Everything Is An Object

MySQL Life Saver

2010-03-06T15:49:00.000+02:00

If you lost your admin password, just follow this. This proved be to a real life saver. Thank god for debian-admin!

First post on my Forum Nokia Blog

2010-03-03T02:02:00.002+02:00

Read all about it, here

Gmail account creation != Usability?

2010-03-01T13:55:00.000+02:00

Today I have sent an invite to a friend of mine from my gmail account, he got into the registration screen and to his surprise (not much to mine, I know captcha's are getting worse and worse as Internet abuse gets bigger) he couldn't read the letters of the captcha. Being hearing impaired he could also not listen to the captcha being said.

Now, most of the sites I have visited lately have a button to request a new captcha, which might be easier to read, How do you do that in Gmail sign up?

What gives?

First Nokia Forum Champion In Israel

2010-02-24T14:18:00.001+02:00

So, on to some good news - I have recived the Nokia Forum Champion Award today and wanted to share the joy. This is due to my ongoing contribution, promotion QA and testing work that I have been doing since November.

I'd like to so far sincerly thank Janaina, Jure and Sami for their ongoing support and care. Working with Nokia, I feel I am doing cool stuff with techie collegues rather then working with the world's largest manufacturer of mobile telephones.

I hope to visit them sometime soon in Espoo.

I look forward to continue work with Nokia and help them maintain and extend their market share of Mobile devices and applications.

Exciting times are ahead of us, with MeeGo .

"Let the good times roll!" (-Kawaski Jet Ski slogan)

Anything you can do we can do better, iPhone.

2010-01-13T21:34:00.001+02:00

Something sweet to see for all game lovers around.
Without further due, I'll just link you to the video .
and here is the howto.

Those of us who can, do enjoy!

HP Support Phone Line In Israel (nation wide support) BUSY?!?!?

2010-01-12T17:47:00.000+02:00

How can it be that a 1-700 line of HP representative in Israel is BUSY?!

Is it so expansive to have a couple of telephone representative to take the calls?

Dear HP, please snap out of it. Israel is a big consumer of your products. Can you please NOT suck badly like an Israeli company?

If there is a franchised lab that is providing the services, and it is not functioning up to standards, let me know, I can help you establish one that will.

I do hope that this issue will not consume too much anger and work on my site, but the touchpad, keyboard and mouse buttons you've put on the HP Compaq Mini 310c are of the saddest combination, and I've never had the misery to use such a malfunctioning pointing device.

Now I will have to wait 2 weeks without a laptop for the matter to be checked, so either it will get fixed or be replaced.

My bad for trying to work with it the couple first months and not going straight to the dealer, who said there was a good chance it would have been replaced.

O' Justice, where are thou ?

repoze.bfg 1.2a1 released

2009-11-29T03:29:00.000+02:00

To all of you that are interested, a new major feature release version is available of repoze.bfg, 1.2alpha1 that includes support for imperative configuration, read more about it here.

Setting up Python2.6 on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

2009-11-22T15:51:00.001+02:00

If you wanna test the new Plone alpha release (Plone4.0alpha1) you'd need a 2.6 installation. If you are using your VPS and 8.04 LTS as your rock OS, you won't want to upgrade just for the python version.

Instead of building it yourself, the non debian way, you should use a package. That's very easy with Launchpad's rocking PPA feature.

Just add the proper sources (of python-dev) to your sources.list in /etc/apt/sources.list , make sure you import the pub key for the archive so apt won't complain , sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get install python2.6. And you've got 2.6 packages made by Ubuntu's Python Chief , Matthias Klose. This is as per this blueprint.

To add the sources:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/python-dev/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/python-dev/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

To add the key, just do:
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys D81367B9

Funny Plonista

2009-11-12T19:30:00.000+02:00

I just found out a very funny yet reality reflecting drawing about the Slacking Plonista excuse 'buildout!'. I'd like to share it with the readers of my blog:

What do you think ?

Budapest 2009 - Plone Conference

2009-10-28T10:34:00.000+02:00

A quick note - the plone conference promises to be an extraordinary evannent. It is amazing to see the participants, meeting some of the plone celebs and superstarts, and sitting next to Hnno from Jarn.

