Purchasing an external DVD burner

It was time to upgrade my backup capabilities by adding an external DVD burner to the computer hardware which I have.

Following the agonizing procedure of selecting a model to buy, I went to the usual price comparing Web site serving the Israeli consumer market and eventually chose a certain model of USB based DVD burner. I also read reviews and asked on the Linux-IL mailing list to make sure that it is Linux compatible and that no surprises are expected. Google was less useful than expected – when looking for technical information about models of USB based DVD burners, I was greeted by lists of price comparison Web sites from around the world.

The price range for that model was quoted as 388 to 688 NIS. I am relatively busy this time, so I decided to look for place to buy based upon geography and logistics (i.e. no need to go to the post office to pick it up) rather than upon price.

I work in northern part of Yavne, and one of the shops was listed as having a branch at southern part of Yavne. One evening I drove from work to the shop’s area. Driving around in a topological circle bent out of shape yielded no sighting of the shop.

Oh well.

I drove back home and on the way there was a branch of Office Depot. On impulse I decided to enter it and see what they have for external DVD burners.

Incredibly, Office Depot, which was not listed at all in the aforementioned price comparing Web site, had exactly the model which I wanted – for 389 NIS, including VAT! The time was about 20:30 in the evening when I paid and departed with the prize, after having been in the shop for about 15 minutes.

The whole experience causes me to doubt the utility of those price comparison Web sites.

P.S.: to operate the DVD burner with my Linux-powered computers (one with Debian Sarge and the other – with Debian Etch), I needed only to install the dvd+rw-tools package in one of the computers (the other one already had it installed) and read the package’s user’s manual. Otherwise, the burner worked out of the box.

Budget cuts drive out the best people

After the end of this round of the Second Lebanon War, the Israeli newspapers are full of revelations and protests about the foul-ups in IDF. There are even calls for the current leaders to go home (but who can replace them in the helm?).

During the last few years, the defense budget was cut several times. There are several important programs, which were delayed or canceled due to the budgetary cuts. I “wonder” why the Arabs considered those cuts to be signs of weakness, rather than as indication of wishing to have peace. Those budgetary cuts were very popular among those, who wanted to emphasize economic development, social welfare and education. And if our neighbors were really peace lovers, they would have been right.

My conclusion from juxtaposition of the above two facts (and from another observation of the consequences of budget de-prioritization and cutting in other places) – is that if you cut the budget of an operation, the operation loses not only what it could do with the missing budget. This loss is a calculated risk, because you figure out that the money had better be spent somewhere else than on this operation.

However, the operation loses also its best people. The top people like to work on challenging problems, on pushing forward the envelope, on overcoming challenges. They do not like to struggle to solve problems caused solely due to budget cuts. This kind of drudgery drives them out.

Then few years later, it is found that the operation has deteriorated and no longer delivers a value for the money still budgeted for it.

Moral: managers need a better way to divert funds to other operations.

Maybe David Ben-Gurion had after all the right idea when he decreed that IDF, as the people’s army, do also various civilian projects, such as building settlements (NAHA”L), sending soldiers to educate illiterate people, and the like. This was a way to have the smart people in IDF continue to do challenging projects, and not feel the pain of budget cuts – yet to cut budgets to operations, which were no longer as essential as they were, once the War of Independence was over.

Another example – the practice of well-managed Hi-Tech companies not to lay off employees when business becomes slow. They transfer those employees to other projects, whose future is better.

August Penguin 5 – Preliminary Impressions

The conference has been held.

It was organized with haste, as long time was lost without anyone volunteering to lead the effort of organizing it, until volunteered to fill this role.

As a consequence of the haste, some events, which have traditionally been held in previous years, were not held at all this time, or if scheduled, were canceled. There was no hacking contest, something which needs long lead time to adequately prepare. The trivia contest was squeezed out of the schedule. A short movie was supposed to be shown, but was not shown after all. The Hamakor Prize was not given this year. There was no booth with technical books sold by Combooks, even though they donated some books to the event.

The most important parts of the event – the panels about Free Software in education and Free Software in business – were held.

In my particular area of responsibility, there was some activity, which was triggered by people with disabilities having pre-registered to the event almost at the last moment. A blind man asked for an escort, and thanks to an extra mile from two of the event’s organizers (Shachar Shemesh and Sagiv Barhoom), he was provided with transportation and escort without my having to do anything more difficult than few E-mail messages. There was also an hard-of-hearing guy, and it can be said that he was screwed by not having registered earlier. During the time I knew I will be the only one needing a notetaker for the conference, I did not bother to inspect the hall as it did not matter to me where the notetaker, laptop and me will sit. However, once we had to serve also an hard-of-hearing person, we should have sat near the podium rather than the far end of the hall. The shortage of time also did not allow me to arrange for a FM assistive listening system for the event, but this was OK, because the guy could cope if he sat near the lecturers (which he did).

