First Words From New York

So now that I’ve been living in New York for almost 2 months, it’s time to get back on track and try to put up some updates. Manhattan offers lots to do and see. Last week was quite eventul – I went to see Mama Mia (courtesy of NYU, where Tally is doing her post-doc now) and to a Knicks game with a friend.

In the first month here I didn’t have an established routine and it felt strange – I didn’t have both feet on the ground, so to speak. I didn’t always know where to go, what to do and where to get stuff. I run across many bloopers, starting with getting lost in the subway to walking all across 5th and 6th avenue trying to find a wifi spot, to paying for over-priced food, clothes and various household items, to eating at crappy restaurants and attending lousy comedy shows.

The lesson from it all is that you need to be well informed about the choices of various vendors and activities (Dining out being the most obvious). I suppose that is true everywhere, but I feel it in a more profound way in Manhattan, where there is an overload of information and an abundance of choices.

I also had to get used to working remotely. The challenges are both technical and psychological. On the technical side, it is remote debugging that proved to be the most difficult. Thanks to skype, communicating with co-workers and with my manager is a breeze. On the psychological side, I have to cope with working from home. It requires decipline, and it is an on-going process.

We also try to get out of the city. Since our arrival, we have traveled to Boston three times to visit the Agams and the Levanons, and went for a hike at Bear Mountain. Next week we are travelling to Toronto.

Here are a couple pictures from Charles River in Boston (click the pictures for larger view).

9 floors up

Today I helped Ben & Shiri move to a new place at Ramat Poleg. Their new apartment is nice and spacious, and has a great balcony with a fantastic view of the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, we ran into another “great” example of Israeli forward thinking at its best – the elevators in their new building were too small to fit a 3-persons sofa and a large futon base.

Yes, that’s right. There was no way to get standard furniture like a sofa into their apartment except for carrying it 9 floors up the stairs. We weren’t that desperate so we ended up shlepping it back to Shiri’s mom’s place. We did, however, carry the futon base up the stairs.

What I find astonishing about this is that the building is fairly new – it was built 9 years ago, so it should be pretty modern. I’d like to find the stupid architect who designed the building, merely 2 years before the millennium celebrations, and did not consider it important to facilitate the actual moving of stuff into the building. So if you know who is the architect of 22 Mordechai Gur, Ramat Poleg (I think that was the address), please let me know

What I’d like even more is to find the moron at Netanya’s city council that approved the building plans and kick his ass, or at least make him carry the sofa.

The Story of Stuff

I think everybody should watch this great educational video over at http://www.storyofstuff.com/. It reminds me that I need to finish up on my writing of the Nature’s Capital series.

The Jerusalem Zoo

Last week we went to the Zoological Gardens in Jerusalem (literally named “The Biblical Zoo” in Hebrew).

Here are a few photos. They link to their full-size versions on flickr.

Desktop Cube Screenshots

I haven’t posted anything for quite a while. Lots of things accumulated on my to-write list, but meanwhile, I want to post a few pictures of my desktop. I recently upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbons), and it comes with compiz working right out of the box.

Youtube hosts quite a few videos demonstrating the Desktop cube, wobbly windows and other 3D effects. I don’t have such a video, and now that I finally figured out how to take screenshots while rotating the cube, here they are. Clicking on the small photos will open the full-size photos from flickr in a new window (or you can just middle-click on them to open in a new tab if you are using firefox or ie7).

Here is the first picture, showing the desktop rotated between two workspaces.

This picture demonstrates the cube’s transparency feature, and the famous gears inside. Notice that you can see the youtube video inverted from behind (it continues to play during rotation).

Just for fun, I replaced the cube cap with one of Yuval’s painting instead of the compiz default one.

This one here shows that compiz can easily handle a dual-monitor configuration, which I use at work.

Here is the one-big-cube display for dual-monitor, instead of multiple cubes.

Next there is the issue of the applications switcher (the one that kicks-in when you press Alt+Tab). Compiz can do much better than the mundane list of applications titles. Here is the ring switcher.