Thank You Facebook

2009-10-20T21:54:00.002+02:00

Different from my usual flame against facebook, I'd like to stop today and thank its existence. The fact you can contact people there without needing to know any cyber-detail about them besides their real name is nothing short but ingenious, to the extent of prooving to be life saving.

Kudos to the Facebook creators for that novel idea!

Plone as a SharePoint replacement

2009-10-08T01:41:00.003+02:00

It's been a while that I've been thinking that plone could be a nice and feature fit replacement for SharPoint.

Before settling on SharePoint, read this. You might save a "couple" of bucks.

I'm happy to help folks that want it installed in non profit organization do first install and give some preliminary intro to the software. Free of charge! :-)

Visualizing Implanted Tumors in Mice with Magnetic Resonance Imaging Using Magnetotactic Bacteria

2009-09-19T12:42:00.002+03:00

Me and my brother were contemplating about the possible imaging application of magnetotactic bateria. We decided to keep in a bit of a secret until he can submit his undergrad project proposal for resarch. However, quite accidently I have discovered that the idea and experiment design has already been suggested and supposedly someone is already working on this.

This is quite interesting, as this holds potential for accurate and absolute modeling and tracking of tumors whilst inducing minial to no damage to the patient and virutally no side-effetcs.

Read all about it here.

ChipPC Super Lite Linux based OS

2009-09-16T17:44:00.004+03:00

Now that it's finally out, I'm proud to say that I had the pleasure to work with Alex Fradkin, Mark Lifshitz,Andrey Baranovsky , Nicolai and Andrey "The Big" our highly esteemed R&D manager.

The fruit of our labor is ThinX , a very low resource consuming Linux based OS that allows for the production of super lite computing units. The units are tightly secured and are excellent for usage as a thin client. Python was instrumental in its creation.

It was a pleasure working with you guys, I hope to be working with you sometime soon again on either projects that we may encounter.

I urge anybody who have needs for such hardware to contact sales and place your order. There's even an evaluation plan. Just don't forget to mention Sivan Greenberg recommended it to you through his blog! :-)

To see the line of products go to ChipPC's website and whet your appetite.

Now that ChipPC has atom based units, I wonder how fun it would be to have Ubuntu installed as the OS :-) Food for thought!

Budapest, Here I Come!

2009-09-15T02:50:00.002+03:00

It appears that I'm going to http://ploneconf2009.org/ !! Will be great to meet all the community there that I've known so far just through IRC. Do some Singing & Dancing hacking and see where taxonomy in plone is headed to. I also hope to learn new tricks and tips, and see how Deliverance is used.

Thank you great grant committee. You made my day!

Twisted Based Directory and file transfer utility

2009-08-19T19:29:00.004+03:00

I recently toyed with Twisted and found it extremely pleasurable and easy to implement a very basic gross file transfer utility. (That can actually sync complete directory structure).

This "app" is composed of a server and client scripts, you have to run the server script on the target computer and use the client as instructed.

The server will never overwrite an existing file or directory but will create transmitted directory structures as required.

I found this utility to be very very useful inside a QA lab or a development LAN where unauthenticated unlimited file/directory transfer tool is needed and there's no will to install ftp, samba etc...

Oh, make sure you have twisted installed before trying this.
On ubuntu that usually means: sudo apt-get install python-twisted

If you modify this to work on windows, let me know. I did this on Ubuntu.

Feel free to package this for whatever distro you fancy, if you find it useful.

Download it here:dirsync

Restoring File Using HUBackup

2008-01-07T21:31:00.000+02:00

After receiving quite some emails about folks bewildered by the crashing hurestore I think it's only fair to create a post about how to restore files from archives created using hubackup using the underlying archiver , DAR.

Usually after a typical run of hubackup you will have two resulting files:

.hubackup-data/paepp-master-archive.1.dar
.hubackup-data/paepp-master-catalog.1.dar

(Thanks goes to Peter Päppinghaus for sending me an email about this)

To restore , which actually usually means extract in DAR's language you need to do something like:

dar -x .hubackup-data/paepp-master-archive -R TARGET_DIR

If there is more then one slice DAR knows how to switch between them properly.

