On windows, assuming imports are free:

But that's just because I like to tune to E. If you prefer a more "natural looking" note, you can use A:

But why choose at all when you can go for all of them?

Image by Keela84

(For the non-Israelis: the Knesset is Israel's congress, where laws are passed.)

The website's mission is to improve Israeli citizens' involvement in our democracy, and the first step in doing so is giving people more information. Ever wanted to know who keeps his promises? Who voted how? Who never votes? Which Member of Knesset is never present in discussions and votes?

Open Knesset is the place to put this information. If you know a bit of Python & Django, you can join development either on the content harvesting front, or on the front-end front (pun not intended :).

"What about algorithms?" you may ask, or "what does this project has to do with algorithm.co.il?". Well, there's also plenty of room for innovation and interesting features. For example, finding the correlation between Members of Knesset that always vote together. Knowing which vote is for which law. Understanding if the vote is for or against that law. Plotting the party graph, and working with it. These are all things that still need to be done. See these graphical examples to see what I'm talking about.

The website is still in its infancy, but it already has lots of content and lots of features. Nevertheless, it still needs more work.
If you're looking for an open-source project where your work will have great impact, this might just be it.

It took them down from 641,281 bytes to 338,705. This is quite a nice return for the effort of a download and a single command line:

for %i in (*.png) do pngout "%i"

I'd like to point out something different that I've observed of late.

It started a few weeks ago, with the story of judge Drori. He acquitted a man who ran over a the clerk at the parking lot, because she refused to let him leave without paying, and stood in the way of his car. After reading the story, and the actual court ruling, there was a public outrage. Judge Drori wrote a ruling of about 300 pages, where he explains the acquittal. Many people commented about the ruling itself, its length, the reasons given in it and so on.

The second story is about the farmer Shay Dromi, who was acquitted today of killing. Two years ago, two Bedouin burglers broke into his farm at night, poisoned his dog, and then went about their business of stealing his property. At least they would have had Dromi hadn't noticed them, confronted them, shot one to death, and wounded the other. This was amid a wave of crime and break-ins at the area, while the police weren't doing much to stop that wave. As I said, Dromi was acquitted, the ruling was also published, and many people commented on the subject.

Now we can get to the point: usually, acquittals or convictions of the "small" people don't merit much press. Judge Drori's ruling probably would not have reached that publicity if he wasn't up for a seat at the supreme court. Dromi's story was publicized heavily a few years back, and the Knesset even changed the self-defense law because of this case.
However, the publishing of full-text rulings is new. Except for a case I was personally involved in, I never read court rulings. I don't really know a lot about law.

Having these two stories published online, and not only in print, allows publishers to link to the full rulings. Newspapers will never come 300 attached pages of dense law text.
Yet online it's easy as creating a link - and just like that, you have citizens reading rulings, understanding court processes, having opinions, commenting, and getting involved.

I find this amazing, and it makes me optimistic. The times are a-changing.

What you won't see in this list however, are IDE's and editors. I don't feel like joining in on the religious wars just yet :)

So without further ado, here's my list:

• IPython - I just can't stress enough how useful this tool is. If you ever worked with Python's interactive prompt, this is the same thing, just on steroids. It has completion, history, shell capabilities, you name it. If you didn't yet work interactively, you won't do badly to start with IPython.
• ActiveState Python, or the win32 python extensions - if you're developing on win32, it will allow you to get at the native win32 API, which I usually found as a blessing
• PyGame - If you want to start game development on Python, that's the tool for you. Even if you don't, I found out I've used PyGame many times just for quick and dirty visualizations. Besides, it makes for a nice toy :)
• numpy - Ever needed to do any computation that's a bit more complicated than 1/(1-math.sin(x))**2? numpy is the way to go, with plenty of tools for vectors, matrices, and what not.
• After mentioning numpy, it's important to mention scipy and pylab (matplotlib). Just a bit of visualization strength, in the vein of matlab.
• coverage.py - Python code coverage by Ned Batchelder. An essential tool for effective testing. While you're there I'll also recommend checking out his blog.
• ply - for most of your text parsing needs. Of course, this is just my preference. I heard about (but didn't use) PyParsing and other modules
• construct - If you intend to do some binary parsing, construct is an excellent tool for that.
• PyOpenGL - I use it mostly for 3D visualizations, see for example my recursive spring.
• PIL - Python Imaging Library is a very useful tool for working with images. I used it in my twindragon fractal implementation
• nltk - Natural Language Toolkit - I realize most people won't be using this one, but it's generic enough, and I've used it enough times so far to include it in here. For example, I used it when I wanted to find rhymes.
• WinPDB - A Python debugger especially useful for embedded Python apps (Python running from within another application).
• nose - the framework I use for testing. Easy to start using it if you're already using unittest.
• psyco - if it so happens that you start to care about speed, psyco is by far the easiest way to go about doing it, short of writing your code in a different language.

