Category clever

Mar 16 2011

Tel Aviv – robotics competition Part 1 The Arena

I am up at 5.30am, its dark, I  get some tea and go out onto balcony to get some fresh air and be ready to leave the house at 6.

My friend Dan picks me up and Theuno, another volunteer from South Africa and we head off to Tel Aviv.

Instead of doing normal IT administrator work and helping our staff in the office, I have got to work on a community project, its for a robotics competition where groups of young engineers get ready to design, build a remote controlled mechanical device in teams.

Its nice to be out of the office and doing something different, and this type of event where youth with a passion for building their own contraptions and have to obtain sponsorship from large companies in Israel to find their projects, get to pitch their creations at this exciting event.

Its no secret IT and technology has been part of Israel’s best and most exciting exports to the rest of the world, this month I got blessed to go to this event, and I am planning to go to a Microsoft technology event also in Tel Aviv later this month.

A not too long drive and we are at skyscraper laden modern city of Tel Aviv, didn’t manage to get take out coffee on the way down but there is a Aroma coffee place built in the side of the building here.

This is Tel Aviv’s Nokia stadium.

Maybe it will have to be the ‘Nokia Windows phone stadium’ soon, given Nokia’s recent plan to abandon their Symbian operating system and use a Microsoft’s Windows mobile.   Bugs and frustrations in Nokia’s touch phones have caused even long term fans of Nokia to abandon to other handsets, especially given problems with the faux-iTunes-alike Ovi media software.    Switching to a non inhouse software environment is likely to result in a huge job losses for software engineers in Finland’s biggest name in IT, and staff and visitor here I see are mostly calling each other or browsing the web on iPhones.

The stadium is apparently owned by Tel Aviv municipality, and built in 1964, in 2005 it was renamed the Nokia Arena.   I guess naming sporting complexes after sponsors is becoming common place just like London’s millenium dome became the O2 arena.

This wiki article on the stadium also mentions a brief bit about the robotics competitions done here.

The stadium is fairly small perhaps by European standards holding about 11,000 people, the centre stage is less than a football pitch.   Its mainly used for Macabbi Tel Aviv basketball club to play.

Left, my friends from work help with fabricating some new pieces of polycarbonate used for part of the stage system, the current thin pieces got brittle and cracked, our DIY supremo Robbie cut these pieces and put the holes in, we had to remove the metal hinges and fix them to the new better quality 6mm plastic sheets.  A ratchet spanner makes easy work of this.

There are in-house stage staff that put up the large partitions and projector screens which are done by pulleys and also by men working up in the roof.

I chatted to a few people there, cheekily asking if there is possibility of free tickets to any bands seeing that Guns N Roses and The Scorpions have played here. 😀   Years ago, U2 and Red Hot Chili Peppers played in Israel in 90s and many fans want them to come again, but I think they played in a Ramat Gan in another part of Tel Aviv, like Elton John, Metallica and Justin Beiber in the last year or so.  I have noticed Israelis are big into live gigs.

Was a long old day taking the large numbers of stage and shelving parts of this event, and got to know some local chaps, some are soldiers and some are studying engineering helping do the set up but not actually competing in the game.

A scissor lift and various forklifts are amongst lots of gear used by the stage hands here.  As well as the semi-permenant tent structures, if you look carefully the white square on the ground is an outdoor lift that can move large amounts of equipment from a truck down to the basement, however it wasn’t working today. 😦

As we went home for Shabbat, there is more set up to be done sunday but there is a different team of people to help then, the event starts on monday and I will be back wednesday to see how the competition goes 🙂

There is even people coming from Lego to showcase smaller robots made from off the shelf parts 🙂

Its jolly exciting.

Part 1: Setting up at the arena
Part 2: Meet the robots
Part 3: Robot inner workings
Part 4: Competition

www.firstisrael.org.il

Mar 13 2011

From Karmiel to Mount Carmel

I stayed with a friend in Karmiel whilst on my journey around northern Israel, it is a little tricky to get there as bus times are a bit hit and miss, requiring a journey at Tel Aviv, Haifa, Akko or Tiberias.   The railway network doesn’t cover the greater Galilee area.

