Blog/December 2014/Dec 12th

December 12th (See this week's devar torah)

Hi, again!

Happy birthday, Sarah! No, we didn’t forget…

Well, it’s our youngest’s birthday, and she doesn’t give up celebrating quickly. This week she celebrated with all of her friends at one time or another. Dinah made her a fancy meal yesterday, and Esther and I were kicked out of the house for the duration. This shabbat we’re doing our best to make a festive meal as well — just so, you know, she doesn’t think we forgot the day or anything.

Let’s see. The complete repercussions of last week’s decision to disband the government (of Israel) have not yet become clear. However, it can be stated unequivocally that the bottom-feeders of the Israeli political world have activated their hold onto my seat at any cost plans. The uninspired and uninspiring leader of Labor, Isaac “Buji” Herzog has apparently agreed to form an alliance with the untalented, opportunistic and disloyal Tzipi Livni. Just FYI: this is the fourth political party to which Ms. Livni has attached herself so far. First was Likud, then Kadima, then “The Movement” (her own uninspired party) and now Labor. One might paraphrase Seinfeld and say that hers is a career about nothing. Incredibly, the latest polls show such a Franken-party gaining 24 seats in the Knesset. That means, presumably, that some 20% of the population don’t see anything wrong with this alliance. I fear for my people, truly I do.

Lest you assume that my disdain for Livni is due to her increasingly Leftist views, nothing could be farther from the truth. I recently astounded some of my friends by declaring my respect for Zahava Gal-On, the leader of the far-Left “Meretz” party. Said respect has been earned by her standing by her principles, even when the specific parties involved would normally be her opponents. A case-in-point is her recent vote against the “Israel Hayom Bill”. So though I share none of her political opinions, I nevertheless respect her for being resolute and consistent. Not so Ms. Livni, of whom Groucho Marx might have been speaking when he said, “Those are my principles, and if you don't like them… well, I have others”.

Ah well, there are three months to go before the elections here. A lot can happen between now and then.

This week I decided I would back-up my MacBook laptop, which is my main development machine. So I used the Apple-provided and built-in backup program, “Time Machine”, thinking “how convenient!”. Indeed: convenient and easy to use, but s-l-o-w. It took four hours to back-up my files to an external disk, which was ok (I have a lot of stuff to back-up). But then it started an encryption phase, meaning it had to read the data from the external disk, encrypt it, and write it back out. After six more hours I stopped the process in disgust, and wiped the backup disk. It took me five minutes to cobble together my own backup script using tar and gpg, which backed-up and simultaneously encrypted my data — in just three hours. Not as convenient, perhaps, but much faster. And I know exactly what it’s done, and that it will successfully restore when done.

Our hope is to publish the last beta release of 8th in the next few days. The past week was very intense, with me doing a complete review and audit of the code. We’ve got the most stable and feature-rich version so-far, and are looking forward to cementing the release version over the next few weeks. As always, we’ll keep you appraised of our progress.

This week we’ve got guests. Sarah’s friend RivQua in addition to Dinah and Sarah, as well as my ḥevruta and his family will be joining us for dinner. On the menu:
roasted chicken, roasted brisket, roasted yams and potatoes, baked musht (a variety of tilapia), stuffed tomatoes, salatim, vegetarian cholent, and chocolate birthday cake.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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