[written last night]

0300 AM, and I'm sprawled in the living room, watching Eminem's 8 Mile movie on DVD, sporadically hitting the keys on hydra the faithful laptop. My kingdom for wireless right now. Being offline, even for a minute, feels disconnected. Maybe I'm just afraid of being alone?

I've been fascinated with money and the process by which it is accumulated lately. On Sunday, I opened up a 15 years pension fund (Kupat Gemel) for the tax benefits. Today, I signed up on Analyst Online and created a virtual stock portfolio, for training purposes. I invested 30,000 virtual NIS so far, and intend to put in 70,000 virtual NIS more. Investing is real easy when it's make believe money and there's no risk involved. So far, after two hours of trading today, my net worth is up 1.72%. Woot! Unfortunately, I can't attribute it to anything except dumb luck as I don't know the first thing about the stock market. Orna lent me a book on the subject today and I expect the situation to be rectified by the start of trading on Sunday.

panther:



Mac OX 10.3 is quite nice. Exposé is actually really keen, and the OS now comes with vim(1) (versus vi(1)).



Also, this is really sweet. I would like to play with it under Linux. If you could defer the copy as part of the usual dirtied writeback, you may be able to really mitigate the overhead. Especially if the file is written to (i.e., dirtied anyhow). Interesting idea, if nothing else.

The certification bizarreness continues; I can
certify a Master no problem, but multiple certs of Apprentice by several Masters is still completely ignored. Looks utterly b0rked to me.

Amnon Barak, of MOSIX fame, will give a seminar at HRL next Tuesday, on Management Systems for Clusters and Grids. The abstract is also attached below for your convenience. I can hardly wait...

This talk is about software management systems for clusters and grids. Such systems consist of algorithms, that use system-wide feedback to optimize some operations e.g. cache management; and mechanisms which respond to explicit user's requests, without using such feedback. Traditionally, single node (including SMPs) management is done by the operating system (and the hardware), which in turn consist mostly of mechanisms.

Erez Hadad, a Ph.D. candidate in the Technion and all around good guy, will give a talk on the O(1) scheduler at the next Linux Study Group meeting at HRL. Do I have a talent for recruiting interesting speakers or what? ;-)

Went out jogging again this morning. Yay! I have a couple of things to post about here, let's see if I remember...

Wondering down the hall, trying to clear my head of the fugly code I'm rewriting at the moment, I happened to enter the library. Behold the treasures I found:

- One copy of Rochkind's Advanced Unix Programming.
- One copy of Kernighan's and Pike's The Unix Programming Environment.

First, a package was waiting at the post office: Joe Haldeman's Forever Free, courtesy of shapirac and omerm.

The last part of my morning workout (based on The Hacker's Diet) is running in place. Running in place is boring. Today I went out jogging in the neighborhood instead, for the first time. I've been terrified of doing this and seeing just how much out of shape I am.

Mental note: reading[1] about superstar hackers[2] who flunked classes[3] and couldn't care less[4] during a break in class[5] does NOT contribute to one's productivity in said class.

[1] Steven Levy's Hackers, which I have both in book form and electronic form and read over and over the way some people read the bible.
[2] Ricky Greenblatt.
[3] At MIT, no less.
[4] "He was placed on academic probation, and his mother came to Massachusetts to confer with the dean. There was some explaining to do. "His mom was concerned," his roommate Beeler would later say. "Her idea was that he was here to get a degree. But the things he was doing on the computer were completely state-of-the-art no one was doing them yet. He saw additional things to be done. It was very difficult to get excited about classes." To Greenblatt, it wasn't really important that he was in danger of flunking out of college. Hacking was paramount: it was what he did best and what made him happiest. His worst moment came when he was so "out of phase" that he slept past a final exam[6]. It only hastened his exit from the student body of MIT."

adb of Scary Devil Monastery fame has his notes from OLS 2003 up. In the entire conference, we only attended the same talk once.

Although reading selected documentation from 2.6's Documentation/* is not exactly the best thing for one's digestion. Also, there were chocolate thingies I crave for desert. I had a banana instead.

The program I was going to use to debug the hardware uses the exact same mechanism that's broken and needs debugging. Royal suckage.

I'm sick and miserable. You may leave appropriately sympathizing comments, if you insist.

On the plus side, I lost almost three kilograms since Saturday evening, and am getting used to the constant hunger. Yay for diets (not!), yay for getting fit (this one for real).

Also on the plus side, I'm reading King's reissued edition of The Gunslinger, in preperation for volumes 5, 6 and 7 of The Dark Tower.

I just spent a few hours researching which Pension Fund ("Kupat Gemel") I should invest in this year. I settled on number 548 (no link due to Ministry of Finance website b0rkedness), which had the highest gross return on investment of the funds managed by banks last year. A trip to the bank is in order on Sunday.