Kermit@CS

A little bird told me that this hint containing a script that eases editing Latex under OSX with gvim comes from inside HUJI.

Now all we need is for whoever writes websites in the university to start respecting web standards (a whole lot of the public HUJI websites don’t work unless your using Internet Explorer on the PC, Leaving Firefox and Safari users out in the cold), and things will be much better…

Nice work Mitmit!!

Well, another milestone has passed us - moadey aleph are finally out of the way (hopefully for the best)
and we’re now in full moed bet swing [which will hopefully end in time for an actual summer vacation…].

Seems there are still people with energy to do things other than study in Giv’at Ram and a neat example
is one physics student who wrote up a WikiBook guide for students in Giv’at Ram. It’s an entertaining
read and being part of a wiki, it’s a “living” document - meaning anyone can add or correct information.

It already contains lots of useful and entertaining info, and I hope more people will add their own content
to make it even better.

For some reason, I don’t think this is what the next Knuth book is going to look like:

Some worthwhile links:

• A very insightful writeup on software design - written on a PERL oriented website, but the advice is solid and most of it is very relevant to software development in general.
• Simply entertaining

Apparently, this Wednesday, theres gonna be an end of year bash on Campus (involving Jazz, and beer, or something to that effect)…

Major kudos to the new Student union for putting things together I’m glad that signs of them doing something have started to appear…

Well, guess we’ll just have to wait and hope that this all holds up…

In the meantime, some quickies:

• Just got a universal (25 in 1) memory card reader [where did all those formats come from??]. I’m really happy with it so far, and it’s much faster than copying files back and forth through the camera. Also, a steal for 60 Shequels including shipping(more basic models where going for over NIS 100 in local computer stores [bandits?] I checked out).
• Straight out of the Hitchiker’s Guide - Singing Dumpsters.
• Ajax on Rails - Extremely cool, especially the file upload indicator part…
• Lemmings in DHTML - wowzers!

First off, some stuff from the web:

• Hell has officially frozen over.
• If you’ve been hiding under a rock since Pesach…

Now on to our regularly scheduled blogging:

I was planning to write about the subject a little later on, but as current events dictate - here goes:

Google has started, what they refer to as the “Summer Of Code“, in which they’re giving a scholarship of $4500 to students who partake in open source software development during the summer.

Apart from the prestige of having a google reference in your resume, (and getting payed of course), this is a really great opportunity to get a leg up on the Open Source world and write some cool software!

The benefits to be reaped from such an endeavor are immense. Getting down and dirty with source control and real world program design is very different to the “clean room” environment we’re presented with in the lecture hall.

We are also in the unique position as CSE students, to be part of a relatively small community of Hebrew Speakers. Although contemporary software handles hebrew much better than a few years ago, there is still much to be done in this regard, especially in the Open Source world.

It’s no longer big things like writing a word processor to support RTL text input, or implementing hebrew encoding from the ground up. In most cases the basic groundwork is in place, but software developers lack either the knowledge, or the motivation to implement Hebrew support properly.

Although Google already provides a list of open source projects inviting contributions, and a list of features they’d like to be implemented, it’s be great if some of us got to working on some Hebrew related software. Some possible projects:

* Fix some of the bugs that Firefox (gecko) has with BIDI.
* Add “re-type” functionality to Linux or MacOS (i.e. lets say you typed some text in as Hebrew, but forgot to switch to the hebrew script - automatically retype the last text block inputted in the script you meant - Hebrew [or English]).
* A program to allow sending and reading Hebrew Email through any web browser (whether the host OS supports Hebrew or not) - many backpackers in south America and their parents will thank you dearly!

Full details are on Google’s site, in order to participate your going to need a mentoring organization (who also get $500 for t efforts).

Some useful links:
* Fribidi
* Open source hebrew spell checker