I still have some homework to do – arrange for the conference’s presentations to find their way to the blind guy (the second accessibility provision which he asked for), edit the notetaker’s transcript, and post it on the Wiki for other people to review it, fill in missing information, correct errors – and finally use it to help caption the short movie planned by Ram-on Agmon to commemorate the event.

A response to a Leftist in the wake of the Qana disaster

I participate in a mailing list with subscribers from all the world. The recent events in Qana provoked a discussion. In this discussion, a Leftist suggested to me that it would be a good idea if I were to write to some Tel Aviv newspaper editor and explain that it is immoral to bomb civilians.

My response:

  • How about writing to editors of Arab newspapers explaining that it is immoral to sacrifice oneself and one’s children in order to kill civilians?
  • How about writing to explain that it is immoral to be suicide bombers?
  • How about writing to explain that it is immoral to use people as human shields, the way Hizbollah are doing in Lebanon?

Not expecting better from the Arabs, I am not amazed anymore at their hypocrisy at approval of Israeli civilian deaths from rockets, yet crying foul when Arab civilians, who proclaim readiness to die in the war against Israel – get their wish and die – only because they die from Israeli bombs rather than from exploding themselves in middle of crowds of Jewish civilians.

HOW MANY ISRAELI CIVILIANS HAVE TO DIE IN ORDER FOR THE IDF TO REGAIN ITS FREEDOM TO ACT TO PROTECT THE REST OF US FROM HIZBOLLAH MISSILES?
Obviously one or two (the usual number of casualties of missile attacks) are not enough. How many of us do you, bloodthirsty Leftists, want to die before you reluctantly allow us to defend ourselves against enemies, who use human shields forcing us to kill civilians in any act of self-defense we commit?

37758969372093th Reason to Hate Wars

Any relationship between the publicized schedule of broadcasts of channels 1 and 10 and the actual broadcasts has been lost.
As a consequence, yesterday I missed my weekly infusions of “Veronica Mars” (channel 10), “The Simpsons” and “Stargate” (channel 1). I expect to miss also “Lost” (channel 10, tonight).

AAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Prayer

World of potential for mercy and compassion,
of room for grace and reconciliation,
teach all your children in the Middle East:
Jews, Muslims and Christians,
Bahai’s, Druzes and Buddhists,
Atheists and Agnosticians,
Palestinians and Israelis and Syrians and Iranians,
Let us value and love our fellow human beings
more than we value our beliefs, God or Gods.
Let hatred be turned into love, fear to trust, despair to hope,
oppression to freedom, occupation to liberation,
that violent encounters may be replaced by loving embraces,
and peace and justice could be experienced by all.
Let us swear that we shall never let Gods incite war and hatred among human beings.
Amen

The deaf are still 2<sup>nd</sup> class citizens

In the build-up toward the 2nd Gulf War at 2003, the deaf in Israel were at last issued beepers to alert them under the same circumstances that airstrike sirens are activated.

My beeper appears to work – I got several test messages. However, according to unconfirmed report from someone, there may be a delay of as long as 5 minutes from the hearies’ siren activation until messages are sent to the beepers. This report is still not confirmed, and I hope that we’ll not have the opportunity to put the beepers to live test.

The more serious problem is that three Israeli TV channels (channels 1, 2 and 10) broadcast news several hours each day, and they sometimes repeat themselves. Yet there are no universal captioning or Sign Language interpreting in the news – not even when they are repeated and therefore are not truly live broadcasts, which are still difficult to caption.

Finally a test for aptitude for programming?

It is well known that it is impossible to use currently available tools to test for ability to program computers.

In their paper The camel has two humps (working title), Dehnadi and Bornat claim to finally have a test, which can predict one’s ability to program. Basically, their test assesses the candidate’s ability to manipulate symbols according to rules without looking for a meaning in those symbols.

A note to self:
According to the above paper, the following are the major semantic hurdles, which trip up novice imperative programmers:

  1. Assignment and sequence.
  2. Recursion/Iteration.
  3. Concurrency.

Novice declarative programmers have to leap the following semantic hurdle:

  • Argument substitution.

In addition to the above semantic hurdles, I know of one additional major semantic hurdle:

  • The concept of a pointer.

I wonder whether there are additional semantic hurdles, listed in some obscure (or not so obscure) paper published somewhere in the world – or even unrecognized so far.

Scheduled Electric Power Outage

A week ago the Electric Company announced a power outage scheduled for Wednesday night, to last until 07:00 on Thursday morning, due to maintenance work on the electric power supply grid in my street.
The week elapsed and also the powerless night. At 07:45 the power has not been restored, yet.
I went to the grocery shop to buy my usual morning addictions (newspaper and bread).
The grocery shop was lighted by a candle.
The shopkeeper vented about the absence of electricity. I told him about the scheduled power outage and about the fact that we should have got power back by 07:00.
He phoned the Electric Company. After a brief conversation, he told me that they told him that power will be back ten minutes later.
We laughed, knowing that the promise for electric power was empty.
The time was already 07:50. I returned home with my morning addictions.

At 08:00, power was back.