Whee, I’ve made my first bitstrip

I heard of bitstrips.com, a site that lets you easily generate your own comic strips a while ago, and now I’ve found some time to try it out.

Enjoy my first strip!

Nice EscapePod today, awsome closing music

As I usually do, I enjoyed this week’s installment of EscapePod, the story, as they typically are, was good, but what really made my joy levels rise was the inspiring closing music, “I Feel Fantastic” by Jonathan Coulton.

I’m not a real fan of Coulton, while I find his lyrics imaginative, they typically strike me as childish, and his music style is not really in line with my typical preferences in music. “I Feel Fantastic”, however, seems to be an exception, its a smart and funny song, the music placing you in a comfortable, happy and joyous atmosphere while the lyrics drive cynical arrows through your heart.

Well done. I enjoyed this.

Oracle RAC/Linux/ASM forum convention

I’ve spent Wednesday afternoon at ilOUG‘s RAC/Linux/ASM forum convention held at the Hilton Tel-Aviv hotel.

Without naming names, I must say that that overall, the level of lectures was so low to be embarrassing.

While the lecture material itself was interesting enough so that even an experienced user of the RAC, Linux and ASM technologies such as myself could learn a few new tricks, the manner in which the lectures were given was poor indeed.

Happy clock change day

For those of you who aren’t from the vicinity of my locale, I should mention that here, in Israel, we shifted the clocks to DST tonight.

DST rules in Israel being the hodge-podge they are, a clock shift is always a mess, especially since historical operating system bugs have made the ill-advised habit of manually shifting the system clocks rather then adjusting the time-zone or having it automatically adjusted using a zoneinfo file take hold.

Having had to stay up all night to fix problems essentially caused inadequate planning and testing made me realize once more just how crucial planning really is.

Needless to say, that in systems where proper planning was done, the clock shift was performed quickly, easily and efficiently.

Israel rebukes US: Our copyright laws are fine, thanks

WOW. This really doesn’t happen often, but sometimes my country really makes me proud.

Anime and Debian

Every once in a while, looking though my blog stats, I find some very weird searches hitting my blog, of the kind I cannot ignore (And therefore strive to ensure they keep hitting my blog), Today I found just such a search: “anime debian”.

Anime and Debian, hmm… unless I am failing to see a different meaning for the word Debian, this is indeed a weird combination, I can’t possibly think what the person who conducted the search expected it to yield.

It does ring a certain bell, I did remember seeing a picture of Debian-tan once, which is part if the “Linux-tan” series of characters, which is an attempt at a Linux-based response to the OS-tans.

Blogs and Internet

While I do not wish to put the wind out of Salo’s sails, I haven’t much positive things to say about his recent post, nevertheless, since he touches upon issues that are close to me heart I can’t avoid pingbacking it.

The core of my contention with his post, is that what seems to be the gist of it, e.g. blogs influencing politics and traditional media, isn’t news. Also, the idea that not the media nor “the people in power” know best should be clear to any citizen of a democratic state.

It is interesting to note that similar issues to those he mentions, e.g. state-mandated censorship of internet pornographic material and copyright laws, are being discussed now days in Israel as well. On a personal note I should probably find the way to become better informed of the public debate of those issues in Israel.

Terminator: Nice tool – huge potential

I’m quite pleased and impressed with Terminator, a tool to allow splitting a single window into multiple terminal windows.

I’m pleased with the existence of Terminator for a few reasons, the first of which is that it almost fits the bill of something I’ve been looking for for a while. In my day-to-day work I often find myself having to monitor a system by tailing a few log files at once. The way I’ve achieved this so far was by writing a script to open up multiple GNOME Terminal windows, each tailing a different log file, and position them around the desktop using the “–geometry” parameter, however, the whole construct, being built out of several unrelated windows is difficult to move around the desktop, minimize, and takes way too much space in the task bar.

Another reason for me to be pleased with Terminator is the fact that it is implemented with Python, this gives me the hope that while currently Terminator lacks a few features I need in order to use if for my purpose, I may be able to add those features in a timely manner.

Fantasy and Reality convention: Day 2

Since I pretty much enjoyed myself yesterday, I decided to go ahead and attent the second day of the Fantasy and Reality convention at the Haifa University.

I was quite pleased with the way the first day was organized, therefore I was quite disappointed to realize that today they decided to take a similar route that other conventions take and have multiple lectures taking place side-by-side rather then stick with the first day’s format of having only one lecture going on at a time.

Fantasy and Reality convention: Day 1

I’ve spent my day today attending the Fantasy and Reality convention at the Haifa University, I must say it was quite interesting and joyful.

The convention is composed of a series of lectures by various speakers as well as a marathon of fantasy movies projected in a hall nearby.

Since I’ve already seem all the movies projected (The Never Ending Story, Blade Runner, Disney’s Fantasia and The Fifth Element) and movies being a mere download away, I attended the lectures instead.