Saturday, August 25, 2007

זחל פרפר זנב הסנונית




קניתי כמה שתילים קטנים בכמה שקלים של צמח הפיגם, כשהמטרה היחידה היתה למשוך פרפרי זנב הסנונית להטיל ביצים על הצמח, כדי להנות מצפייה בזחלים היפייפיים ובתקווה גם בפרפרים.

כבר היו לנו כמה וכמה זחלים, ועד כה אף לא אחד מהם זכה להגיע לשלב הגולם, כי תמיד ציפורים סעדו בהם את ליבן.

הערב החלטתי לצאת לחצר ולצלם את אחד הזחלים. ככה למזכרת.

אביב וסיון מתלהבים מאד, ובודקים מידי יום את מצב הזחלים על כל צמח פיגם.

הרקע נראה לי מעט משעמם, אז לקחתי עציצון קטנטןן שבו צומח צמח ה ניצנית שלו פרחים אדומים וגם הוספתי לרקע פרח גאורה קיפחת. לדעתי יצא יפה.

את התמונה האחרונה צילם אביב. הוא בחר גם את זוית הצילום, סידר את הפוקוס, ובחר את הקומפוזיציה. אני אב גאה!

פרטים טכניים על הצילומים:

ציוד:

  • EOS Digital Rebel XT (a.k.a. 350D)
  • Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L Macro USM
  • Canon 72mm 500D Close-up Lens
התאורה: אור טבעי

השתמשתי בחצובה

f/32, ISO 100, sometimes using manual focus and sometimes auto-focus at 48cm.

משך הצילום נע בין שנייה לבין 8 שניות

The piano-man

Nir on the piano

Monday, August 20, 2007

References to My Lingua::EN::Sentence Perl module in books and academic papers

My Lingua::EN::Sentence Perl module was mentioned in two books, according to google book search. One of them is Advanced Perl Programming (the second edition by Simon Cozens) and the other is Le Poids des mots: : JADT 2004.

According to a search in google scholar, there are dozens of academic papers that report usage of the module.

The above evidence agrees with the dozens of emails that I got from various commercial companies, researchers, research institutes and individuals that reports using the module and were inquiring about it.

The only references to the Hebrew version of the same module, Lingua::HE::Sentence are from my own research papers.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Some pictures of the kids from today

Location: our back yard.
Camera: EOS Digital Rebel XT (a.k.a. 350D) 8.0 Megapixel
Lense: Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM (mostly at 10mm at f/8 or f/4)
Illumination: natural evening light + 2/3 stop overexposure.

Full series is available at: http://yeda.cs.technion.ac.il/~yona/aviv/2007/8.2007/index.html






Saturday, August 11, 2007

Interesting commentary on "how am I driving?" stickers

A very interesting, funny and to-the-point commentary on the "how am I driving?" stickers in Israel by עידו קינן in his Room404 blog. See: http://room404.net/?p=11869

אני מזדהה מאד עם הציניות המועלית ע"י עידו קינן. מצער שמשטרת ישראל לא מסוגלת להתמודד עם אכיפה והרתעה יעילים בכבישים והפתרונות מגיעים למנגנוניים כאלה.

I broke my left albow yesterday

Yesterday morning, while helping Aviv master his new skill of riding a bicycle without aid-wheels, he suddenly stopped and I found myself thrown up and away above him just to fall on my left arm.

Damages: one broken elbow.

Fortunately, the injury has been classified by the ER doctor as mild and no surgical intervention or cast is needed. I got the arm in bandages and some medication and was sent home with a week's worth of sick leave and an invitation for a follow up.

This elbow injury is very painful, I'll tell you! I spend all night trying to find a position where there's no stress on the painful arm, but failed. I got up this morning cranky and nervous...

Hopefully, the pain and problems will go away in a matter of days/weeks

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Humus blog חומוס בלוג

A blog on Humus: humus101.com בלוג על חומוס

zoominfo profile

I have a zoominfo profile -- the nice thing is how the information I input was augmented automatically from other sources.

Bad luck with orders from Amazon.com

I run into some bad luck with a few orders I made from amazon. Since May I was not able to get them. The orders were re-ordered since after the arrival time was long overdue, and still did not arrive yet (which is yet again long overdue).

Amazon did not give me any trouble and refund the money in full. I'm very happy with that.

Now I need to think where from to order the books or perhaps to give Amazon another try, but use a "door-to-door" delivery using DHL/UPS to increase chances that my books don't get lost in the way.

Functional Programming ponders

I first encountered functional programming in an academic course that I took in my undergraduate studies for a B.Sc. in computer and software engineering at the Technion. The course name was Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (044261). It is no incident that this name is the name of a very popular and successful book: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (mit press). This book given an introduction to programming using the functional language Scheme. The authors, Abelson and the Sussmans, goal as they put it in the preface to the first edition of their book:

"Our goal is that students who complete this subject should have a good feel for the elements of style and the aesthetics of programming. They should have command of the major techniques for controlling complexity in a large system. They should be capable of reading a 50-page-long program, if it is written in an exemplary style. They should know what not to read, and what they need not understand at any moment. They should feel secure about modifying a program, retaining the spirit and style of the original author."

I truely enjoyed reading this book, enjoyed the course and learned a lot from the assignments given in this course. Since then I wanted many times to be able to re-read the book cover-to-cover, and not just the needed material for the current assignment in the course, enjoy and learn in detail and complete all exercises. I didn't get to do it so far... unfortunately.

The next encounter was reading MDJ's material on closures in Perl, and the material on it in the perldoc and Perl literature. A few years later, MJD released his Higher Order Perl book, which delved into the functional programming aspect of Perl programming in greater detail, and actually suggested a consideration of functional programming approach to some of the problems people solve, and showed and explained how these can be done in Perl. I did get to read this book cover to cover. I did attempt to solve myself the problems raised in this book and got to do it. The process was indeed rewarding. Check out the book review on HOP that I wrote on Amazon.

A few months ago I got to know Zohar Kelrich, who infected me with a need to understand, learn and use Haskell. This actually was after I heard some other Israeli Perl Mongers, such as Yuval Kogman, Yuval Yaari and Gabor Szabo mention Haskell, its potential and its usage in implementing Perl 6. As much as Haskell gets good marks as powerful programming language, I found the available online material on it very hard for me. I still don't consider myself Haskell literate.

So I decided to focus my Functional Programming education efforts on Scheme, get good understanding, then try to apply my knowledge in Perl and then only when I have solid ground dive back into Haskell.

Here are some items from a book order I am going to post later on today:
I intend to find the time and read all these cover to cover, do all exercises and understand scheme enough to be able to:
  1. compare Scheme with Haskell (which should be useful once I understand Scheme in full -- this should be more practical, I think, than comparing Haskell to Perl). I hope that the process will give me enough insight and understanding that will help me progress and advance my understanding in functional programming
  2. Apply schema-like and functional programming practices and ideas into my Perl and C programming.
  3. Hopefully this process will allow me to come up with interesting and useful designs and develop a yet more open mind that will lead me to more good ideas in solving problems at work.
A (too) few ideas (I'm afraid) that I am using from Functional Programming are:
  • Closures
  • Functions as data (including functions as arguments and as return data)
  • Recursion
  • Divide and Conquer
A few ideas (that I know by name to be able to list them...) that I tried to understand but was not able to do it successfully yet are:
  • monads
  • continuations
  • type-systems (I'm not sure that this necessarily applies to functional programming, but I did find this to be key in Haskell)
There are, I'm sure, a lot more ideas in Functional Programming that I don't even know to name, and once I get some more understanding and practice, will, hopefully become accessible to me.