That should be enough for most of operations, for more detailed explanation of what dar can do in restoration (or backup for that matter) DAR's manual pages are quite good.

HUBackup and rdiff-backup, or how I should have done it at the first place!

2007-10-24T13:05:00.000+02:00

Okay, so exploring the rdiff-backup code base I now come across some ideas I do not want forgotten yet I don't feel like editing/creating a new spec (that will come later) but part of my plans for Hardy (again an LTS release) I want to start at the direction of making HUBackup the tool it was meant to be ;) so the first point I want to note:

* Use rdiff-backup as the backup/archiver tool instead of DAR; Although DAR is a truely amazing tool, it currently lacks good python bindings and the fact HUBackup uses it from a ptty is a bit of a pain to maintain and expand with features. This also stands in the way of a better restore process. Moreover, Using rdiff-backup, I now think of just letting it create its "meta data" (reverse diff) along side the already existing directories the user wants to backup, which will *greatly* reduce space overhead when backing up (essentially just burning the folders to the optical media together with the special information for restoring the permissions and other file attributes). Now, given that I need to explore how to slice up backup data to fit in more then one optical medium.

Very Simple Web Scraping

2007-10-14T19:01:00.000+02:00

Got interested lately in extracting some data (namely emails and sublinks) from web pages I came out with a very simple, very straight forward class in Python that when instantiated will hold all the unique outgoing links the web page in question has and all the unique email addresses it has, just for practice. It is not intended for "production" use in any way as it does not respect any of the HTTP GET rules that even very simple fetchers support. This was just for practice. However, you are free to use it for your purpose. I wonder if this would be a good candidate when improved to build a graph for the web as it looks from the stand point of the specific "seed" web page. (ofcourse I will need to wrap it in a recursive algorithm to go deep following the links discovered).

Here is the code:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import re
import os
import sys
import urllib2

class URLRepo:
URL = None # holds this URL's address, as is the parent of the son URLs it will hold
def __init__(self, URL):
""" A Class representing the collection of all son URLs a parent URL holds.
URL is the internet URL to prcess."""
self.URL = URL
raw_html = urllib2.urlopen(URL).read() # note this completely disregards proper HTTP workflow e.g. proper GET headers
self.html = raw_html
emailre = re.compile('[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}',re.IGNORECASE)
linkre = re.compile('.*(.*)<\/a>') # match the URL and its corrsponding title
links = linkre.findall(raw_html)
emails = emailre.findall(raw_html)
self.emails = []

# filter out any link that may return us to the same parent URL and clean out email links
self.links = [i for i in links if (not i[0].startswith('/') and
not i[0].startswith('mailto') and
not i[0].startswith('#') and
not i[0].startswith(self.URL) and
(i[0].startswith('http') or
i[0].startswith('www')))]
for eml in emails:
for eml in emails:
try:
self.emails.index(eml)
except:
self.emails.append(eml)

if __name__ == '__main__':
SEED_URL = sys.argv[1]
A = URLRepo(SEED_URL)
print "List of links:"
print "--------------"
for link in A.links:
print link
print "List of Email addresses"
print "-----------------------"
for eml in A.emails:
print eml

A Word Of Gratitude

2007-04-14T12:50:00.000+03:00

Jonathan, Paul , Daniel and Rob. Just wanted to thank you for a wonderful time a while back. Although it seems like a distant, warm dream right now that some time has passed, I am all intentions to do something like this again , on the same grounds - and explore further your wonderful, green and water rich country ;-)

Oh dear, now how do I recreate the fun earned from that amazing canoe ride? .....

Surely not a way to do performance testing, #2

2006-12-04T21:42:00.000+02:00

Thanks to all the kind folks for commenting on my previous post . After a couple of people who managed to mildly experience some performance losses over my mentioned "experiment" one guy with another IBM/Lenovo PATA-to-SATA bridge based system managed to reproduce the issue. Is this a hardware related one? I'd like to kindly ask owners of such machines to make sure their Lenovo/IBM laptop model has the bridge and attempt my "experiment". If this is not Linux's fault then surely for people with warranty there should be a remedy. Now where is find for windows so I can "experiment" the same there...;)

Surely not a way to do performance testing, but still...

