Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

… discovering that the large chunk of obscure code you need to write as soon as possible has already been written. Two years ago. By Donald Becker. And works.

After OLS, I am supposed to be spending a week at IBM’s facility in Tucson, Arizona. At first I thought I’d get there on Sunday evening, work Monday through Friday, and then leave on Saturday morning. Today, after having realized that the hotel I’ll be staying in is pretty comfortable and that Tucson is not quite the little burg I thought it was, I decided to stick around for an extra day, see the local sites and rest. Of course, I’m much more likely to end up spending Saturday in the lab debugging something, but – c’est la vie.

Welcome back advogato!

(posted to advogato
and livejournal).

Tough workout this morning. I gained 0.3kgs last week. That is all.

It’s my birthday today. I’ve had a lovely weekend, spent with ladypine and the rest of my family.

I see I haven’t updated my diary since Monday. Shame on me! let’s see what happened. On Tuesday, I worked (but not too much, because orrd visited HRL and gave a talk on TCPA), gave a short presentation to the Linux Kernel Reading Group I’m organizing at work on chapter 3 of Uresh Vahalia’s Unix Internals (excellent discussion), and then played Tennis with Orna in the evening. On Wednesday, I made significant progress on both of my projects, one of them an entire day before the deadline. One project required some mucking around with the kernel (much fun), and the other with bochs (c++ flavored fun) . On Thursday, I was on vacation, resting before the roleplaying convention we attended in the evening. Before the convention we met orenr, whom I haven’t seen in ages. It was very nice to meet him, and I’ll hope we’ll meet again in somewhat less than 4 years. On Friday, yesterday, there was work code that needed to be written and I had a great time writing it, and then we had a family dinner in the evening, which was a lot more fun than those things usually are. Today there was another family meal at noon, and then we played some tennis, and then my uncle came to visit, and now I’m writing this, and that’s about all, I think 🙂

Didn’t make it to the gym today. Not enough will power, too much pressure at the office, whatever. My body could use the rest. No culinary transgressions, though.

Pool tomorrow morning, then tennis in the evening. Back on track 🙂

(16 days until we leave for Boston. 2.3kgs to lose, as of this morning. That’s 144 grams per day, which roughly translates to a caloric deficit of 1100 calories per day. If I keep the elevated activity levels, should be a breeze).

The loot from thinkgeek has arrived. I am now the happy owner of a bunch of cool geeky stuff! pictures coming up whenever.

There’s a new security forum being set up at TAU that looks fairly interesting. (via linux-il).

– StackGhost: Hardware Facilitated Stack Protection, by Mike Frantzen et al.

– GCC extension for protecting applications from stack-smashing attacks, from IBM’s Tokyo Research Lab.

– StackGuard: Automatic Adaptive Detection and Prevention of Buffer-Overflow attacks, by Crispin Cowan et al.

The weekend was pretty damn fine, PNS-wise. Played tennis[0] on Friday and Saturday, watched for I ate[1], and achieved my weight goal for this week! I am now 9.2kgs less than when I started this diet. Although there’s plenty more to go, that’s starting to border on “respectable”. What’s better, I am getting into an athletic frame of mind[2], which means that in any day that I don’t engage in sports, I miss it.

This morning had a very-good workout in the gym, although my entire body is sore from tennis. Started with 28 minutes on the cross, in my usual “weight loss” program. The program has 7 alternating 4 minute segments, where in one segment the cross is “level” (all major leg muscles), and in the next segment it is elevated (inclined) (thighs and buttocks). I usually try to maintain a pulse of 145-150, which is in the middle of my cardiovascular range, and then go up to 155-160 for the next-to-last segment, and go to 160-170 for the last segment. Today the last segment was particularly hard, and I kept chanting “SEAL SEAL SEAL” in my mind to avoid giving up. I didn’t.

Plan for tomorrow is gym again, and then pool on Tuesday. Assuming my body can keep up with this pace, of course…[3]

[0] With ladypine on Friday, and then with ladypine, nyh and Hadar on Saturday. Hadar beat me 6-1, which is a great incentive to get better 🙂

[1] except for one incident – on Friday night, after a pretty exhausting day and 1.5 hours of tennis, I had a tiny supper. Then I went to sleep hungry, assuming that I would wake up in the morning refreshed. Instead I woke up at 2 AM, *hungry*, and had a rather large midnight snack. Note to self: not enough food is just as bad as too much food.

[2] “athletic frame of mind”, or more likely, an endorphin rush.

[3] It can. I’m tougher than I think.