Before heading to Dave’s flat, I saw a fox outside.   He looked a bit different than a common British garden and dustbin explorer.   This one was grey rather than brown and red.   Sadly you can really only see his eyes glowing here.   Hes not scary though.

The beautiful, mostly ex-Russian community of Karmiel is very clean and tidy with well kept gardens and trees by every street junction.

Waking up in the morning I was greeted by bird song.

Whilst at the north of Israel, I got a chance to go with some people to a church close to Karmiel.

Only a few months ago there was a devastating fire that affected this place resulting in deaths of prison workers scrambling to get people out of the jails.

As this a short distance from Mount Carmel (two different places with similar sounding names) close the where the prophet Elijah went to.

This church is on the outskirts of an Arab village on top of this mountain overlooking Israel’s third largest city Haifa.

Where actually this one isn’t the closest to Karmiel where was staying, it is one hours drive away, it was worth it.

There is some beautiful views at the top of a steep hill which requires negotiating around some zigzag bends to get up there.  We would of been late, so thought we would do some photos on the way back down.

The church has the service in three languages, English, Hebrew and Russian, some of the Russian Israelis who don’t speak English or Hebrew had some of radio headsets I have seen at quite a few churches now.   There are also a few Arab believers here.

At the end I only got a quick chance to speak to people including the senior pastor David Davis, I was really impressed with this church and mentioned to him about some Jewish believer friends who had moved from the UK and Germany, he gave me a copy of his book the Road to Carmel to give to them, although I have read it myself, its really encouraging testimony, and on how he got to Israel, and worked with actors and people in the theatre industry and drug users in both the US and Israel.

I highly recommend checking out this congregation for both Israeli believers or visiting foreigners looking for a congregation whilst checking out northern Israel.   Its also an example of God working with reconciliation between Jews and Arabs.  I regret not being able to get a nice picture of the outside of this church which is how you imagine a congregation could of been back there with large archways all the way around the front, this church was built in the late 1990s.

www.carmel-assembly.org.il

Some amazing views, however not the amazing ones seen earlier driving up some zig zag roads as it was now foggy in the afternoon!

After another bus from Karmiel to Akko, to get a train to Jerusalem, which was a long journey, the bus station gets interesting views of the surrounding hills here.

On the train I got a glimpse out of the train a remainder of some famous names in IT that are here.   This time I get to spy on Google!  Ha ha ha!

Mar 12 2011

Karmiel food bank IT work

Whilst I was on a break up north, I did one day of work just doing preventative maintenance and planning for back up power.

This cabinet has switches and routers for our Karmiel food bank.

The top device sticks out and the cables protrude too much stopping the glass door from closing.

There are two UPS battery back up units here, some of these small shoebox sized units have not been reliable in other systems I have used and my guess the batteries which normally have a life of 3 years or so, probably need replacing.

The server room sits down the corridor, I plan to do is to install a bigger UPS here and run all of this equipment here and the other room too.

I need this week making diagrams on how the wiring for this is going to work.  The electrical sockets in the computer room need to be labelled as ‘IT only’ as a vacuum cleaner or some other device with too much power will overload the system.

The wiring closet will need to have all of this junk removed, but, there is a fire hose here, not the best place to have this..

The new UPS needs to have a network port, as I want to check its status 160Kms away in Jerusalem, as we are not at this site very often.   Ideally I would like to see this item appear on my Spiceworks monitoring software.   In the past UPS manufacturers like APC require it to be connected to a PC via serial port (hopelessly out of date)  to check and monitor and issues with the power, and you have to pay extra for software.   Spiceworks integration would make this great.

Fixed a our server that handles back ups at this site, every once in a while this machine would turn itself off or crash.  When I visited this site, I notice the power supply on the back of this PC has a fan not working, when poking it with a pencil it would not turn.   I got a new power supply from a local computer store in town.   I found some scrap batteries which were left from UPS devices that had been serviced with new batteries by the IT guy who was there before me.

Left: Some UPS devices that are spare I need to bring back to be tested and possibly fit new batteries in.  These are quite important as they are needed to stop spikes and brown outs in the power from cutting out the computers and other important equipment.   Right: scrap stuff labelled to be recycled.  I am not sure exactly where old batteries are supposed to be disposed of in Israel.  It seems irresponsible to throw them in the bin as all batteries are highly toxic.