Here is the shift switcher. It is very similar to what Windows Vista offers (one of its highlights, as far as I know). I am not sure which one came first – perhaps they both copied the design from Apple.

There are lots of other effects to show, but I think it is much better to try on your own. So next time that you want some cool graphics, forget about Vista. Get Ubuntu live CD and try it out.

By the way, the background picture behind the cube – called the skydome – is of Avalanche Peak, New Zealand. It’s a wonderful place, I high recommend that you visit it if you happen to travel in NZ south island

Auto Companies Create Grassroots Campaigns Against Fuel Standards

Via digg (originally from here).

Auto companies have creates a few websites which encourage the public to contact their representatives and oppose a fuel standard reform – a reform that, I believe, will not only help the environment, but ultimately it will also help the American economy by reducing dependency on foreign oil.

Here are links to a couple of the websites:

• www.drivingamericasfuture.com
• www.drivecongress.com

As usual in corporate land, these companies didn’t create the sites by themselves. Instead, they let some front organizations do the work for them. A whois query reveals that DriveCongress in owned by Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. As for the first site, the query doesn’t return any useful information – it just lists 1&1 as the owner. 1&1 is an internet registrar, thus it does not really own the site, it just lists itself as the owner to protect the identity of the real owner.

(A side note: 1&1 is a really crappy registrar. I once made the mistake of using their services, and I strongly recommend against it.)

I think that for grassroot look-a-like sites, they are doing a pretty good job, as long as the reader is an average joe that understands nothing about environmentalism, and is not an internet savvy user. The Contact Us page on the first site lists an address with just a postal code – no name, no street address; a sure hint that they are hiding from visitors. That alone is a sign not to mistake this site for a representative of an authentic grassroot movement (that is true even if you happen to agree with the opinion expressed in that site).

A few more things to note:

• A quote from the first site – “The American auto industry is taking the lead in incorporating alternative fuels and developing new technologies”.
  Huh? is that why they are losing sales to Toyota’s and Honda’s hybrid vehicles like there is no tomorrow? Did you know that by 2012, the entire Toyota fleet sold in Canada will be based on hybrid technology? (yes, I mean the entire fleet, including their SUVs and trucks) So who is the leader in developing new technologies? This quote is so falsified, that it is just another proof that we are surrounded by bullshit.
• As mentioned in a couple of comments on digg, this shows that the auto companies are afraid. In a twisted way, I guess that’s a good thing. Perhaps they’ll eventually stop the lobbying/PR/legislative parade, and start to actually make better cars.

An Over-hyped Copyright Issue?

This number has been all over the place recently:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 56 C5 63 88 C0

Why? because this number is used in an encryption algorithm that encrypts new DVDs, so consumers can’t copy the movies. In the last couple of weeks, the RIAA has frantically tried to prevent this number from being published, but their effort back-fired and now it is all over the place (around 1,700,000 hits on google). Digg users revolted against censorship and forced digg to keep the number published. People have done all sort of things to get the number out there, like printing it on t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.
(Remember that the RIAA recently received the “honor” of being America’s most hated corporation)

Ed Felten, from freedom-to-tinker, wrote a very interesting series of posts about the topic. In his last post he even offers a nice parody on the way that RIAA claims to own numbers.

The only problem is, RIAA doesn’t claim to own this number, and this stories is not about copyrights. According to the EFF, the RIAA is indeed using the DMCA as part of their battle, but they are not claiming that the integer in question belongs to them. What they are claiming (or will claim in court when the day comes) is that the integer in question is used in a technology that illegally circumvents encryption (i.e., the integer is a “part” or a “component” of a malicious technology). Further more, the number has no other practical purpose, and therefore whoever publishes this number is engaged in “trafficking”.
(You can read a much better explanation directly at the EFF site)

Nowadays, the term ‘copyrights’ sneaks into every story that somehow intersects between technology and public policy, be it about privacy, file-sharing, espionage, law suits, medicine, theft of personal information and what not. Many times this term used in the wrong way, where the real issue is perhaps related to trademarks, trade-secrets, trespassing, civil rights and a whole lot of other things.

