Blog/February 2013/Feb 8th
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< Blog | February 2013
| Feb 8th (See this week's devar torah) | Comments or questions? Click here! |
Hi, again!
Excellent! Daniela and Jeremy will be coming for pesaḥ this year! We are all very excited, and not only because Jeremy's team won the Super Bowl!
Sarah's teachers liked her work so far, which made her happy (and that, in turn, made us happy). Now she's working on finishing her term projects and then she's on break between semesters.
Esther had the stitches removed from her wrist. Though it looks alright, it's still bothering her. We're hoping it will improve over the next several weeks. And my knee has been keeping to its task of bothering me, but I'm doing the physical-therapy exercises and hoping the silly joint will improve. So much for the medical status of Clan Aaron, Middle-East Division.
In local politics: the President (Shimon Peres, not Obama) gave the nod to Netanyahu to attempt to form a coalition government. Netanyahu has six weeks to do so; if he is unsuccessful, we may be in for elections again.
In additional, it appears His Highness will be visiting us in the Holy Land. I dread the visit, not only because of the strain it will put on our overburdened traffic system, but also because I assume outrageous pressure will be brought to bear on our Prime Minister (probably Netanyahu, but we'll see). After assigning Kerry and Hagel to top posts, it's not looking like Obama is interested in improving relations with Israel, quite the contrary. But time will tell, and our fate is not in the Obummer's hands but in God's (and ours).
Last week I reported that the Iranians sent a monkey into space. This week, their mad-dog Ahmadenijad volunteered to be the first Iranian in space. To which the intrepid John McCain tweeted, "wasn't he just there last week?". He stole my joke; but the truly funny thing is the uproar his joke caused amongst the chattering classes. "Racist!", they simpered. Come on, people; have you heard the unceasing stream of vitriol and real racism coming from the wannabe space-monkey?
It's been a busy week for geeks. The largest prime number ever has been discovered. Of course, it's not the last... but the computing power required to verify it really is a prime, is most impressive. Lots of computer-security related issues this week: SSL weaknesses getting exploited, PPTP was cracked wide open. The infamous "Kim DotCom" opened his new encrypted storage service called MEGA. And we found a plug-in called 'Hola' for the Chrome browser, which lets us use services like Hulu even outside the USA. Wild and woolly, it is!
In my own personal realm of geekdom, I made good progress on my own "project" (which will take several more months to reach a usable state, I think). One of the interesting things I did with it this week was to incorporate a much faster hash function. That may not sound interesting, but let me explain:
If you have a lot of data to keep track of (as my project does/will have), and the data are somewhat "random" so you don't have an easy way to index them, a "hash function" is useful for being able to uniquely identify each blob of data. In addition, if you are sharing the data across the internet and you do not want random people to be able to tell what the data are, you need to use an identifier which cannot be converted back to the original data. This is what a "cryptographic hash function" does.
But since my project will be running this "hash function" a lot, it needs to be as fast as possible while still remaining "cryptographically strong". That is what this new "hash function" I incorporated this week gives me, and it is a significant pillar of the project. Now that the lower level portions are complete (data storage, etc), I will work on the GUI (e.g. how it looks to the user).
This shabbat we are returning to our tradition of having seminary girls spend a shabbat with us. Since Sarah's friend Dinah was generous enough to leave us a (presumably) delicious dairy bombe cake, we'll be pareve for lunch:
home-made ḥallah,
chicken soup,
roasted chicken with potatoes,
zucchini with mushrooms,
rice pilaf,
beet salad,
oriental noodle salad,
cauliflower salad,
avocado salad,
eggplant salad,
vegetable cholent,
apple cake,
and the bombe.
Until next week,
shabbat shalom!
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