I also done some tuning and updates of several PCs at this building, and set up Skype and a few other small jobs.

Mar 9 2011

Jerusalem roof top exploring

I have always wondered if its possible to go on the roofs of the apartments here.  Most of the time the hatch on the top floor is locked.

Whilst I was watching some films at a friends house, they told me theirs wasn’t.

Curiosity meant I had to check it out and get some pictures…

Yes those are solar panels, almost every block in Israel has them as they run the white cylinder things which run your hot water.  There’s some garden rubbish up here, which is odd seeing its got to be tricky to carry things up the ladder.  I guess it might of been from someone who trimmed a tall tree.

I would like to be Jason Bourne and run along roof tops, that scene from that film set in Morocco has some houses that quite similar to here.

Years ago, some extra footnotes in a bible I had mentioned that people during the time of Jesus dried flax on their roofs or used it for guests to sleep on.  Not sure if there is stuff in the scriptures to prove it, or if there is evidence in archaeology.  Where I live in this area in East Talpiyot part of Jerusalem the flats were built between the 80s and the 90s.

View from here over a school and a small allotment where some residents have some vegetables.

You see a lot from up here!  my house is about 1.5Km away in about the middle in the distance….

Mar 4 2011

Akko – arriving at the old city

I took a trip to Akko, as this place is very rich in history, its just a brief train ride from Netanya too.   When leaving the station it looks fairly unremarkable apart from a sign on a hill and some palm trees, to get to the coast required about a mile and half of walking.

There was signs of bad weather in Netanya, here it seems the sea has been pretty fierce indeed.

Only a few miles down the road is Caesarea which part of the ancient Roman city walls are under the sea now, it seems its easy to underestimate the power of the Mediterranean!

Islamic worship places meets a fishing community.


Fishing is a big part of Akko, and the array of fish and shellfish was quite amazing.  I was quite tempted to get some prawns as I have not had any in a long time, they are strictly not kosher, so you won’t find them for sale in a Jewish city.   Take a closer look at what’s on this trader’s table…

Next I will show some interesting discoveries, treasures and sad events I experienced in this city.

Mar 3 2011

Giving frequent flier miles away & special Libya deals

Before I left the UK, I went through boxes of old stuff and threw some things out.   Something I found was a letter from Delta airlines from 2001 (Yes I flew couple of weeks after 9/11 – to LA)  about some frequent flier miles I had earned.

I usually find seem to get a cheaper deal with an airline I had not flown before, so loyalty doesn’t really come into it, and burying this letter in a cupboard somewhere, those point expired in 2004.

I have some miles with BMI, British Midland I earned in 2009 which combined with a credit card I used to have will get me a European flight but still needing to pay the taxes.

I have some points with Airberlin, which I am unlikely to use.  Is there a way that these unwanted points could be pooled together and given to a Christian organisations that have volunteers working overseas?    Of course, you would need to study the terms and conditions, something I quite can’t be bothered to do right now…

Here is a amusing email from (2/2/2011) I got only weeks ago, a bit before various different Arab nations have been taking it in turns to get a bit cross with their government, BMI have asked me if I want to try out their new route, to Tripoli, capital of Libya!!

Erm, I will think about it!!

Feb 26 2011

Viva Netanya

I returned back to this city to stay in a holiday apartment I have been kindly loaned again for free for a few days.

A like the varied styles of architecture of the apartment blocks in Netanya.  The one on the left seems to be a bit Art Deco influenced with some pastel colours and geometric shapes, and others have some air of kitsch to them with these gold rims the window balconies.  There is a lot of construction work going on with blocks of flats being refurbished with the windows and balcony fronts being ripped out showing a hollow shell of the apartments inside, presumably to have a new facade put on to freshen them up to holiday makers or those seeking permenantly dwell here.  Right: I quite like this sort of foot shaped new apartment block.

The local estate agents have ads up for property listed in Russian and French for new immigrants coming in from these nations.

This city is a world apart from Jerusalem, with wide and long boulevards which are a grid fashion like an average US city, as I wrote before when I came here, the coast line with gardens and cliffs looks like UK city of Bournemouth, which funnily enough, the two cities are twinned.

