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

SQL Injection cheat sheet

Check out http://ferruh.mavituna.com/makale/sql-injection-cheatsheet/ for an SQL injection cheat sheet.

New pictures of the kids

There are new pictures on the kids available on the gallery at http://yeda.cs.technion.ac.il/~yona/aviv/index.html

Here are some previews:


Nir with his great grandmother (Michal's grandmother), Sabina.

Sivan devouring some olives.

Aviv just before his celebration of his 6th birthday party at his kindergarden with his teacher, Sara.

Music of the primes המוסיקה של המספרים הראשוניים

I read the "Music of the primes" over the weekend. See my review on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Music-Primes-Searching-Greatest-Mathematics/dp/0060935588/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-9555581-6095224?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174159170&sr=1-1

קראתי את ספרו המרתק של מרכוס דה סוטוי, המוסיקה של המספרים הראשוניים. הסקירה ההסטורית על נושא במתמטיקה וחשיפה עלילתית של ההתמודדות של האנשים השונים, של החוקרים השונים והכול תוך כדי חשיפת האוירה והתרבות והחיים בתקופות שבהם פעלו הדמויות -- כל זה מרתק.

I'd describe the book first as a novel, then as a history book and will not describe it at all as a mathematics book. It does, nonetheless, links nicely the thread that links several important works in mathematics.

Too many metaphors for my taste. Also, too many repetitions on information that was already mentioned in previous pages.

The book gave me a nice overview of the last two centuries viewed through the linking thread "The Riemann Hypothesis", introduces some interesting problems, some of which I learned in my undergraduate studies, and some were new to me. I liked the list of references for "extra reading" given by the author.

Nice book, too much of a "novel" for my taste. I like my math formal and my history with more facts than metaphors, but I'm not sure that my taste is the kind that makes books like this sell... :-)

Bottom line: nice read. I read it in a weekend and the Hebrew version (with a very good, in my opinion, translation by Uriel Givon, who added some extra information in the footnotes).