Dror's Blog

Back then, in 1989 when Augusto Pinochet was removed from power, Hernan sent us all a message "¡VIVA CHILE, MIERDA!" and went home to Chile, leaving me two of his elaborate drawings which he made while the APTools software was slowly compiling on the DEC VAX system... Here they are:

השירות שלהם למוצרים שהם מוכרים הוא גרוע - בלשון המעטה. אם אתם קונים אצלם קולט אדים למשל, אל תתפלאו אם אחרי שנתיים שלוש כבר לא תוכלו להשיג מהם פילטרים. אנחנו עשינו טעות וקנינו קולט אדים מהם והפכנו אותו ליצירת מופת אבל כשהיה צריך להשיג פילטרים חליפיים כבר לא היה עם מי לדבר. אחרי שהם שלחו לנו בדואר מספר פעמים פילטרים לא מתאימים, הם אמרו לנו שהדרך היחידה להשיג את הפילטרים היא לעשות הזמנה מיוחדת מחו"ל במחיר מטורף. ראו הוזהרתם

Brett Smith of FSF has posted today an unwarranted attack on the Android App Market ( Steer clear of Android Market and its DRM ). Here's my response to him (with few alterations in italics ). Dear Brett, I am an avid Free Software supporter and usually am in agreement of what's posted on the fsf.org site. Having said that, I am really having trouble with your blog post today about the Android Market and its DRM. Let begin with the quote you made: From time to time, Google may discover a Product on the Market that violates the Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement or other legal agreements, laws, regulations or policies. You agree that in such an instance Google retains the right to remotely remove those applications from your Device at its sole discretion. It says "Google may discover a Product on the Market" so they do not deal with programs you have installed outside of the market which (unlike in Apple's case, you can) - only programs you h...

Egyptian official says Israel committed crimes against humanity . Is it just a blatant ignorance or is it part of an ongoing campaign trying to dehumanize Israel and prepare the Egyptian people for calling a war on Israel? If you want to know the answer just see how Israel and the Jews are portrayed on Egyptian TV. Translation done by MEMRI : Clip 1: See viedo here Transcript at MEMRI: See here Warning: contains shocking Holocaust images and very disturbing lies and contortion of history. Clip 2: See here video Transcript at MEMRI: See here The widespread of harsh antisemitism in the Egyptian society. I, for one, do not trust Egypt -- that is not how a country that seeks peace with its neighbors encourages its people to back peace. קטע שני: - מעורר בחילה ומעלה מחשבות נוגות

Today is Memorial Day in Israel where we remember the 22,570 people, soldiers and civilians, Jews, Christens, Druzes, Muslims and other citizens of Israel who fell in wars and terror acts against Israel. The Israeli people do not like to fight, they love life. This love of life is behind the moral obligation the Israelis have to defend themselves. Unfortunately, it does not look like the aggression against the Jews in General and Israel specifically is going away anytime soon. From the shameful Durban II conference and Ahmadinejad's hate speech to other like sayers in other Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt it is clear that the people of Israel will have to maintain their vigilance and firm standing for Israel to exist. And for those who still think that the Arab wars with Israel are because of land and occupation, here is a sobering evidence (sadly, one of many) to the contrary. It is a video clip from Al-Rahma TV where Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya’...

ספק הגז הביתי שלי הוא דור-גז. לפני כשבועיים הזמנתי גז בטלפון וכעת כאשר הגיע פירוט התשלומים בויזה ראיתי שאני משלם 150 ש”ח לבלון גז ביתי קטן. התקשרתי לחברת ישרא-גז והם אמרו שהמחיר שלהם לבלון גז ביתי קטן הוא 110 ש”ח. בשיחה עם דור-גז נאמר לי שיש עכשיו מבצע לחג במחיר 120 ש”ח. כשאמרתי להם שחברה אחרת הציעה לי מחיר נמוך יותר (בלי אפילו לדעת אם אני לקוח) התשובה הייתה - אין בעיה, תקבל גם ב- 110 ש”ח אבל לא תקבל החזר. עוד לא החלטתי עם להחליף ספק גז. לאחרונה הוחלה רפורמה בתחום הגז לצריכה ביתית שאמורה לעשות את המעבר הזה לפשוט מאוד. אשמח לשמוע מהנסיון שלכם בנושא.

