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Blog/January 2014/Jan 31st

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Jan 31st (See this week's devar torah) Comments or questions? Click here!


Hi, again!

The week that was, weak it was! Well, not really. In fact, it was full of adventure and intrigue. Well, not really…

In fact, we were busy as usual. Daniela lead her students in a live-broadcast play, a “siddur party”, which we were able to view from the comfort of our home. Her students were remarkably well-behaved… Sarah was doing projects for school and planning a summer-trip with her friend Dinah. She also received her official “bagrut” (graduation from high-school) documents, which she had simply ignored — they ended up getting sent to her. A lesson in procrastination’s benefits. Esther put together her summer-trip to Argentina (with Sarah). She also renewed her Israeli passport in just a few moments (take that, USA!). And she and I met with my former boss and agreed to hire his company to help give our company strategic guidance over the next several months. Meanwhile, I was furiously busy whipping all my various software into shape.

During that whipping process I made several rather cryptic comments on FaceBook, alluding to my progress or lack thereof, which only my fellow techno-geeks would grok. But I had the pleasure of translating my nerd-speak into something Esther would understand, which is important. It’s important, because she’s the “face of the company”, so to speak, and will need to be able to explain some of the technical issues to potential clients.

In one instance, I said: “All straggling refcounts have been mercilessly eliminated”. That means nothing to most of you; if you’ll indulge me, I’ll give a short explanation. In the 8th programming language, everything — numbers, text, what have you — is an “object”, and the user of 8th creates an object when necessary, and “holds onto it” by putting it “on the stack” or by putting it “in a variable”. By holding onto it, the user can do something with it — use it in a calculation or whatever. Most of the objects thus created use resources such as memory, and if they didn’t release the resources they used then eventually the system would run out of those resources, causing a “freeze” or a “crash”. That would usually be considered a Bad Thing.

In many programming languages, the programmer needs to manually take care of “allocating” and “de-allocating” the object’s resources. But 8th has as one of its goals the elimination of that painful pitfall. So in 8th, each object has a “refcount”, which is a count of how many “references” are made to that object. An object on the stack or in a variable gets an increase in its refcount. When the refcount drops back to zero, it means nobody wants the object any more and its resources can be released. So this week, I added lots of tests for “refcount problems”, and got them all under control. This is important especially for a program which might run a long time, so it doesn’t suddenly freeze up the system. Anyway, now you know what a “refcount” is; you can thank me later.

And now for something completely different:

We’ve got two seminary girls staying with us this shabbat, and a new olah will be joining us for dinner. So we’ll look forward to serving up:
red lentil soup, basil chicken, meatballs, zucchini pashtida, eggplant rolls filled with rice, veggie chili, rice, salatim, roasted potatoes and apple-cake.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom and ḥodesh tov!


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