2006-12-04T15:43:00.000+02:00

Back then, when I started using Linux based operating system (namely, RedHat, Mandrake to finally settle on Debian and then finally arriving at Ubuntu) I used to show off to my Windows using friends one o "features" at the time that was the major attraction GNU/Linux had for me. Rock solid, smooth multitasking that always kept the system responsive and usable.

A special case of that was that I showed them, how on heavy disk IO of the system, I can still have a responsive UI and use the desktop while their Windows desktop on the other hand , using the same exact hardware, running the same "benchmark" operation, started to lag on the desktop UI, have very jerky mouse movement performance and nearly choke to death.

Are those times over?

Recently, I revived this "experiment" using my ThinkPad T43p laptop with the following specs:

PCI-E bus
1GB Ram
1.87GHz
60GB PATA disk, connected in what is know as a pata-to-sata bridge.

I am runnign latest feisty, but I could also reproduce this using edgy, and dapper on the same laptop configuration. I am using the open source ATI Xorg driver.

Now, what I have done (I urge you to try the same and let me know how that went for you) is make sure no running application are open after boot, open one gnome-terminal window, and there in a quick sequence I do:

find /
CTRL+SHIFT+T (open a new tab on the gnome-terminal)

And repeat this until you have 4 tabs with find running inside them. Now when I attempt this to open some more tabs (1-2) , the UI starts to lag, disk access becomes increasingly slow and the UI eventually becomes so unresponsive that even the mouse cursor refuses to obey the the mouse movements. Even when not displaying the tabs output (e.g. ALT+TAB to another window entering text) the performance loss doesn't go away, and even prevents me from easily entering text to this blog post. The most annoying part of this, is that ALT-TAB to switch another app becomes nearly impossible when the system is under this load (e.g. you can actually see UI redrawing etc as it happens) Something tells me this should not be the case...

Does anybody have an idea why this is caused? How can we possibly address this? In the beginning I thought using the -nolatency kernels could help, but this seems to have no effect on this. Any insight, comment or feedback on that are welcome.

2006-11-18T13:41:00.000+02:00

Some stuff I don't want to forget for hubackup so I'll put them here:

Think about maybe integrating something into the installer, such that when a user is detected to have a CD/DVD drive and is interested in enabling hubackup desktop notification, the installer will offer him to create a special partition for storing the temporary archive and iso files before burning them.
Add checks while backup is being created, such then when space is reaching too low, either abort the process with proper error or halt the dar process until user makes some more free space and then allow him to resume it.

HUBackup Main Development Branch In Launchpad

2006-11-08T20:23:00.000+02:00

Today I've got into some storage problems in a server I'm using to host the current development branch for hubackup. Knowing the good work ddaa has put into improving launchpad's abilities in that respect, so quickly I set and in no time (using ddaa's instructions on his blog) I had my branch fully stored safely in here - now I know I'll never run out of space for commits!

If you want to play with the code and maybe even contribute your share to help us make Ubuntu a safer place for our data, you just need to install bzr, grab the code and start hacking. In other words:

$ sudo apt-get install bzr
$ mkdir hacking
$ cd hacking
$ bzr branch https://launchpad.net/people/sivan/+branch/hubackup/hubackup--main
$ cd hubackup--main

Today's surprise is a fresh new class to transparently create and handle backup meta data, also referred to as "backup config files". This config files will be used by the mime type recognition to run the restore program that will allow to either update a backup set, or restore it to the original location from which it was taken.

Link To Old Posts

2006-11-08T14:50:00.000+02:00

To be able to read any of the previous posts, just visit this. Luckily I haven't posted too much before moving here, so there's not much of a backlog.

Moved To Blogger Beta

2006-11-07T16:32:00.000+02:00

After reading some friends blogs hosted in beta.blogger.com , I decided eventually that I also want an account there. The interface is excellent and there are a couple of things you get for free like some nice design templates, tags, much better editing interface then advogato's and a sub domain. Feels much more encouraging and inviting to be expressive in here, so I think I'll stay.