Returning to Auckland Aero Club

A few weeks ago I returned back to my favorite Aero Club in New Zealand

Almost 30 years ago, back in 1994, I tried to feel for the first time how it is to fly an airplane at Auckland Aero Club in New Zealand.

Back then, I was sent to New Zealand for a week on behalf of Amdocs, in order to conduct meetings with a local Telecom company that worked with the Ministry of Tourism, offering them the development of Information Kiosks.

I used an old 8mm video I filmed back in 1994, in order to locate my old flying school. Here is a snapshot of Auckland Aero Club from that old video:

Here is Auckland back then (1994).

Luckily, I kept the Pilot Log Book with the information about the flying lessons I took back then, and during my recent visit, (almost 2 months this time), after I took some flying lessons in other countries, I came back wishing to continue from where I left off…

That morning, at 7:00 AM, I went jogging in Auckland. I ran 12 Km from Auckland to Mission Bay and back.

_{My Facebook post that morning}

A few hours later, I flew a Cessna 172 Skyhawk, with the guidance of William Lee-Johnson, to Auckland, and above Mission Bay, the same area I ran to that morning (12 Km run).

From my running app

Taking off…

Auckland from above

Ruth, sat at the back and took some amazing photos.

The instructor, William Lee-Johnson, was very cooperative and filled my Log Book (from 1996) after we landed.

Looking forward to my next flight! To be continued…

What You Cpp is What You Get

Ruth Haephrati and I have been working on our new book, Learning C++, with the amazing team of professionals at Manning Publishing, New York, for over a year now. I am proud to announce that we have reached a huge milestone, as of Aug 30, 2022 (EST), it’s available as part of Manning Early Access Program (MEAP). Now you can get the first chapters immediately, as well as access to a forum where you can post questions and get our answers directly! Ruth and I would like to offer you an exclusive MEAP launch discount code: mlhaephrati (40% off Learning C++ in all formats), and it’s valid through September 13th at http://mng.bz/aPPX .

More chapters to come, and soon the printed version will also be available for purchase.

C++ is alive and kicking and is considered by many to be one of the most powerful and robust programming languages across all platforms. 

_{Learning C++ by Michael Haephrati and Ruth Haephrati}

Here, at Secured Globe, Inc. we use C++ for most of our ventures, projects, and collaborations, such as our SG Revealer, a recently developed Malware Detection Engine, for Anti-Virus products, was developed in C++ and is. In this book, we take a step-by-step journey, laying out the fundamentals of the most modern C++20, and, at the same time, use a practical and simple approach, so you will not only understand the basics of C++ in theory, but you will also learn how to use your new skills in real-life projects and get your hands “dirty” writing code. We explain the “why”, not only the “how”. 

Explaining a bit about Rahumon

Our book is aimed at those with NO previous knowledge or experience with any programming language, or even knowledge in the basics of computer science. Our book is also suitable for those who have some experience in other programming languages and are new to C++.

Please “like” and share this announcement

My book

https://learningcplusplus.blog/2023/05/11/45-off-only-on-may-13th/

Please subscribe to our book blog.

Participating in the Phantom Run

Running 12 Km as part of the Phantom Run in North Vancouver.

After 9 Km

The Phantom Run 2021, took place on November 13th. For me, it was an extremely chalanging run with 1/2Km accends and decends, some of them are stiff stairs. It was shocking, being the first time running in this trail. I finally made it and enjoyed a warm soup.

Project for the blind people

As part of a Secured Globe, Inc. project with Freedom Scientific, Inc., the creators of JAWS, and as part of adding support to Albanian, I developed a small tool for converting PDF files into text so another piece of software we develop can convert thousands of e-books in Albanian and using AI techniques, create an optimal list of sentences in the Albanian language that can be recorded and added to the JAWS platform.

Github Repo

https://github.com/securedglobernd/SG_PDF2Text

Download Link

https://gograb.site/SG_PDF2TXT.exe

Auto Update Mechanism

Github issue with previous versions

I work a lot with Github and we, at Secured Globe, Inc. manage our own repo as well. When our programmers push changes in the source code, I somestime need to revert back and I do that by going to the previous version, download it, and compare to the recent one, then update it and push.

I contacted Github’s support after finding out that when I go to a previous version of the source code, and downloading it, I get the latest version.
This wasn’t like that before and seems to be a bug in their system.

I created a small POC video:

I received the following response today:

Hi Michael,

Thanks for reporting this!

We have had a few reports of this bug over the last couple of days and our engineers are looking in to it. It’s very useful for us to have more data points, so thank you for submitting this report! I’ve passed it on to the team.

As a temporary workaround, you can manually construct the download URL with the commit SHA you want to download:

https://github.com/{username}/{projectname}/archive/{sha}.zip

I’m afraid our system is going to mark this ticket as “solved” now that the issue has been created with the engineering team, but that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten about it! In the meantime, please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you and we will be happy to assist!

Thanks,

Tammy
GitHub Support

London Summer Run

I participated in the London Summer Run for Cancer Research. It was fun!

A new article

I published a new article https://haephrati.medium.com/when-dostoyevskys-muse-and-a-rogue-nose-were-hosted-on-ibm-cloud-6893acdfd7a2

My script for backing up Alexa recordings

A while ago I developed a Python script for backing up Alexa‘s (Amazon Echo devices) voice recordings. Many of these recordings are just random voice recordings captured for no reason while other are commands given to Alexa. You can get the software in our web site.

I have written the following article in CodeProject.

Following a touching email I received from someone who was able to get his late mother’s recording after she passed away and thanked me, It went vital in Reddit . It broke the all times record being the highest voted post of all times!