I don’t mind that bloggers over-use this term so they can feel like freedom fighter, like this blogger did. I do, however, find it disappointing that Ed Felten, who is such a prominent blogger and a policy-expert second to none, doesn’t see the difference.

Oh well, at least I got a chance to publish the number myself. I wonder if anyone at the RIAA would ever read this page.

Anti-Spam Measures

Although I haven’t been active on this blog for a couple of months, the stream of spam comments and trackbacks hasn’t decreased at all. In fact, I think it has intensified in the last couple of weeks. I don’t have the exact numbers, but I estimate that there were around 300 spam messages in the last 2 months – an average of 5 per days.

I got tired of deleting the comments, or marking them as spam for akismet to handle them, so I decided to install a few extra wordpress plug-ins to do the job for me:

• Akismet. This plug-in is actually installed by default, but you need to activate it manually. When activated, it sends every message received at this blog to a central akismet server for analysis. Since the central server receives thousands of messages, it has the power to compare each message from this blog with thousands of other messages, and to pick up trends of comment spam in real time.
• Bad Behavior. The ultimate gateway filter. Bad Behavior analyzes incoming http requests for common patterns of behavior that are typical of automated bots and other malicious software.
• Challenge. This plug-in is responsible for the math challenge that you now face if you wish to leave a comment. Its purpose, like the captcha, is to verify that you really are a human being, and not an automated program.
• Simple Trackback Validation. Some spam messages arrive as trackbacks rather than as comments. This plug-in follows a simple logic: when a trackback is received, it retrieves the web page located at the URL used in the trackback and checks if the page contains a link to this blog; if there is no link, then it is a spam message.

I could have installed more plug-ins (there are lots to choose from), but I don’t think it would change much. You might have noticed that the plug-ins listed above are all complementing each other. Each plug-in handles a certain aspect of spam filtering that the others don’t, thus I hope that by combining them together I’ll have a spam-proof filter that is stronger than each of them alone.

I couldn’t find any more plug-ins to add that won’t replicate any functionality that I already have. For example, adding a captcha plug-in for submitting comments probably won’t do much, as it replicates the functionality already provided by Challenge.

However, one might claim that there is never “too much” when fighting spam (just like there is never enough security), but that is not true. Answering both a math question and facing a captcha (and whatever else will come next) is a nuisance that hinders usability. Therefore, as a general rule, one needs to think carefully how much benefit a new plug-in provides to the system before adding it.
Hopefully with these plug-ins spam would be history, or at least it would become a manageable problem.

Nature’s Capital II – The Moo Factor

A while back I posted my thoughts about the progress trap – a theme that runs through almost everything that we do today. Simply stated, as we make progress and improve the manageability of our lives in the large scale, we reach (or have reached) a point of diminishing returns, as we exhaust too many environmental resources along the way. By over exhausting those resources, we are living off nature’s capital, instead of living of nature’s interest.

(to see this visually, take the ecological footprint test).

I claimed that one reason for which I choose to avoid meat is because of its negative environmental impact. When describing this idea to friends and acquaintances here in Israel (but only when they ask me first), I often face a very harsh resistance and an expression of disbelief. A lot of people, some of which are highly supportive of green movements, don’t see the connection. Most of them simply aren’t aware of the facts, so I figured perhaps it is worth a while to elaborate on this issue a bit more, and what a better place for this than this blog?

(You see, in the real world, unlike in this blog, there is the issue of timing. Usually, people ask me about this topic exactly when they serve meat at the dinner table. It happened a few times when my dad and I were invited for a Friday night dinner. I then start twitching and turning uncomfortably in my chair as they are eating their turkey and I am supposed to lecture about environmentalism. Although pushing guilt-trips over others is a well-known Jewish trait, it’s not as fun as it sounds, especially not when you are a guest, and sometimes amongst the youngest at the table )

There was an article in Haaretz a couple of months ago exactly about this subject. I wish everyone would read it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an English version of it. The article’s bottom line: switching to a veggie diet helps the environment more than switching to a Toyota Prius.

