NIST announces competition for new cryptographic hash algorithm

NIST announces competition for new cryptographic hash algorithm. This sounds like a nice opportunity to go public with ideas you have for a new cryptographic hash function.
See: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/012307-nist-cryptographic-algorithm.html

A nice introduction to Finite-State Automata and Regular Expression with Critique about Regular Expression Engines' implementations

Russ Cox explains and demonstrates how good old theory put to practice results in good computer programs while ignoring good theory leads to bad programs.

See: Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast (but is slow in Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, ...) by Russ Cox


His regexp page contains more interesting information and implementations.

Weekly sys-admin tips for Linux and Windows

Martin Kroser, a friend of mine, opened a blog with weekly sys-admin tricks for Windows and Linux. See: http://windowsandlinuxweeklytips.blogspot.com/

I announced the February meeting of the Israel.pm (Israeli Perl Mongers).
See: http://perl.org.il/pipermail/perl/2007-January/008376.html

I just added a few new books reviews on Amazon

Check out my book reviews on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A10UA4V0Z4691N/ref=cm_pdp_reviews_see_all/002-1178222-6558416

Nice article about how to auto-test web applications for security

http://www.net-security.org/dl/articles/Crawling_Ajax_driven_Web_2.0.pdf

My profiles over the Internet

Amazon
Linkedin
CPAN
Flickr
BlogSpot
Tapuz

Gnosis -- a cool addon plugin for FireFox

From the documentation of the Gnosis plugin:

"With a single click, Gnosis will identify the people, companies, organizations, geographies and products on the page you are viewing."

Check out:ClearForest Gnosis

Companies involved in Natural Language Processing in Israel

Here are some companies that are involved in Natural Language Processing in Israel:

* Ligature Ltd
* Linguistic Agents Ltd
* infoneto
* peer39
* Semingo
* Information Retrieval Group at the IBM Haifa Research Labs
* Knowledge Center for Processing Hebrew, Technion, ITT.
* The Pudding
* ClearForest
* PureSight
* Topixa
* Targetize
* internative
* 2001
* Wizsoft
* Activepoint
* Holtran
* Idioma
* Persay
* Celebros
* Nielsen BuzzMetrics
* Melingo
* Invoke
* Nuance
* Effective-i
* Quigo
* Intuview
* Answers.com
* Pidgin
* Babylon
* Google
* Mercado
* White Smoke
* CubeEffect

My 2006 פדיחה is in the Semi-finals

Check out: תחרות הפאדיחה - חצי גמר 1

New books that I ordered

I ordered a few books from Amazon:

• Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (2nd Edition)
• Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation
• Optimizing Compilers for Modern Architectures: A Dependence-based Approach
• Querying XML, : XQuery, XPath, and SQL/XML in context (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
  

How to transliterate Hebrew in Latin script?

Have you ever had a chance to see how road signs, street signs and Hebrew text (e.g., Hebrew names) in Israel are represented in Latin Script?

If so, you probably know that there is a problem because there is more than one way to represent the Hebrew text in Latin script.

Should the city פתח-תקוה be transliterated into Petach-Tiquwa or into Ptax-Tiqwa or into Petah-Tikva...?! (there are plenty more possibilities, and those driving to that city can laugh about it while viewing the road signs...).

Apparently there are too many ways, some of them are even documented. See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Hebrew. Sadly, there are also some ad-hoc ones...

I find the suggestions made in ISO standard 259-3.1999 (Conversion of Hebrew Characters Into Latin Characters. Part 3: Phonemic Conversion. ISO/TC46/SC2) useful. However, this standard has not yet been adopted.

I recently saw an article by Prof. Uzzi Ornan, which was presented in SIGRTS in volume 13 number 1 in January 2007. Ornan discusses the problems that the Hebrew script poses and the resulting requirements on a Latin transliteration. He further lists the pros and cons of several alternatives and suggests an alternative that has more advantages then other suggested alternative.

I recommend reading this interesting text by Ornan: http://sigtrs.huji.ac.il/papers/131-ornan-072006.pdf

I also tried to start a discussion about this in Linguistics forum in Tapuz and in the Hebrew Language forum in Tapuz.

The Rule of Least Power

I read an interesting text about sharing information and a simple principle which should help facilitating information sharing: The Rule of Least Power by Tim Berners-Lee and Noah Mendelsohn (editors).

Here's the abstract of that text:

Abstract

When designing computer systems, one is often faced with a choice between using a more or less powerful language for publishing information, for expressing constraints, or for solving some problem. This finding explores tradeoffs relating the choice of language to reusability of information. The "Rule of Least Power" suggests choosing the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.