Hi all, thanks to everyone who came and to the six of us who stayed for the dinner after that in Spaghetim, and special thanks to Meir for giving the talk and answering the questions. I really enjoyed the meeting and learned quite a bit about the cool technology behind it.
Here are some related links to the discussion: 1. I mentioned code golf - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf - these are online competitions where you are supposed to write the shortest working solution. There's an active server for such competitions here - http://golf.shinh.org/ . I've been working on this challenge: http://golf.shinh.org/p.rb?combination - writing solutions in Perl, Ruby, and Haskell so far. As an anecdote, my Perl solution is so far the shortest, and tybalt89 (an expert golfer) provided a shorter (by 10 bytes or so) solution, but which requires adding <<use re 'eval';>> in perl-5.14.x and below (where 5.14 is used by the server for conformance testing), but with it, it is longer than mine. 2. I also mentioned going to the Khronos Group's Tel Aviv chapter meetup on Sunday: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khronos_Group * http://www.meetup.com/Khronos-Tel-Aviv-Chapter/events/169536192/ Anyway, I sent a link to it to Linux-IL but not hear. 3. Hearing it was called Khronos sparked a discussion about who was Khronos in the Greek mythology ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronus ) and later on on other details of (the recorded) Greek history including the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon and other https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Persian_Wars and about the Oracle of Delphi ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia ) . 4. In the context of DARPA, we discussed their creation of the Internet and there were some rumours of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET having to survive a nuclear attack which are discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Misconceptions_of_design_goals . 5. There was a mentioning of the nvidia chips with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA and I mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL which is maintained by the Khronos group. 6. Someone mentioned a software bug in a French missile that caused it to need to be self-destructed and was traced to a debug statement that was left. I mentioned http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~alum/patriot_bug.htmlwhich says: <<< During the Gulf War in the early 1990's, Operation Desert Storm used sophisticated technology to end the war in a quick and timely manner. Part of this technology was that of the Patriot missile air defence system.1 On the night of the 25th of February, 1991, a Patriot missile system operating in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, failed to track and intercept an incoming Scud. The Iraqi missile impacted into an army barracks, killing 28 U.S. soldiers and injuring another 98. The cause of the missile system failing to defend against the incoming Scud was traced back to a bug in Patriot's radar and tracking software.2 7. There was a discussion of pipelines in logic gates design, Hz (frequency) vs. seconds (time), and technologies to prepare circuits like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit 8. We mentioned that "The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from". This brought us into http://xkcd.com/927/ ("How standards profilerate") which was updated by this comment - http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/show.cgi?id=joel-ms-lost-api-war-1from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html . 9. Meir gave an anecdote that a software developer he worked with told him that he wished someone would create a computer without hardware, because the hardware he had to work with was buggy and finding the bugs was time consuming for him. I noted that I once had this to say - http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/show.cgi?id=bad-thing-about-hardware. >>> ------ Anyway, it was a very enjoyable meeting and I learned quite a bit. Meir told us that he'll send me the PDF of the talk, so I can put them on our sites, so I'm looking forward. I'm going to put a call-for-lectures later on, but if someone wishes to volunteer to give a one hour or so talk at the scheduled day on 30 April 2014, please reply to either message. Thanks again for Meir and the other people for coming. Regards, -- Shlomi Fish -- ------------------------------------------ Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Chuck Norris helps the gods that help themselves. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
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