Blog/April 2014/Apr 11th

Apr 11th (See this week's devar torah)

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Hi, again!

Sarah’s on vacation, and Daniela and Jeremy will be here B”H on Sunday night/Monday early morning! The whole family gets together again to celebrate pesaḥ. But the preparations, the preparations can be a bit intense.

Esther and I went off to the shuq to get vegetable necessities for the holiday. Among the necessities is fresh garlic, grown in the Land (the usual dried stuff in the stores is from China). Anyway, it’s only available right before pesaḥ, and we stock up, dry it and use it until the following pesaḥ. So we got 15 kg (33 lbs!) of it, and put it in the trunk of the car, before we went off to our weekly business meeting.

We figured that since the car was parked in underground parking, in a cool, dry and shady location, the stuff in the trunk (which included all kinds of things besides the garlic) would be just fine. Two hours later we returned to our car, opened the doors and nearly passed-out from the garlic reek. We really do love garlic, but that was just a little bit too intense.

In other happenings this week, the company whose CTO I am scheduled to be (they are still incorporating) entered a competition to be part of Orange’s 4G Innovation Lab. They were one of 116 entrants, and were among the 15 chosen to go to the next round. This week, I was invited to attend this “next-round” with the CEO (of the upcoming company, not of Orange) and he presented the product idea and how it can take advantage of Orange’s 4G technology. There were a number of top executives of Orange there, and they said they would choose the six companies who would go onto the finals later this week.

So yesterday, the CEO called me to tell me we’ve been selected to go on; this is pretty big, since Orange (actually Partner, which uses the “Orange” name under license) is the second biggest telecom company in Israel. If we manage to enter into some sort of arrangement with them, it will lend us a lot of credibility.

You may be wondering, “didn’t you say you were CTO of your own company?” The answer is, “yes”. I still am; this second company is one which is/will be a strategic partner for our own. They want a product developed, and we’ll develop it using our 8th development environment, and they’ll pay us as well. So B”H, they will help us make 8th a better product, faster, and we’ll help them deploy a more solid product across multiple platforms. Win-win, but a lot of work for me and mine, and a really intense couple months coming up (after the holiday, of course).

And I am very happy to say that I left my prior client’s clutches just in the nick of time. The team I was on has been conscripted to be “on-call” during pesaḥ! Being on-call is not pleasant any time, but it’s worse over holidays.

In other preparation news, the gardener finally showed up! Yes, he and his crew were here for half a day and really did a good job getting things cleaned up and repairing the irrigation. So despite my misgivings and his very calm approach, we were able to achieve the sprucing up we wanted to do (had been meaning to do for a long time). Since the coming year is a “sabbatical year”, we won’t be able to do anything really but water the plants to keep them from dying; but we can get them in good shape before then.

Some of you are aware that Microsoft is terminating its support of Windows XP. Some people really don’t care about it, but it’s potentially a major problem waiting to occur. Many “ATM” machines run XP, and so do lots of other “kiosk” kinds of appliances. It will be interesting to see what if anything happens.

Unlike the merely potential problem of unsupported-XP, a truly big problem was uncovered this week: the so-called Heartbleed bug. This is a bug affecting a very large proportion of web-sites using “SSL” for encryption, and the bug was found in the well-respected open-source library called OpenSSL. The upshot of this particular bug is that it permits someone to surreptitiously (and without possibility of detection) gather private information from a web-server. All kinds of “secret data” are vulnerable.

But wait, there’s more! It’s not just web-servers: Cisco found 13 products so far with the same bug. It’s unknown whether this bug was inserted by a three-letter-agency or whether it’s a simple coding bug, but it has very real consequences and the effects will probably not be known for some time. Kudos to the “OpenSSL” team for providing a fix almost immediately (which I applied to my own web-server) but the potential for very widespread abuse is real and alarming.

And it should be noted: this bug has been present in OpenSSL for several years, but was only just found. This despite OpenSSL being “open source”, meaning that thousands of people have looked at the source code. It may be this is a counter-argument against the notion that “open-source” is safer than proprietary software.

dayyenu! This shabbat it’s just us. The calm before the storm, so to speak. We’ve already segregated any ḥameṣ to one little corner (not in the kitchen! that’s off-limits!!) and will be carefully eating:
chicken-in-a-pot, roasted yams, onion pashtida, roasted vegetables, cabbage salad, carrot salad, corn salad, chili and rice, tuna salad, macaroons, and fruit.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom and a happy and kosher pesaḥ!

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