Uri Gellers meets modern cryptography
This has been making rounds on the ‘net all day - hope you enjoy it… 
Personal
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Well,
Haven’t written here in a while…
Finishing off my cs degree was time consuming, and while exams where going on I started working…
I’m now in a very nice company in Har Hotzvim doing embedded development and lots of other cool stuff.
I’ve been writing quite a bit of C++, Python and looking at the odd disassembly - interesting stuff…
I’ll write some more in (hopefully) a little while…
Title is from: http://www.radgametools.com/gramain.htm
Looking for a job right now, found these sites to be useful for interview questions:
http://maxnoy.com/interviews.html
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/techinterview/
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=976998
The interesting thing is, that nearly all the places I sent my resume to asked for my grades (never thought anyone would care about those). This is weird since I’ve got quite a bit of work experience behind me… One place even asked for my psychometric scores 
At any rate, it looks like the job market is really good in Israel now, with lots of companies doing really interesting things.
Some things I was asked in Interviews that I didn’t know: Cache coherency, Priority Inversion, Differences between floating point results when compiling in debug and release code on Intel CPUs.
The first two can be found easily on Wikipedia - the last one has to do with the fact that Intel CPUs use 80 bit precision for FP registers, but when you write the values out to RAM they’re stored as floats or doubles (precision is cut off). When you compile in Release and debug modes, instruction order can be switched around causing FP values to be written back and read from RAM in different orders so precision is cut off at different stages leaving us with different results - neat ‘eh…
Wishing everyone a great Passover vacation!!!
Well, the semester has started - [knock on wood] positively…
Doing theory of computation (חישוביות), Switching Systems, OS, and the advanced gfx course this semester.
Computation is awesome, Orna is an amazing lecturer and the course text is really fun to read.
The advanced graphics course is similarly amazing - we talked about Morphing in the first lecture, and have now moved on to cloth simulation - turns out having a background in physics can be helpful in CS at times…
Apart from that, been playing around with cocoa quite a bit recently - its one of the most enjoyable programming environments I’ve encountered to date. Very elegant, very mature, and most importantly - fun to develop for…
Also, set up an Ubuntu box with on old iMac someone gave me. Thought it might not be the most hardcore h4X0r linux distribution, Ubuntu “gets the job done” - it’s up to date, stable and things just work. which is something that has been a bit lacking in other distros I’ve tried…
In between studying for IMPR and DB, I’ve snuck in a little time to take a peak at some interesting technologies I’ve been dying to try for a while.
The first is Ruby On Rails - it’s enough to just see the screencast (and try not to laugh at the neat European accent) to understand what this can do [and is doing] to web development.
The Second is XCode - Apple’s development environment, which frankly just blew me away.
After building a functional webbrowser in 5 minutes, and seeing how easilly live comunication between objects is, just makes my head swim…
Sure you can do some of the same things trivially in VB and the like - but this is a full blown C/C++/Objective C environment - you can write real, fast production code with this.
Sheesh, maybe I’ll get some more time to play over the weekend
Only 2 more exams to go!! (and still no grades from the 3 I’ve taken so far).
Graphics was really fun to study for - I highly recommend the course, I think I’m going to try to do the advanced course next semester (I hope I have enough time).
This year’s Algo exam was probably the easiest one in known memory; though having only 3 days to study for it after graphics wasn’t really enough…
Had a review lesson for DB today - usually these are a waste of time, but Gidi and Aron (the TAs) did an admirable job of preparing themselves beforehand and actually went over allot of relevant material and tried to explain how we should answer questions on the exam.
In other news, I just took another look at MIT’s OpenCourseWare site and they have some more lectures by Walter Lewin - cool! Even if you’re not into Physics, this is definitely worth a peak - this guy shows how university classes should be taught…
I wonder if HUJI will ever have its own open courseware program…
Good luck to all!
Just wanted to wish everyone a really great [civilian] new year
Went out last night - I think this was the first time I actually enjoyed myself on new years eve. I was at the Syndrome, which quite surprisingly wasn’t packed full - and there was a really great Reggae band playing
Things are starting to come together now towards the end of the semester, I hope the exam season goes well…
As to the courses I’m taking:
- Algorithms has been super, Alex is a really good lecturer and the exercises, although time consuming definitely help understanding the material.
- Computer Graphics is probably the single best course I’m taking this semester. The exercises are simply amazing, and showing off a spinning 3d object in opengl, you created yourself is a blast…
- Image Processing also gets high marks - The only downside is that the exercises [for me at least] are incredibly time consuming. On the plus side, the material we’re learning is definitely non-trivial and is immensely interesting. Extra high marks for Yael the TA who actually comes to the lectures and gives, hands-down best TA sessions of anyone this semester.