Other useful but less often used packages include:

• pefile - for parsing win32 pe files.
• PyDBG (from within PaiMei) - an interace to the win32 debugging api (there's an upcoming post about that one :)
• scapy - I didn't use it lately, but if you want to sniff packets programmatically, that's a good way to go about doing that
• Peach - Easy Python tool for fuzzing. Didn't get the chance to use it myself though.
• diStorm - the fastest disassembler for x86 and amd64 around, with a Python interface. Of course, it helps if I'm also working with gil on the next version :)
• sqlalchemy and sqlobject - your handy ORMs. I use them mostly for web development. For other work I don't often need a full blown db.
• wx and PyGTK- I really don't do that much GUI work, so I don't have really much to say about those two. I still have them lying around though, just in case.
• RPyC - Didn't get a chance to use it myself, but if you want to get into distributed Python programming, I'll look into RPyC first.
• NetworkX - if you happen to need some graph algorithm or visualization, I'd go for networkx. Last time I used graphs I mostly wrote my own code, and discovered networkx only afterwards. Next time I'll be sure to use it.
• SymPy - Symbolic Python, in the vein of Maple and Mathematica. It allows you to do symbolic operations for example, integrating f(x)=sin(x) and still getting a function and not a number. I used it a little bit for my homework.

Now it's your turn: what packages did I miss?

Back at the computer shop, they asked me to reproduce the errors. Just firing up the computer and booting directly into memtest didn't seem to do the trick, so I suspected that I had to overwork my computer a bit to reproduce this.

Since I was at the lab, I didn't want to muck around too much.
So I thought, "what's the quickest way to give your CPU a run around the block?"
That's right - a tight loop:

However, this snippet doesn't really play with the memory.

The next simplest thing to do, that also jiggles some ram is the following (and one of my favorites):

I will talk about this peculiar piece of code at a later post.

In any case, this snippet also didn't reproduce the error. It is also quite unwieldy, as it raises a MemoryError after some time. Later at home I tried two more scripts.
The first is a variation on the one above:

I ran a few of those in parallel. However, my Ubuntu machine actually killed the processes running this one by one.

The second is smarter. It allocates some memory and then just copies it around:

After both of these scripts didn't reproduce the problem and it still persisted arbitrarily, I returned the computer to the lab. Turns out that the two replacement sticks and the two new sticks weren't exactly identical, and that was the cause of the problem. So now my memory is well again.

As for the scripts above, I once wrote a similar script at work. I was asked to help with testing some software in some stress testing. The goal was to simulate a heavily used computer. A few lines of Python later and the testing environment was ready.

Footnotes:
(*) - Finding out that it was a memory issue wasn't as easy as it sounds. I didn't think of running memtest. I checked the image on my HD with md5, and the hash didn't match. I downloaded a second image, and again the hash didn't match. I checked twice.
At this point I was really surprised: not only the second check didn't match the published md5, it also didn't match the first check. Some hours and plenty of voodoo later, a friend suggested running memtest, and the culprit was found.

I know I could probably have solved it in a smarter fashion, but it wasn't worth the effort.

My lesson:

When someone writes crappy software, their software is probably crappy in more than one way.

This is not the first time I've seen this happen.

Here's the link to the story.

I actually wrote this one about a year ago, when I was discussing with Gadi his lecture on the bionic man. I thought the subject has a lot of room to play and a lot of security implications to consider. Some of our ideas became a reality when researchers managed to hack into a pace-maker.

Well, I hope this short story never comes true.

I've been doing various things lately, including work on Vial and various university tests. I'll be sure to write some more now that the website is back online, to make up for the lost time.

I also had a job interview in Tel Aviv a few days ago. Here's a little critter I folded on the train (click for larger images):

This one is made from a square piece of paper, and it has 6 legs.