Blog/May 2020/May 22nd

May 22nd

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A week-plus of beastly heat overpowered the country’s power supply one day. We lost power intermittently for about two hours all told. Fortunately, the house remained relatively comfortable until the power came back. I’m curious: just what does the Israel Electric Corporation do with all the money it rakes in? It doesn’t seem to invest much in improving its capacity or capabilities. Maybe because it’s a monopoly and has no reason to improve?

The usual: work, eat, sleep. Rinse, repeat. Nothing very exciting, except that Sarah is being moved to manage a different branch, one with better sales prospects. So congrats to her!

And: happy 2nd birthday to our grandchildren!

<tech>
I’ve been looking into alternate math libraries for 8th. In particular, the “big-floating-point” math library I have been using is really slow. I found a much faster one, and have been slowly trying to incorporate it.

As a first step though, I refactored the number parsing. That is, when 8th sees something like [123, 456], it needs to convert that to an array with the numbers 123 and 456 in it. I hadn’t thought to examine the parsing in depth before, because it’s “fast enough”; but this week I refactored it… and improved the parsing speed by three times.

Sometimes redoing code is worth it!
</tech>

Stuff and nonsense:

• Did you really think Wikipedia is neutral? As someone who has contributed and edited there, I can tell you it’s a raging Dumpster fire.
• COVID-19 and contact-tracing privacy issues.
• Don’t throw out that old computer, it might be valuable!
• The governor of NY has made reckless choices, costing lives. Though to be fair, he’s not as much a bobblehead as his brother, CNN-host Andrew. Oh, wait: they’re both bobbleheads!
• The Teflon campaign.
• Israeli mothers are tough!
• A really cool photography exhibition by the City of David.

In another round of the tit-for-tat Israel/Iran cyberwar, Iran breached Israeli websites. This sort of thing happens all the time, but this time my client’s website was affected. This, even though I warned my client and the web-contractor, specifically, about the vulnerabilities in the software the contractor wanted to use. “No, you don’t know the right way to do this”, the contractor told me. Me: someone who’s been working on security-related tech for a long time.

“I told you so”, I wanted to say, but didn’t, because I get paid regardless. Of course, none of the sites I personally manage had a problem despite hacking attempts.

The forecast claims the heatwave will break this afternoon, and that shabbat will be chilly (!). Hopefully they’re right.

One week to go before shavuʿot! This shabbat we’ll have:
homemade sourdough ḥalla rolls, gazpacho, homemade ḥummus, zaʿtar chicken, sumac potatoes, tortilla de papas, various salatim, and brownies.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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