Blog/October 2019/Oct 11th
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So this week we had the fast of Yom HaKippurim, and since it’s a fast — I don’t have a menu to give you. The synopsis: we all survived and are looking forward to the fun part of our “holiday season”!
Esther was working hard all the rest of the week trying to finish off her clients’ tax forms before the upcoming holiday. I was working hard on bugs my users reported in “8th”. More on that later.
After the fast, I made the mistake of looking at the news. There I found out that Trump had announced his decision to withdraw some US troops from a position in northern Syria which is occupied by Kurds. The withdrawal was timed to allow Turkey to invade northern Syria for its own purposes.
Turkey’s main purpose is to slaughter Kurds. The Armenians were just a warm-up.
Abandoning a good ally after having worked with them for years and developed obligations towards them is, in my opinion, despicable. I understand that “nations have no friends, only interests” as Charles de Gaulle famously said; but that doesn’t mean we should allow people to be massacred, who yesterday were our friends.
This hits home quite strongly: Israel thinks of the US as a “good friend”. But all of us are old enough to remember when Barack Obama withheld resupply of materiel during “Operation Protective Edge”. Other US administrations have also, without exception, applied enormous pressure on Israel because we’re beholden to the US for our military supplies.
We need to think strategically and move away from dependence on Uncle $am. Quickly.
Various & sundry:
- Scientists should by trying to reincarnate Leonardo da Vinci.
- The US is pressuring Facebook to backdoor WhatsApp.
- A Japanese stalker found his victim by the reflection in her eyes.
- And: “Are you one of the idiots who unthinkingly believe Hamas propaganda?”.
The most important bug I worked on this week was one which I initially thought was a minor annoyance. The manifestation was “garbage characters” showing up on the screen at times. It turns out to have been a major security problem in the C function snprintf(). That function is supposed to be “secure”, meaning it doesn’t write more data than it is told there’s space for. But in the compiler I’m using for Windows development, the implementation of that function is flawed and it writes more than it should. That opens up a whole slew of security vulnerabilities.
The good news: I fixed the issue. The moral: don’t trust your compiler!
The weather is looking to be pleasant for shabbat, but hot for the beginning of the yom-ṭov. I hope the fan in the sukkah will be sufficient!
This shabbat the three of us will have:
homemade ḥalla,
chicken soup,
turkey “shawarma”,
stir fried veggies,
rice,
sausage and potatoes,
various salatim,
and fruit.
Until next time,
shabbat shalom and ḥag sameaḥ!
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