A few flowers from my garden after the last rain

See the new Hyacinthus flowers in my garden moments after the recent rain.

A new niece was born on the 15th

My sister in law, Irit gave birth to a healthy baby girl two days ago. The name of the new-born baby is still to be determined.

Some of my reading for today

Wei Zhang and R. van Engelen: "A Table-Driven Streaming XML Parsing Methodology for High-Performance Web Services". ICWS '06. International Conference on Web Services, 2006. September 2006. pp 197-204

David F. Bacon. Realtime Garbage Collection. IBM Research. ACM Queue Vol 5. No. 1 - February 2007.

Automata theory for XML researchers. F. Neven. ACM SIGMOD Record. Volume 31 , Issue 3 (September 2002). Pages: 39 - 46. 2002.

Bryan Ford. Packrat Parsing: a Practical Linear-Time Algorithm with Backtracking. Master's Thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cool link preview addon

see: http://ajaydsouza.com/wordpress/plugins/snap-preview-anywhere/

Planting in my garden

I spent an hour on Friday in the Meltser nursery and filled up my Ford Connect with dozens of plants, among them were:
begonia plants
Fuchsia plants
Viola hederacea plants
Hydrocotyle ranunculoides
and a few more types.

I'll try and place some images of them soon.

The garden in front of the entrance to our house is now fully planted.
The garden in the back still needs a lot of work:
* removal of many branches that I pruned from the neighbors' trees which invaded our garden while casting shade -- too much shade
* re-new the grass: replace the al-toro grass with a derben grass
* continue planting in shaded places.

Finally, a picture of my family

I took today a picture of my family (using timer...).
Finally, all 5 of us in the same time in the same picture.

About israel.pm monthly meetings

I replied on the israel.pm mailing list and explained about the monthly meetings.
See: http://perl.org.il/pipermail/perl/2007-February/008421.html

My parents got back from Thailand

It seems that they had fun.
I'm looking forward to looking at the few thousands of pictures that they took and to listen to them describing their experiences.

XML Parser attacks -- talk I gave today at the israel.pm meeting

I gave a talk today about XML Parser Attacks in the monthly meeting of israel.pm.
See: http://yeda.cs.technion.ac.il/~yona/talks/xml_parser_attacks/slides/index.html

I will probably have a few revisions on it sometime in the future.

We bought Purim (פורים) outfits for the kids

We bought Purim (פורים) outfits for the kids:
Aviv will dress up as a pirate.
Sivan will dress up as Snow White.
Nir will be dressed up with the kids' stuff from previous years :-)

I just submitted another patent idea to a patent committee at work

I have just sent another patent idea to the patent committee at work. The idea is about automatic detection of zero-day-attacks and automatic creation of signatures from the resulting examples.

Let's wait and see what the verdict will be...

Swimming lessons

Lately, I'm thinking about a swimming course for Aviv. Last year he really enjoyed attending swimming classes.

As soon as the season starts, I'll check the local swimming pool for possibilities.

In the picture you can see Aviv in a swimming lesson. This picture was taken last June.

Two new recruites

Two people that I recommended for work have been found qualified and wanted to come work with us in Tel-Aviv. Hurray!

I was very impressed with them and I'm sure they will be great.

It turns out that with these two, 10% of the workers in our R&D center were recruited through me :-)

I'm trying to get at least 3 additional people in the following weeks.