Question: I have a WCF service hosted in IIS6 that uses Integrated Windows Authentication. When connecting from Firefox, I am prompted for Username/Password and when I enter them, the service works as expected. With IE7, I am also prompted (no automatic login happens) and enter the Username/Password but then I am prompted again and then the login fails. In the server logs there is a message "Authentication failed for HTTP(S) connection" Answer : The resolution is to open the Advanced tab of the Internet Options dialog (under the Tools menu of IE7) and turn off the option "Enabled Integrated Windows Authentication". Be sure to restart IE7 for this setting to take effect. Turning off this option tells IE7 to use the NTLM authentication rather than try (and fail) Kerberos authentication. See here for more information on this topic.

David Berlind of ZDNet wrote " Posting your Microsoft license keys to Web not the brightest thing to do " and it may sound reasonable until you look at this from a different angle. Now I am not playing the cynic here. Consider what happens to published keys? Correct, other people find them and use them to activate their windows. What happens next is that Microsoft takes notice and invalidates the keys, denying the PC of further security updates (unless it's Vista where it denies it of oxygen too). Most PC users (and I say it from experience) will not necessarily understand what hit them and how to resolve it. The ones that will try will be blamed by MS for distributing their keys. So why is it a such a smart idea? Clearly it's not in the best interest of Joe Average. Well, for Joe Cracker, the well known bot-net builder, this is a lottery ticket. The last thing Joe Cracker wants is for his zombie army to get security patches from Microsoft and since Microsoft does no...

תופעות בשבוע הראשון של דייטת יעקב איידלין עצבות (פלוס עצבנות) תוגה עור פפירוס גרפסים בטעם זית חרצפים (קקי לייט) הערב מת (נעלם מהשעון) חמש בבוקר (חזר לשעון) משתלם? כן!

Today, I accidentally hit upon Yahoo Games where I saw an offering to download some games, one of them Zuma, is a very addictive and well done bubble shooting game. The Deluxa version of this game was offered for free download and I decided to take the offer. After installing the program successfully, the program did two things that are considered very bad from security perspective: It called home -- the Windows Firewall poped up asking me to allow the program to access the network (which I did not, playing a game locally should not need network access). It immediately crashed. The reason being that my machine has DEP (Data Execution Protection) turned on, preventing programs from changing their code while running. DEP is a relatively new protection again worms and viruses that get in via the network using buffer overflow techniques. Zuma is the first software thus far that triggered DEP exceptions and crashed on my machine. I am not willing to risk the security of my machine so I am n...

Yesterday, after longs hours of work on two word documents I got Word to suddenly disappear on me. There was not crash dialog (GPE, 'Send this blab la to Microsoft?'), the program just ended (like the code was calling exit(1)). Rerunning Word I got into the recovery mode where both the last-saved-by-user and last-auto-saved were offered. However, they both did not have any of my changes. I am sure you are familiar with this very frustrating scenario (although in recent years this became less frequent). Now rather than just tell you to save often (which is, indeed, a good tip) I'd like to tell you that the file: C:\Documents and Settings\<your-name>\Local Settings\Temp\~WRS<some-number>.tmp Contains all the keystrokes you typed and within it you can find all the text you entered which will help you recover manually but still recover.

Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip, gave a very compelling presentation at Web 2.0 of the Identity 2.0 concept. I highly recommend viewing this presentation, it is well done and convey the message very well. What's interesting in the presentation style is the use of one or very few words per slide. It works well for conveying concept, less so for conveying detail (after seeing it, I do not really know any better how it is done, if at all). Apparently this is a well known style and Dick gives credit at the end of the presentation. Geoff Feldman made an insightful comment on this presentation: The opposite, long sentences that the audience reads are about the dumbest kind of slide there is. If you ever notice, when this is done, you see people reading and not listening. So, their attention is not on the speaker. You can also see them then talking amongst themselves and "comparing notes". Since they are not listening, they are bored and it all goes down from there. It's not so muc...