This house appears to be some sort of famous historical place, but I didn’t see any signs in English of who it belonged to.

This local chap was out with his pets, there was two of these identical dogs, as well as a parrot enjoying the nice weather which is getting warmer.

Netanya’s own Shuk (outdoor market) is fairly similar to Jerusalem’s but has less English speakers, so its a little more challenging buying stuff.   I got some oats and raisins for breakfast, a kilo of bananas, some almonds.  Some huge squash fruit here.

These cliffs have some erosion, but doesn’t look like the sand thats exposed is causing any kind of threat to people’s houses.

Out on the beach, you can tell its been stormy recently.

The concrete foundations of these lifeguard’s huts have moved considerably.  There was three of these damaged, mostly the back wall sections have broken off.

Oops the Khazi would be out of action then 🙂

Jelly fish!  Maybe just half a one, after prodded the sand around it I couldn’t see any of its legs. 🙂

I really like Netanya, its only existed since 1929, so there is not a lot of historical places but it makes a good base point to stay whilst exploring the north of Israel, its much cheaper than Tel Aviv and traffic seems quite reasonable.   There is lots of shops and a good beach.

For me there was a good place to relax and read and take a break from work, and gave me time to pray and think about plans for the future for a bit.

Feb 17 2011

Can IT assist with organ transplants?

Just read today that Steve Jobs who is away from running Apple is rumoured to be in the late stages of terminal cancer.

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/01/17/1433213/Steve-Jobs-Taking-Medical-Leave-of-Absence

A couple of years ago he had a liver transplant, this got me thinking.

A few years ago, a work colleague called “D” who is also a Christian who lives in Southampton has had some awful health problems and has had no less than THREE organ transplants!  Turns out after liver and heart replaced by an illness that destroyed body components, to stop his body rejecting his new parts required some powerful drugs which had the side effect of messing up his kidneys.

Now when I used to meet up with my colleagues during lunch breaks for prayer, sometimes D would not be there because he was in hospital with infection, but was back the next week, for me, this man was a living miracle of suffering a complex combination of health worries.

He told me that when waiting for a heart transplant from a match from a cadaver, it took three attempts after being opened up in a theatre to get one that successfully matched.   Each time with him and the deceased donor were not the right size parts.

I was amazed this seems to be so hit and miss and there isn’t an IT solution to aid this difficult process.

I am thinking software could be designed to take away a lot of guess work of doing this surely.   I think sucessful organ transplants depend mostly on your height and build.   By using other statistics such as ethnicity/skin colour, blood group, age, location etc, as well as some critically important aspects such if the patient has ever had HIV or Hepatitis would need to be added.   Also, if its feasible to fly someone to another country, or a deceased person as a donor, as well time of flight, how much time from bureaucracy a particular country would take to get through to fly them in as well.

Health care IT and innovation are two subjects are something that is rarely seen together.  As I have worked in IT in a hospital and find it very interesting (I wanted to be doctor as a child)  a lot of the time you are supporting very old and very awkward to support apps.

Now I know Apple have not been backers of free software, where as Google has done, maybe Apple’s developers could write some software and release it publicly for free to enable health professionals to enable more people to have successful matches in organ transplants maybe?   As hospitals rarely have Macs or iOS devices something web based (and OS independent) that would hold a database securely in the cloud.  Maybe if a developing country has a 3G mobile GSM network, a database could be accessed by a healthcare professional on a smart phone.

I am praying for Steve and his family, and that he would find Jesus through this severe illness.

Feb 17 2011

Why I like Foxytunes for listening to music at work

Not stuff life in Israel today, but just some handy little known snippets of things I use both at home and work.

I almost always listen to music whilst I am driving or working.   There is quite a lot of similarities for me between these habits.

Good old iTunes.   Lots of people like it and lots of people hate it.  I don’t own a iPhone, and I think it would be better if Apple spun off the phone controlling features into a separate application.   iTunes does a grand job of cataloguing your music, occasionally there are some funny quirks, but in general its a nice application.  I am quite a big music collector and have most of my 200 odd CDs imported and on my (now old school rotary controlled) 30gb iPod.

