Summer!

The kids playing in a small pool last weekend.

Don't waste your time reading EULA

In the coding horror blog (see:http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000892.html) I read a nice explanation why it does not make sense to waste your time reading EULAs.

Funny, I had a similar discussion at work with a colleague...

XML generation tools

Motivation:
Given an XML Schema (not a DTD) -- generate XML instances that are valid against the given schema.
This is very useful in creating tests suites, as it allows production of "positive" examples. For negative example generation, I am not familiar with any available tool other than untidy (which can only cause "not well formed" problems but also gives well formed examples by manipulating rules that give different representation to what is syntactically/semantically the same thing, such as adding/removing whitespaces).

Here is a list of available tools for this task:
* oxygen
* xml spy
* XML-XIG: XML Instance Generator (pronounced XML-ZIG)
* Stylus Studio

Anyone aware of alternative (better) tools?

Priamos -- SQL injection and scanning tool

Yet another SQL injection tool: PRIAMOS is an SQL injector and a scanner.

http://www.priamos-project.com/

Scuba by Imperva Database Vulnerability Scanner

Imperva launched a few days ago a free database security scanner called Scuba.

See: http://www.imperva.com/application%5Fdefense%5Fcenter/scuba/

untidy - XML Fuzzer -- in beta 2

Untidy, and XML fuzzer, is now available in beta 2: http://untidy.sourceforge.net/

State Of The Art -- ACLTwiki -- NLP and CL

From the abstract of the page:

``The purpose of this section of the ACL wiki is to be a repository of k-best state-of-the-art results (i.e. methods and software) for various core natural language processing tasks.

As a side effect, this should hopefully evolve into a knowledge base of standard evaluation methods and datasets for various tasks, as well as encourage more effort into reproducibility of results.

This will help newcomers to a field appreciate what has been done so far and what the main tasks are, and will help keep active researchers informed on fields other than their specific research. The next time you'd need a system for PP attachment, or wonder what is the current state of word sense disambiguation, this will be the place to visit.''

See: http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=State_Of_The_Art

What To See -- NLP and CL readings and a useful tool

Here's the abstract of a useful page I found on the web:

``I have a routine problem that sometimes paper titles are not enough to tell me what papers to read in recent conferences, and I often do not have time to read abstracts fully. This collection of scripts is designed to help alleviate the problem. Essentially, what it will do is compare what papers you like to cite with what new papers are citing. High overlap means the paper is probably relevant to you. Sure there are counter-examples, but overall I have found it useful (eg., it has suggested papers to me that are interesting that I would otherwise have missed). Of course, you should also read through titles since that is a somewhat orthogonal source of information. Here is how to use the system. You upload your personal bibtex file and have the system compare it to a known conference index; it will then present a list of papers, sorted by relevance.''

See: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hal/WhatToSee/

Dragon Fly

A few pictures of Dragon Flies that I took today in עין חמד ('ein xemed):

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...