A discussion about portrait lenses in Tapuz photography forum

See my contribution there at http://www.tapuz.co.il/tapuzforum/main/Viewmsg.asp?forum=809&msgid=96810724

Noa and Yuval (and parents) visiting

Nadel family: my sister, Ruth, my brother in law, Shai, and the kids: Yuval and Noa came for a visit.

We spent the morning in Alexander stream (נחל אלכסנדר)

We spent the morning in Alexander stream (נחל אלכסנדר). The kids had fun.
The reservation looks great and we only saw very little of it by the time the kids got tired.

The location is very close to our home and we intend to visit there more in the future.

New Meltzer Catalog

I bought the new Meltzer catalog. This is a new revision to the catalog that they published a few years ago. There are a lot more new plants listed, more information, and more indices.

A day at פארק לכיש in Ashdod

We though of visiting a buffalo diary but the place was closed. Wishing for a good time with the kids we drove to the nearby Ashdod and spent the day in Lachish Park (Park Laki$ -- פארק לכיש).

The place was indeed fun for the kids. Here are a few photos from our day there:

Passover 2007

The dinner of Passover evening was held this year at my parents in law's house. It was a happy event, and the kids had fun.

A "candy train" birthday cake

Ruth, my sister, and Aviv's aunt, prepared a train, or a candy train cake for Aviv's birthday party.

A soccer game birthday cake

We celebrated today (this is the third time in the last 2-3 weeks: first time was at my parents' home, second time in the kindergarden and this is the third) Aviv's 6th birthday, by inviting over to our house family members.

Here's a birthday cake with a soccer theme.

New pictures from a morning in the National Park in Ramat-Gan

I spent this morning with my mother and my youngest son, Nir, at the national park in Ramat-Gan. We went there due to a gathering of participants of Tapuz's gardening forum.

Here's my post with many pictures, at the forum: http://www.tapuz.co.il/tapuzforum/main/Viewmsg.asp?forum=465&msgid=95914106

New patent submission

I just submitted a new patent idea at work. It describes a pattern matching engine that I designed and implemented for signature based negative security (i.e., signature based IDS/IPS). The engine is useful in cases where one needs to match a large (possibly even a very large) number of matching rules against data, for example be used in lexical analyzers or parsers, or other information extraction tools.

Let's see when the patent committee discusses the idea.

Multiple possible root elements in XML Schema validation

I posted to xml-dev that validation of an XML document against an XML Schema allows more than one root element to the document when there are global element definitions in the schema.

This was confirmed and the relevant standard text was quoted by repliers.

See: [link to post is not yet available in the online archives]

Google Reader

A few weeks ago a friend of mine at work showed me how he reads things using the Google Reader. From then on my life is not the same :-)

I gradually find more bloggers that I enjoy reading and I like it!

I started to do daily reads on XML technology, math, science, open source software, linguistics, data mining and other interesting things.

xsd:any and xsd:anyType mish-mash

I posted some questions related to xsd:anyType on the xml-dev mailing list. See: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200703/msg00159.html