Why is it that a meat-based diet is more harmful than a veggie-based diet? lets look at a source close to home – our friends at veg.ca. They write:

Farm animals naturally inefficient … Like us, animals are naturally inefficient because much of their food is converted into energy for movement, excreted as manure, or used for the growth of body parts not eaten by people. Very little can become direct edible weight gain. For example, cattle excrete 40 kilograms of manure for every kilogram of edible beef produced.

Combine the fact from the last sentence, together with the fact that meat production have increased almost fourfold in four decades, and we are in deep shit! … sorry, I couldn’t resist

In a previous comment, my friend Jorge wrote something similar:

Consumption of resources at the end of the food chain is less energy-efficient than consumption of resources at the beginning of it, since end-of-chain beings spend a good deal of energy just staying alive.

The energy spent by end-of-chain beings, i.e., livestock, can be categorized as follows:

• Use of land;
• Use of water;
• Use of energy, for example, the use of electricity for heating;
• Pollution, produced both by the animals themselves and by the operating cost incurred by the use of energy.

It worth examining to details each of those categories. I’ll try to do so in a later post. Meanwhile, here are a couple of additional references:

1. This is a futuristic article by Guy Dauncey. If you are into computer science, you might recognize a similarity in spirit to this article.
2. If you are a vegetarian, you are in good company

Pomegranates and Tomatoes

This weekend I went to visit the Lev family, who lives near the Golan Heights. The company was great, as usual, and the trip was fun, despite the overcast weather. I was hoping to take some pictures of the borders with Jordan and Syria and post them here, but the weather wasn’t good enough.

Yochi brought cherry tomatoes from a special project in the Arava, in collaboration with BGU (Ben-Gurion University). Those tomatoes grow in Brackish water (salt water, but not as salty as sea water). I suppose that common sense is that when you water something with salt water it should die; however, the folks at BGU found a way to prevent that, and also to yield the most delicious tomatoes I’ve ever tasted. Unfortunately, they aren’t available commercially yet. When they do, I’ll let you know

Yochi also took me to his new project – a pomegranates orchard. He is working on it in collaboration with Bet-Zimra vinyard, makers of the hip pomegranates wine. Anyways, here’s a picture of his “playground”, where the tree seedlings will be planted next week (click to see larger picture).

The white lines are sheets of insulating fabric. Below them is essentially a channel with a mixture of soil, vermiculate and other materials that I understand nothing about, and don’t remember their names. At the moment, the tree seedlings are at a nursery, but next week they’ll be moved here and planted directly into the channel. The channel itself is partially isolated from the ground below it, so the trees grow in a partially hydroponic environment.
(When the trees grow bigger, their roots penetrate to the ground below. However, as Yochi explained to me, the trees grow two kinds of roots: roots for physical stability, that go down deeper, and roots for nutrition, that stay closers to the ground, inside the channel)

I have seen this system in action with his orchard of mango trees, which is already mature. There are 4 pipes running through each channel, carrying water, minerals, nutrients and whatever else those trees desire. All the pipes are connected to a central hub at the far end of the orchard. The hub is completely computerized, thus all the work of nurturing those trees is done with much less labour than I previously thought possible.

The system also has lots of sensors, both at a global level, and also per individual tree. The sensors give back information about water level, ph level, temperature, density, and pretty much anything else that Yochi needs to know about each tree, to assess the overall health and growth of the orchard.

At the hub, there is also a satellite-based transmitter, so the information flows straight from the trees to his laptop, where everything can be analyzed and checked for problems. He even monitored his mango orchard during his last visit to Toronto.

Finally, that green stuff that you see in the picture, between the white lines – that is not weed. It is barley. To avoid the need for herbicides, they grow barley between the lines of trees. The barley is dominant enough over the wild weeds to achieve a local mono-culture in those lines, thus protecting the trees from weeds, and eliminating the need to herbicides. To top it all of, they sell the barley commercially as well.

Pretty impressive, eh?