- DB has some remarkably good TAs, the only gripe I have with the course is the fact they keep publishing illegible exercises. For example the first exercise they gave assumed knowledge of stock market terminology without explaining any of it - guys… This is a CS degree…
In general it might be a good idea for one of the TAs to write the exercises and the other one to try to solve them - any questions he has to ask the other one need to be clarified in the exercise…
For example, they gave an exercise in JDBC a couple of weeks ago in which they didn’t specify the string needed to connect to the Oracle server anywhere - ???
-
Logic - This course needs a new TA, who actually knows whats going on in the lectures. Up to now the exercises have been completely disjoint in regards to the class material - I have a feeling this has more to do with the TA not communicating with the lecturer than anything else.
In other news:
- SVG has landed in Firefox, and someone has created an implementation of Canvas in Explorer - this is absolutely awesome!
- Wordpress 2.0 with AJAX support has been released!!
Well, it seems that some of the software I mentioned in my last post has actually been installed on the Ross computers (although this most probably has nothing to do with it being mentioned here).
Acrobat 7 is installed by default, and Firefox 1.0.6 is available from the command line:
firefox &
It’s still a bit early for any conclusive remarks, but I’m really excited about this year. I found the first week to actually be quite interesting, although I was sure that at least some of the courses would be a bit “gray”.
Algorithms is especially surprising, as the lecturer is both very clear, and appears to be a really nice guy…
I’m also doing Graphics and Image Processing, which both, as expected are amazing - The literature on the subject can be a bit “grey” at times, but both lecturers seem to enjoy teaching the subjects, and the first exercises are especially interesting…
Its also nice to finally dabble a bit in OpenGL
Link[s]:
- Dina’s notes for this year
Who voted for this guy anyway?
A moment before the new academic school year starts, heres my wish-list, some of these may already be done - if so kudos to the relevant parties:
- Campus-Wide WiFi - Wifi coverage is already present in the libraries and in the Ross building, but Wifi access in the lecture halls and on the lawns is sorely lacking. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could look up relevant research on the web during a lecture or check our mail from the grass outside Shprintzak?
- Standard Compliant Websites - UNIX and Mac users can’t sign up for courses or even browse the shnaton (!! - search function doesn’t work) this year due to poor standard compliance in some parts of the University’s web-presence which only works in Internet Explorer. In a perfect world, the University would require that all web pages be standard compliant and work at least in Firefox. The real pity is that it appears this would be very easy to fix - as from a quick look at the code for these sites, most of the problems seem to stem from use of the document.all property.
- Install Firefox, Thunderbird and an updated version of Acrobat in Ross - last year at least, the default web browser on the Ross computers was an antiquated version of Mozilla. It would be nice if someone went about installing a modern version of Firefox and thunderbird. The recent builds are much faster, more compatible, and definitely more stable than the older versions of Mozilla.
- RSS on course websites - It would be nice if instead of checking email lists, nntp news groups and course websites we could simply use our RSS readers to subscribe to each courses website and automatically be notified of new announcements/exercises. This could be easilly achieved with minimal effort using Wordpress or one of a myriad of other blogging tools. Of course it would require the TAs to become familiar with the relevant software, but that seems a small price to pay for the improved functionality.
Well for reasons of brevity, thats my list. Overall I’m very happy at HUJI, to date the experience has been much better than I thought university would be. The CS secretaries have also proved to be super, and where of great help whenever I needed anything.
Wishing everyone a very successful and enjoyable new year.
Nachla’ot - it’s like living in a bloody village
I’m looking for a new place to live. I currently live in a really wonderful apartment in Nachla’ot which I love dearly (close to the university and the machneh yehuda market, great/weird neighbors, etc.), but I’m moving in with my gf so we need a bigger place…
Saw an add that caught my eye on one of the online boards this afternoon for an apartment really close by. Chatted with the guy on the phone and was over there in a matter of 3 minutes.
Here’s the kicker - the present tenant is a friend of a friend (and from here the village reference)…
Apart from that, it turns out that it’s the height of apartment hunting season at the moment. When I came in to see the apartment, there was already someone there (they add had only been put on the net this morning).
I took the landlords number shortly after and phoned him up, turns out the guy who was there before me closed with him 5 minutes beforehand…
Oh well… If anyone hears of a 2 room apartment in Nachla’ot that’s freeing up in the start of October for around $500 (preferably less), I’d really appreciate a heads-up… (oh, and one more thing, the loo has to be inside the house, and the roof has to not leak, thanks )
