It has been raining in LA the past 24 hours. This is fantastic. I can hardly even remember the last time it rained. Certainly not this summer. This has lots of great side-effects: I don’t need to water the lawn this week. The streets are going to get nice ‘n’ clean. All of that gross […]
Wal-Mart’s sub-$200 PCs
I’ve read with great interest about the dirt-cheap PCs that Wal-Mart has been selling. It turns out that these not-so-wimpy internet appliances (128Mb of RAM, 10Gb of disk, and built-in 10/100 Ethernet) are running an new operating system called LindowsOS which is really just Linux + KDE 3.0 and some really easy to use management […]
Prime numbers
Last night on the plane ride home I was reading a copy of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, a magazine for programmers (I think I got a free subscription to this when I registered for PHPCon). I came across Michael Swaine’s column and read about a polynomial-time algorithm for testing primes that was discovered this summer. I […]
Ariella has a blog
Ariella started keeping a blog today. I guess after seeing me waste a bunch of time with this thing she decided to give it a try, too. I’ve long been a skeptic of blogs, but I’m starting to be a believer. Last week, wrapped up in my own egocentrism, I searched Google for the text […]
Free Hebrew Dictionary?
Does anyone know if there are any Hebrew-English dictionaries available that aren’t encumbered by copyright restrictions? Ideally I’d like to find something in electronic form, but I’ll take a print dictionary if that’s all that’s available.
Torahthon: the Zealotry of Pinchas
The second session I attended at Temple Beth Am’s Torahthon was Dr. Ron Reisberg’s class on “The Zealotry of Pinchas”. He advertised the title of his session as “Good Tefila, Bad Tefila”, but acknowledged at the beginning of his teaching that he decided to change the subject. Instead, much to my pleasant surprise, we did […]
Torahthon: Shema for Beginners
Ariella and I went to an evening of learning called “Torahthon” tonight at Temple Beth Am. Rabbi Mitch Malkus from the Pressman Academy lined up about 20 great minds from the greater Los Angeles Jewish Community (mostly Conservative rabbis and professors) to teach some short classes to the community. The two sessions I attended were […]
Hiding .php extensions in Apache
Here’s a neat little trick. If you want to serve out PHP scripts without showing the .php extension, you can add something like this to your httpd.conf file: DefaultType application/x-httpd-php DirectoryIndex index index.html Those directives will tell Apache that if there is no extension on a file, it should run the file through the PHP […]
Yahoo!/PHP media wrapup
After the buzz on slashdot several more reputable news websites published stories about Yahoo! and PHP. Here’s a summary so far of the press coverage: slashdot CNET News.com MSNBC internetnews.com TechWEB I doubt this sort of thing ever makes it into the New York Times, but it’s really novel for me nonetheless. All sorts of […]
I stole Jeremy’s CSS for my blog
Well, I completely ripped off the CSS from Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Still doesn’t look right, but it’s way better than the MovableType defaults. I’m off to UCLA now to hear a lecture about “Seeing as Statistical Inference” for my CS201 class.