't hurt as much as your mama said it would).

DevTeach Recap: Agile is About Community

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:27:31 GMT

- "So, have you been to Jeremy's talk?"
- "Yeah, it was packed full. Again. Probably means he's a good speaker."
- "Well, have you noticed that all the other speakers come to his talks? That's a good sign too."

-- Lunch conversation at DevTeach 2007.

I think what I liked most about the sessions I took in DevTeach -- at least those in the Agile track -- is that feeling of community. Formally, every session had one speaker; but that didn't stop the others from joining in and contributing from their experience. I asked Dave Laribee about splitting user stories to tasks during one of his talks, and found myself in the middle of a debate between him, Jeremy Miller and Ayende. I got three answers out of that question, all of which by people who actually practiced what they preached.

It really felt like the agile track was built upon real folks doing real development with an agile attitude, and coming out of the trenches to talk about it. The distinction between speaker and listener was very vague, and it always felt like the guy currently doing the talking was still "one of us".

This was especially true during one session which was built as a fishbowl-style Q&A, where Dave only guided the discussion taking place between a rotating panel of folks from the audience. We threw onto the notepad everything we wanted to talk about, then prioritized it by votes and started talking about it. As agile as you get. The only things Dave (as the appointed speaker) did in that talk, were counting the votes, sorting the list, asking the audience if they wanted to move on to a different topic, and accommodating selfish requests from bastards like myself. It was wonderful.

In essence, it felt like we were all peers in there, with the ones further along the way sharing their experience to help the less-advanced ones keep up. I loved that. That was what I was after.

I could've gone and listened to someone talk about an exciting new technology from Microsoft for 75 minutes, but there would have been nothing in there that I couldn't have gotten from the presentation alone, or from the internet. I didn't fly for 17 hours to hear someone teach me how to use some new feature in SQL Server 2008; I could've done that talk myself, given some time with Books Online. I was there to meet and hear real people who can share something that I could use, and that no MSDN subscription would get me. I was there for the experience of the community.

During the last day of the conference, when the agile track had already ended, I did attend some of the other tracks. They felt pretty much how I thought they would: like a cross between a John Bryce course and a marketing talk. I now know that ESQL exists and that the lead developer is excited about it, but also that he is indifferent, if not ignorant, of HQL. I also know how to use Grouping Sets and MERGE statements in SQL Server 2008, which means I don't have to spend the half-hour to learn it myself. Yay.
I'm not saying that the other tracks had nothing but bad sessions; it's just that to me, they had far less value than most of the sessions in the agile track, because they were mostly one-way: speaker to audience. I can imitate this one-way flow of information myself using the internet. It's far harder to imitate a discussion.

Off to DevTeach

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 18:39:00 GMT

Everything's (almost) done. Tomorrow I'll be on my way to DevTeach Vancouver. May this be the first in a series of many professional trips around the world*.

I'll try to post from there, but, lacking a laptop with which to take advantage of the free WiFi coverage, that might prove difficult. Don't feel bad, it would all have been boring techy stuff anyway.

At any rate, I'll be back on December's 2nd. See you on the other side!

[*] In this text, the term "world" refers to "Europe, the US and Canada". I'm not planning on attending any software development event in Goa or Manaly.

Information R/evolution

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 21:44:02 GMT

Michael Wesch, the guy who made "The Machine Is Us/ing Us", has another short video about organizing information in the internet era.

So yes, it's a little too faltzy, but it stresses some points the importance of which we might have missed when we were too busy experiencing them in our daily life. Take, for example, the decline of categories in favor of tags. It's not just a web 2.0 buzz thing. There's a world of difference in the way we organize and find information on the internet as opposed to what was before. And that difference is a platform.

Anyway, this just makes me that much more aware of how special this time is. There's a revolution happening right here, right now, and we're fortunate enough to witness the world as it changes around us. We can see the future literally taking shape before our eyes, and that should not be underestimated.

Open For Business - Law and Creativity in the Internet Age

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 20:18:58 GMT

Larry Lessig speaks about the relation between law and creativity, the remix culture, and many of the interesting facets of the internet era as it affects copyright and related issues.
A very interesting talk, with a very effective presentation. It's called "Open for Business" and it's on TED, which I think I'm gonna explore a little further, having seen at least three interesting links to it in the past two days.

Currently Cool: Amateur Lip-Dub Video Clips

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:37:41 GMT

I want friends like these. This seems like so much fun. Reminds me of that "Flagpole Sitta" video.

GarageGeeks Music Workshop #1

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:20:53 GMT

The GarageGeeks Music Workshop was... different. And awesome. Lots of people, lots of computers and music equipment, all wired together in a giant jam session. A social dream come true. And, at times, a musical nightmare :)

The heart of the jam was Abelton Live. That piece of software can sync anything - samples, loops, live recordings, MIDI instruments, or live feeds from other computers doing all of the above - into a coherent stream of bars and beats. It adds effects. It does timestretching. It records digital and analog input. It does all of this live, without missing a beat. Throw in over a thousand samples and loops, a saxophone, a harmonica, an accordion and a broken marching snare drum with a rubber band (and krembos gallore!), and you got yourself some interesting sounds.

Technology aside, though, a jam session is still a jam session. You have to listen to the others, and know when to be silent. You have to give lots of room for the group rather than imposing your own solo. That didn't work out as well, though it got better as the night progressed. Some people were dedicated to the music, and some only wanted to joke around. When the latters left, the formers made some pretty good stuff.

I gave up pretty early since the harmonica really didn't go too well with the rest, but I still enjoyed it very much and came back for some lightweight keyboard action later on.

The one thing we lacked there was coordination. This was partially amended by introducing a prompter who cued participants in and out, which helped some, but there's still a long way to go.
I expect the next music workshop will come with some predefined "games", the rules of which would govern the process and guard against cacophony. One example could be to try something akin to John Zorn's Cobra game, only in a loopy, digital form. Guaranteed to be interesting.

Boo 0.8 is out

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 21:55:51 GMT

Boo 0.8 is out. I didn't really get anything done for this version (bad Avish!), but it's awesome nevertheless. In particular, this release improves on the powerful meta-programming capabilities of the language. Simply put, you can write code that modifies your code. That makes "extensible" an uber-understatement.

Also new is a JVM backend for Boo, so that now you can write either .NET or Java programs with it (see here for example).

Unfortunately, the problem with Boo is that the documentation is always lacking, so I can't link to any formal page on the new features. Just believe me when I say that it rocks.

Currently Cooler: DrumPants

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:34:50 GMT

DrumPants let you play the drums by stomping your feet and tapping on your thighs - a skill I've been perfecting for quite some time now for just such an occasion.

To summarize: DO WANT!

(Linkage via BoingBoing)