Various friends have recommended Spotify if you want an “all you can eat” monthly diet of music.  I have yet to try this, but I tend to use Youtube for music I don’t yet own, whether this is legal or not as i am just watching it, I don’t know, but I do know this does strongly influence what CDs I buy next.   I still prefer to buy CDs than download, its cheaper, I like having the tangible copy on a shelf with the others in my collection, some songs are best played as part of a collection as they can often tell a story together which is not so significant if you buy one song at a time.

Now you can notice Firefox has some extra buttons at the bottom.

Clicking this little button above lets you choose your preferred music player, iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp and many more.  If you stop iTunes and open up another tab in your browser with Youtube, I can listen to a song on here, switch back to what I am doing on the web and control the music with the buttons at the bottom, Foxytunes will shift the functionality of these controls to the appropriate music player transparently.

The controls on Youtube are horrible from a usability point of view.   Try adjusting the volume, its awkward and fiddly, even more so when the phone rings and you need to quickly silence the song in a hurry.

This method is similar to way I like the last car I had had audio controls on the steering column, I think Renault were the first to do this, with original Espace in the early 1980s.   A lot of generic car radios have scrolling messages of how many channels it has, and the buttons are small and awkward to operate, a truly hideous experience to use whilst you are trying to operate a car.  The stereo on this car was a simple one, the four directional joystick, one axis for volume the other for radio or CD track, just for the main essential features of the radio that doesn’t distract you from driving.

Now I am not currently a car owner for the time being, I still have the same tastes of making controls for things not more complicated than necessary.  Here these buttons just have which music player, backwards, play/pause, forwards, volume slider, and some other bits I haven’t used as of yet 🙂   There is a faint red line under the title of the artist and song that shows how far through the song you are.   You do have to switch to your music player to pick a different artist of course.

Anyway Foxytunes is just a very pleasant way of controlling your tunes whilst busy on the web, and can’t recommend this little app more.

There are some extra little ways it helps out, in terms of letting you play MP3 content on a web page without having to download it.  I haven’t used this enough to comment on it though.

As in 201xs more software operates via the web via browser via cloud technology, I think Foxytunes may become more and more popular to listen to music whilst using the web or browser based applications.

Recent surprise, Foxytunes is developed in Israel by a small team, and they are now owned by Yahoo.

The other good news it works on Firefox on all Windows (XP, Vista and 7) Macintosh and Linux computers with the Firefox browser 🙂

Get your Foxytunes add on for your Firefox here

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxytunes/

Feb 16 2011

2011 Egypt and prophecy

Read something quite amazing on the blog of Walid Shoebat, an ex-Palestinian terrorist who came to Jesus.

http://www.shoebat.com/blog/archives/753

This passage from the bible specifically mentions current events in Egypt:

Isaiah 19:2-4 “I will stir up Egyptian against Egyptian— brother will fight against brother, neighbour against neighbour, city against city, kingdom against kingdom.  The Egyptians will lose heart, and I will bring their plans to nothing; they will consult the idols and the spirits of the dead, the mediums and the spiritists.  I will hand the Egyptians over to the power of a cruel master, and a fierce king will rule over them,” declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty.

Something not mentioned on the news at all, is the Suez Canal.  This man made water highway through Egypt is a shortcut to get goods in from Asia to Europe and North America.  That includes oil just in case it wasn’t expensive enough already.  A new Egyptian administration could chose to tax this route higher or close it altogether.   Obviously this affects everywhere meaning more inflation could be on the way.

Reading this part and making my own conclusions:

Daniel 11:43 He (the AntiChrist) will gain control of the treasures of gold and silver and all the riches of Egypt, with the Libyans and Cushites in submission.

This also has great significance, as I read today (16th February 2011) not only has historical items been looted from a museum in Cairo in recent weeks.

Libya is on the news today here.

Cush refers to a nation in north east Africa, possibly Ethiopia, or, in this case today on the news there has been the birth of a new nation, South Sudan which breaks away from the main part of Sudan, this is a place where Christians have suffered one of the highest rates of persecution in the world.  South Sudan will become autonomous in July 2011.

I do pray that Egypt gets a better leader and a government, but I am not optimistic.  A likely side effect of all the trouble in many middle east nations at the moment as this scripture says is lots of Arab people come to Christ as they get disenchanted with Islam and their government.