דוד נסים נפטר

הערב, נפטר דוד-אמי מצד אביה, נסים צרפתי.

דוד נסים היה אדם נפלא: פעלתן, דעתן ואופטימי, עד לכניסתו המצערת למחלקה סיעודית לפני מספר שבועות.

תמיד אזכור את הסבריו המלומדים, את הצהרותיו הבלתי מתפשרות .

הוא היה משתתף בהפגנות, כותב ומגיב באמצעי התקשורת ובפני חברי-כנסת, שרים ורשויות.

איש שיחה מרתק.

ציוני ואוהב הארץ.

אדם נפלא.

הוא יחסר לי מאד.

יהי זכרו ברוך.

A picture of mine made it to the finals in a "funniest picture" contest

A picture of mine made it to the finals in a "funniest picture" contest. Please vote for me :-)

see: http://www.tapuz.co.il/tapuzforum/main/Viewmsg.asp?forum=149&msgid=100439566

Interactive Digital Photomontage

You took several group images of the same group, but in none of the pictures all look well. The following technology will help to produce a new picture that contains the "good" parts from the pictures you give it. So you can, for example, create a new group picture where everyone is smiling and no one has his/her eyes closed.

COOL!

http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/photomontage/

Halcyon smyrnensis in my backyard

A Halcyon smyrnensis flew into my backyard. While resting, a cat stormed on him and caught it between his gaws. After playing with it for a few minutes, the cat let go and the bird run away. The cat went to sleep, and the bird, terrified, waited (perhaps it was wounded... I don't know...). I took the chance to grab a few photos. We put a deep plate with water for the poor bird. Chased away the cat and went to bed. We hope that the bird will get over the trauma and move on before another bird takes a shot...

ICML 2007

The 24th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning is just around the corner and will be held in conjunction with the 2007 International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon.

See the list of accepted papers at: http://oregonstate.edu/conferences/icml2007/paperlist.html

An interesting yet amusing view of writing job advertisements

I read an interesting and amusing post in use Perl about job advertisements

It says that you want to hire people that fit. It also says that the audience splits into the following four groups of people:
1. Those that qualify: have the necessary required skills and knowledge and that can do the job
2. Those who are unqualified and are honest about it
3. Those that think that they qualify but they don't
4. Those that do not qualify but are not honest about it and lie

This looks like a partition that should make life easy: you want to hire people from the first group and not from any other group.

Two problems are being raised:
One that those that qualify most probably already are working. This means that any advertisement targeted at them should be clear about why switching jobs is worth doing for them?
The second problem is that it is hard to filter out the people from groups 3 and 4.

The post further tries to give some advice about the proper way to advertise your "wanted ad".

I like that posting very much and enjoyed reading it.

google face search

Try adding to the query string in the resulting search URL in your google search the following: &imgtype=face

see: http://emad.fano.us/blog/?p=556

I played with this a few times now and it is kind-off disappointing... this feature has some serious maturing to do :-)

Photographing children in the kindergarten

I started a new thread about Photographing children in kindergarten.
My goad i to get tips regarding the approach, lighting, composition, technical issues and the general approach.

The discussion is in Hebrew in a Tapuz forum: http://www.tapuz.co.il/tapuzforum/main/Viewmsg.asp?forum=809&msgid=99785178

JINR -- publish your negative results on NLP and ML

JINR is an electronic journal, which brings to the fore research in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning that uncovers interesting negative results.

They idea is that while we see a lot of publications about successful attempts, it is not clear which paths are not promising directions.

Much can be learned by analysing why some ideas, while intuitive and plausible, do not work. The importance of counter-examples for disproving conjectures is already well known.

Negative results may point to interesting and important open problems. Knowing directions that lead to dead-ends in research can help others avoid replicating paths that take them nowhere. This might accelerate progress or even break through walls!

see: http://www.jinr.org/

xml namespaces decision table

Being able to correctly handle XML namespaces in an XML processor seems to me to be summarized in the following formulation. I don't know if I'm right or not, but that's why I posted a question about it in the xml-dev mailing list.

Let's consider three variables: a, b and c:

a. Name is qualified in XML Schema: yes/no
b. Name is prefixed in XML document: yes/no (default namespace is also considered as a prefix, the empty string prefix, for this discussion’s sake)
c. Prefix for name is defined in XML document: yes/no

If we consider all possible values for a, b and c we end up with 8 possibilities:

a	b	c
0	0	0
0	0	1
0	1	0
0	1	1
1	0	0
1	0	1
1	1	0
1	1	1

I don't expect to get any namespace related error
if a==b==c==0
or
if a==c==1 and b is either 1 or 0

(0 stands for no and 1 for yes...)

If I'm right than testing for namespace can be done with two comparisons


In case we don't have an XML Schema, the table has only two columns (no column for qualification):
So we get

b	c
0	0
0	1
1	0
1	1

we get that the only error is if we use a prefix that is not declared.

OWASP-IL mini conference

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/2nd_OWASP_IL_mini_conference

Unfortunately, I didn't attend, and I could only read the presentations online. Hopefully some of my friends from work who did attend will give a summarizing presentations on the new things for us to learn from the conference.

From my own reading I liked the talk about positive security, although there is nothing new presented there.

Some pictures from Nir's 1st birthday party

Here are some pictures from Nir's birthday. Nir is now one year old.

Racalling a visit to XRCE in Grenoble, France

After recalling my visit to Trento for ESSLLI2002, I also recalled another visit to Europe that was related to my academic interests. In March 2002 I visited Xerox Research Centre Europe in Grenoble, France, and attended a Finite-State programming course, that was given by Ken Beesley. Dr. Beesley is currently at Inxight.