Remote Meetings
I’ve spent more than half a year working from home due to Covid-19. Since much of my work time is spent in meetings, I decided to share some of what I learne...
Technology
Historically, I was not a fan of Facebook, to put it mildly. And yet, tomorrow is my first day working at Facebook.
Seattle and Trust
The family moved to Seattle a couple of weeks ago. We have a home with wonderful landlords, the kids are in school and daycare, and I’ll be starting a new jo...
Moving to Seattle
After many years of living and working in Jerusalem, the family is ready for an adventure – we’re moving to Seattle, Washington!
Startup Investing for Everyone
Generally speaking, there are two ways a person can generate income:
Freeware Game
These days I take my backup strategy pretty seriously (locally to an external drive and encrypted on the cloud using Backblaze). This wasn’t the case in the ...
Ditching Google Analytics
Just a quick service announcement - I’ve stopped using Google Analytics on this website. Instead, I’m using Open Web Analytics.
On the Future of the Apple Watch
I spent several days in Lyon, France recently. It was during this vacation that I was fully convinced that Ben Thompson was correct about the future of the A...
Venture Capital and Equality
Thomas Piketty’s 2013 best seller “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” made plenty of noise in the popular media. In his book, Piketty discusses the growing...
2014 Summary
I only recently did a big reboot of this site. Nonetheless, a new year is upon us, which means that a yearly summary is in order.
Learning to Code
I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary...
C++ and Automatic Garbage Collection
Programmers know about the mental state commonly referred to as “flow”. In this state, we are most productive, by a significant margin. This state is, of cou...
What You Have You Keep
The second law of thermodynamics states that in an isolated system, entropy is an increasing function. In his book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Phil...
Kill the CAPS LOCK!
The Caps Lock key can do wonders to wreak havoc in VI. You’re in command mode, minding your own business, when all of a sudden all hell breaks loose. All bec...
Configurability
A while back I stumbled upon the following vim command, which opens a file explorer view. Now, this is truly scary stuff. I was as shocked and disappointed a...
First Donation
Today I donated money to an open-source project for the first time. And it felt good. I’ve decided that paying for free open-source projects you use and fin...
Running a program on a server after logging off
At work we have a pretty powerful server on which we run computationally intensive programs. Many times, I want the programs I execute to continue running af...
Language Verbosity
I recently took a look at the upcoming C++0x specification, and I was annoyed that yet more keywords were introduced into the language. C++ is already a very...
Why Not to Write Shell Scripts
Don’t write shell script. Not in bash, and not in any other shell. There are two very simple reasons for this:
Programming Editors
I’ve used a wide range of programming editors throughout my life. From the glorious copy con and QBasic of the DOS days, through the Turbo C of my teenage ye...
Source Code Highlighting - In Blogger!
There are a great many posts on how to post syntax highlighted code in blogger. I can’t really understand why google doesn’t have a ready made solution in pl...
Source Code Highlighting - In Blogger!
There are a great many posts on how to post syntax highlighted code in blogger. I can’t really understand why google doesn’t have a ready made solution in pl...
Project Euler
I’ve just stumbled upon Project Euler. It’s a nice little site with mathematical puzzles to be solved using a computer. For example, this first problem is to...
Programming with Vi
This page will serve as a place to store my notes on using vi as a programming editor. And when I mean vi, I really mean vim, but these days I think it’s pre...
TBB and Non-Integer Ranges
I’ve been using the Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) library for a while now, and I finally figured out how to overcome one of the annoyances I had with...
Bash: Passing Arguments with Quotes
Today I needed to write a bash script that eventually calls another program, passing all the arguments to it. It seemed like a simple enough task: just use $...
Languages
“It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentall...
Active Learning
“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls in...
If You Can’t Test It, You Can’t Program It
A well known axiom of business management is: “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. I believe there is a software development corollary:
Programming by Coincidence
In their excellent book, The Pragmatic Programmer, Andrew Hunt and David Thomas have a section on “Programming by Coincidence”. Although their book is jammed...
Creativity and Constraints
Although my university obligations are enormous at the moment, I find myself drawn back into the Origami world. Thus, I came across this month’s challenge on...
Blogging 101
At 27, I’m an old man. I guess I’ve been living under a rock or something - I have no idea what’s “hot” in technology these days. I’m new to blogging. I onl...