Lots of people are talking about Microsoft vs. Google and about the Sun's angle. How and if Google can challenge Microsoft and its Office suite. Moving Office to the Internet as-is does not make too much sense. However, looking at a particular application for example, Word, there are very interesting spins to word processing that may make a very compelling alternative (even if it will be less slick to write in; Word is slick indeed). I envision a Word alternative that is built on the Wiki concept. It will be wysiwg (such as Social Text's one) and will allow me to create arbitrarily complex documents and possibly involve other people in writing them. When I send a document to someone (a link really), I can send a read-only copy or a live link, or send a frozen version. Obviously, the storage would be on Google and search would be integrated so real folders would not be needed (labels would do). Templates will make it very easy to start writing. Automatic versioning (wiki style) ...

I have recently heard about a new music service called Pandora. What they do, in a nutshell, is give you a little box in your browser window where you type a name of an artist or a song you like. Then, the Pandora box plays for you high quality songs by the artist you chose as well as by other artists with similar music and mood. That's very simple and it works just great. The name of the song or arist you chose becomes the name of a 'radio station' you can switch to whenever you are in the mood (you can keep a hundred stations). You can share the stations you create with friends by email and if they're not subscribed to Pandora they get free 10 hours to use Pandora, listening to your station or to other stations they create. Subscribing to Pandora costs $36 per year. I think it well worths it. By the way, it works with Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows and with Safari on OSX. It requires Flash v6 or v7.

I don't know how is it with you but tying my shoelaces was always a little bit of a problem to me. It's not that I did not manage to do it; it's just that the shoelaces kept coming undone. Well, today I hit upon Ian W. Fieggen's website and within minutes I dug it all. I first tried the Freedom Knot which brought me to this site - it worked but was a bit slow. Then I tried and Ian's own Secure Shoelace Knot and got hooked. So simple, so fast, so secure. So if any of you share a similar problem or just want to learn more on the subject - head off to Ian's shoelace knots site . I also liked the explanation of what goes wrong in the Slipping shoelace knots page.

I was shopping around lately for wikis. On the way, I stumbled on twiki wiki and registered there to get to try it. Today, I found that when I search for my name in Google, it brings up a page in twiki.org with the registration details I gave ( http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Main/DrorHarari ). A nice place for one to create a personal wiki though I really did not like to see this registeration fiasco.

Jon Udell wrote ( http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/01/20.html#a1155 ) on alternative programming models based on, for example, the tree structure underlying languages such as Java. He referred to a screencast and paper by Jonathan Edwards. The factorial example brings me back about 22 years to the hilarious April 1984 CACM issue where Dijkstra's "Goto Statement Considered Harmful" was "solved" using the COME FROM statement including its more advanced variants of ON x COME FROM label, COMPUTED COME FROM (See http://www.fortranlib.com/gotoless.htm ). That article culminated with a demonstration of the powerful of this new construct. The factorials function was built using COME FROM. Of course it took considerable effort to decipher the logic and understand what it does and how. When I look at Subtext, I get a similar feeling -- I cannot see and get it at once. I really have to work to decipher it. I guess the main reason for that is that us humans think in...

Need to burn an ISO image on disk - DeepBurner is a free utility for that The other day I downloaded a Knoppix clone (GNU Linux Kinneret) as an ISO and needed to burn it to a CDROM. I do not shy from using and buying shareware programs but the options I saw were really pricey (Nero BurningRom for example was around $80 - way to much for what I needed). Then I found DeepBurner at http://www.deepburner.com/ - a free utility for burning data CDs/DVDs, audio CDs as well as ISO images. This great program also let you design an autorun screen, create labels and more. I would have paid for that a reasonable sum if they had asked but they don't, so I just highly recommend them.

Mailinator - an instant anonymous email accounr Now that's a neat idea for an instant mailbox for the common occasion where you need to provide an email address but really want no email or just one or two emails from the person or body you give the email address to. Go to Mailinator and see this for yourself. Other related services: Jetable SpamGourmet Note that both delivers the email to your normal mailbox.