Interviews, CVs and integrity

I've been doing quite a lot of interviews of candidates for several development and QA positions, and I'm constantly amazed how some people don't write the truth about their knowledge and experience.

It might be that people think that they are more knowledgeable than they actually are.

I don't know.

I met people who claim to be proficient in algorithms, but cannot describe a sorting algorithm. I met people who claim to be proficient in some programming language, but as soon as you present a simple task to be performed in that programming language it turns out that they actually were only participating in a course where that language was used and don't have any real understanding or proficient of it.

What do these people think? Do they really think that their lies will not be exposed? Even if they fool me and others in the interview, don't they think what will happen when they actually start working and be expected to perform?!

Purim

Sivan dressed up as Snow White.

Aviv dressed up as a Pirate. He was really happy that it included a sword.

The kids were excited from the chance of dressing up in colorful costumes and looked forward to meeting their friends at the kindergarden. Just before we took them to the kindergarden, we took some pictures of them together.

A new batch of photos -- Purim

I put last night a new batch of photos.
You can see the kids with their Purim outfits.
See: http://yeda.cs.technion.ac.il/~yona/aviv/index.html and the March section: http://yeda.cs.technion.ac.il/~yona/aviv/2007/3.2007/index.html

There's a new batch of pictures

There's a new batch of pictures. This batch is with my uncle Sabi and with my cousin Selim. Of course, the kids play a key role in the pictures :-)

See: http://yeda.cs.technion.ac.il/~yona/aviv/2007/2.2007/index.html

Negative Security and Positive Security

I find myself a lot lately explaining the difference between positive security and negative security.

Positive Security: a security policy based on modeling of the application or the system that is being defended. Things that agree with the model are considered legal while all other things are suspicious to be illegal.

Negative Security: a security policy based on modeling of the malicious things (e.g., attacks, worms, viruses, and so on). So that things that agree with the model are considered suspicious to be illegal while all other things are considered as legal.

Warming liquids for babies in a microwave oven

I saw a discussion in a Tapuz forum about heating baby liquid food in a microwave oven.

One person claimed that this is forbidden, and I got curious and started asking questions.

See: http://www.tapuz.co.il/tapuzforum/main/Viewmsg.asp?forum=149&msgid=94429245

Should XML parsers know anything about XML namespaces?

I asked a question about XML namespaces on the xml-dev mailing list

The resulting discussion yields that:

* xml parsers know nothing about namespaces
* namespace processing should be done by the application that uses the XML parser
* a validating XML parser should be namespace aware

Today while walking and touring in a field we saw mating Coccinella septempunctata beatles

Today while walking and touring in a field we saw mating Coccinella septempunctata beatles.

Aviv was enjoying himself not only with his new discoveries in the field, but also by stepping into every possible puddle we came across.

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.