Things I've Done

I am not actively looking for a job, but you are still welcome to look at my 2007 curriculum vitæ, in Postscript, PDF or HTML formats.

In this page you can also find some of the things I have done which are publicly available.

Papers

I have made a small part of the reports and papers I have written available on the Internet:

• Finding the largest eigenvalues of a real symmetric matrix, and corresponding eigenvectors 1992, Technion Department of Mathematics research report. The C code described in this report is available in this FTP directory.
• Numerical Solution of One-Dimensional Duct Flow By Method of Characteristics 1994, research report. The FORTRAN source of the program described in the report may be available on request.
• Operator-split computation of 3-D symmetric flow (together with A. Birman, J. Falcovitz, M. Ben-Artzi and U. Feldman) July, 1999, 22nd International Symposium on Shock Waves, London, UK.
• The Ivrix Project - Towards a Hebrew Linux Distribution March 25, 2000, Fourth International Symposium on Multilingual Information Processing, Tsukuba, Japan.
• Harnessing the Power of the Web (Web Automation and Libwww-perl) February 26, 2004, YAPC Israel 2004, Herzlia, Israel. see also slides.
• Beyond Basic Faceted Search February 11, 2008, First ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2008), Palo Alto, California.

Free Software

During the years (I've been programming since 1985) I've created some free software that I shared with the rest of the world. None of it was of earth-shattering importance, but I like to think that it did help several other people besides myself.

• Hspell is a free Hebrew linguistic project, whose first aim is to create a free Hebrew spell-checker. This aim has already been achieved, in the form of an initial, fully-functional, release.
• Sendsms is a relatively-small (~1000 line), no-frills, Perl script that sends free SMS messages to cellular phone subscribers in Israel (all providers: Cellcom, Orange, Pelephone and Amigo are supported), by automating the use of the providers' websites. Other people (as well as myself) have built upon this script to provide fancier features, email-to-SMS gateways, email announcements, automatic stock-prices report to your cellphone, and other cool uses.
• GAPS (Get And Put System) is a set of shell scripts for managing versions of programs, similar to the idea of RCS or SCCS and based on ideas from the book "The Unix Programming Environment". But, as opposed to RCS and SCCS, the usage of GAPS is very simple and straightforward. The shell scripts can be easily ported between unix systems without recompiling, and are easy to change if you want to. Despite (or maybe because) GAPS' simplicity, it was used by several people around 1992, when I first published it. I still use it myself for some things (but I also use RCS, and my current favorite is Subversion).
• Nftp is a front-end to the standard 'ftp' program, which makes its usage much easier. It added machine aliases, easy automatic initialization, background downloads, and other features. Being a shell and nawk script, it was very portable (for different Unix machines) and let you use your own system's original ftp program. Before the advent of graphical ftp clients and programs like Wget, nftp was a really useful tool. Today it still works, but less commonly useful.
• NYH HOC is my much improved, version of Brian Kernighan's HOC interpreter.

Essays

These are just some of my musings about some of the (mostly computer-related) issues I care about:

• Free Software - "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" (June, 2001) In this essay I lay out the benefits of free software to our society, as I see them. I take the slogan of the French Revolution, "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité", and show how each of these ideals (and not just the often- mentioned Liberty) is an important part of the free software movement.
• Free Software - Why and for what purpose? (in Hebrew, August, 2002) This essay is a short introduction to the ideas behind free software and its advantages (as I see them), and demonstrates that free software is a viable replacement to proprietary software. This essays was written in Hebrew, and aimed at beginners who know a little bit about computers but probably never heard about the concept of "free software" before.
  A slightly modified and edited (and in some respects, improved) form of this essay is this lecture.
• "Behar" Torah-reading (in Hebrew, May, 2006) My interpretation of Parashat Behar, which I gave in a synagogue on the week before my wedding.

Web Pages

Web page creation was never my main job. However, I have created quite a few web pages, mainly as a hobby, and rarely for money. Here is a list of some of the more important web pages I've created:

• iGuide is a highly acclaimed guide to WWW sites in Israel. I started iGuide in 1994 as "The (almost) Complete Guide to WWW in Israel", and in 1998 it was merged with John Neystadt's "Israeli Internet Guide", to become iGuide in its current form.
• The Cola Page is a small hobby page about my favorite soft-drink, containing pictures, sounds, links and more.
• Division of Continuing Education and External Studies this is one of the sites I was hired to do. The site is mostly textual (mostly in Hebrew), and among other things includes a complete descriptions of all the division's courses.
• Ivrix this is organization I initiated for advancing Hebrew support on Linux (and other Unix-like systems). This initiative sparked some new development, but even more so an active community for discussions.
• harel.org.il is a site I created for my family. For example, nadav.harel.org.il is my homepage.

Miscellaneous

• I designed the logo of Hamakor, the Israeli Association of Free Software and Open Source.

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