While I was traveling, my mailbox filled up with a few letters, one from the OSU Foundation who I asked to resend their letter because I never received the one they sent me in 2006.

Now I am pretty sure I know why I never got it, because this is how the address part of the letter looks like:

Even if I — friendly as I am — ignore the multiple misspellings of my first name and the random middle initial, one question remains: Who is this mysterious Donna Wenzel?

(As a side note I wonder if there is actually an quasi-namesake out there somewhere who they confused me with.)

Recently, I have to do a lot of point plots for one of my classes, i.e. taking huge amounts of two-dimensional data points, having them “drawn” and printing out the resulting image.

Usually, for this job, I used Maple, mostly because this is my computer algebra system of choice since I used it in my advanced math course in high school. It is just so much better in tedious arithmetic than I am ;). Writing a little script, I read in the provided data file by the teacher and returned an expression that I could directly copy and paste into Maple. The resulting graphs look somehow like this:

However yesterday, I managed to break Maple. I read in two lists of a few hundred data points each and wanted to plot them together with a function in one plot. So far so bad: In spite of the correct syntax, I got some evaluation errors and an empty plot. Great.

So I tried gnuplot, the apparent “industry standard” for all sorts of scientific data and function plots (unless, of course, you spend a sh*load of money on Matlab ;)). And, within minutes, thanks to the numerous howtos on the Internet I was able to make much more beautiful (and working) plot such as this one:

And I finally understand why so many people are using it: It is just the right tool for the job.

One tutorial I want to point out in particular are the not so frequently asked questions that helped me a lot to get the trivial, not-so-trivial-after-all tasks done to get a little more sleep and spend a little less time on homework.

Today I went to a tiny little ACM workshop at OSU. One of the other OSL guys¹ was talking about building accessible web sites with CSS.

Pretty interesting stuff. And, even though I should already know all that, I am always glad to hear stuff from different perspectives.

However, it make me wanna play on some CSS again. I wanted to rebuild the website of my high school graduation class since some months anyway. After a weird incident², I had to take the news script off the site, making it more or less static and not truly informative anymore.

At the same time, I wanted to try out Textpattern as a somehow lightweight, but also mighty content management system. A friend of mine really prefers it for her websites (therefore recommended it to me more than once), and she recently did some very nice CSS magic on her blog.

For today, I only made my laptop carry a lighttpd webserver and snagged some old website source code. But I am going to hack on textpattern soon³.

Thanks for bringing “CSS mojo” to my mind again, Morgamic!

Ah, if you want to read more about it, Mike made a nice “Accessible CSS” wiki page with quite a bunch of useful links for you.

Oh, and thanks for reading the article with the most footnotes I ever made ⁴

[1] by the way, I should bug someone to include me in this list – have to take a photo, though
[2] some script kiddie defaced the site through a security flaw in the news script we were using.
[3] maybe on the OSLUG hacking social? If I go there once after band rehearsal on wednesdays…
[4] I’m serious!

Today, I got my social security card. (Yes it is as ugly as in the picture…)

This, however, is no big secret. Almost every American has one.

The bigger secret is the number itself. Being discovered by “bad guys”, they can do quite a bunch of bad things concerning identity theft. Therefore it is a sensitive document, and you don’t want to carry it around. And you don’t want arbitrary people know your number. Maybe your employer. Maybe your bank. But nobody else. Especially not the bad guys mentioned above.

Considering this, it is impressive that you are asked for your SSN almost everywhere. I don’t really get why some companies should need it, but they ask for it nonetheless. Being an international student is usually a good excuse not to have one, however it is strange how easily this sensitive data is asked for and written down everywhere.

If I read it right, once upon a time even the “student ID” number at Oregon State University was derived from the SSN.

For my job however I have to inform the university administration of my new SSN now. But I kind of hesitate to send it via plain text email. – “No problem!”, you would guess, “as a facility that has to handle sensitive data every day, they surely have a bunch of GPG public keys (or something else) for their employees. I mean, they must be interested in the privacy of their students!”

But no, no, you might have anticipated what comes now: Of course they do not have GPG keys for us to use, of course they want me to send my sensitive data via unencrypted email, and of course they have no clue why plain text emails are bad.

Surprising? No.

Sad? Kinda. :-/

How cool was that?

To celebrate 100 million firefox downloads, the OSU LUG and the NASA launched a weather balloon today called “Firefox One”. I’ve been there on the MU quad with quite a bunch of other people who were celebrating the Firefox jubilee (or just thought “cool, what a nice balloon”).

The balloon is a latex thing weighing something like 3 kilograms in total. It is filled with helium and will go up to the final height of 100 000 feet, which is right at the edge of space. During all its flight, the digital cameras mounted to the balloon will take pictures of where they are. Eventually, when going too high, the balloon will rupture and on a parachute, it will go back down to the earth. Someone will hopefully find it and call the number that’s written on it.

And then – there will be photos of “Firefox One”’s fantastic journey I will keep you posted on that.

I made quite a few pictures during the launch today, too. I will post them as soon as I get home later.

The whole launch was also recorded by the Oregon State Webcam by the way. But as quite a lot (millions?) of firefox users clicked on it in order to see Firefox One launch, I am not quite sure if anyone was able to see any picture

Go Firefox!

Update: I uploaded some photos on my photo page (see: USA -> 2005-10-22 Firefox…)!
However, there are even more photos on the LUG website.

That’s kind of nice. Two very nice pieces of software hit “magical mile stones” these days.

My favorite web browser Firefox finally got unbelievable 100 million downloads. Celebrations! It’s one of the most wonderful open source software products I’ve ever seen. Go spread the word!

Another nice one – closed source though – is the voice over IP service Skype (not a google or yahoo toy, by the way, but soon an eBay one) that will finally break the four million users mark this week. In my opinion, it is still the best possibility to call home so far. It works unbelievably smooth even though the people I’m usually calling are roughly 5000 miles away.

So, it seems to be totally the right moment for me to get employed at the OSU Open Source Lab soon. It’s a good week, really w00t!

The Open Source Lab at OSU now (proudly) hosts the kernel master server.

When I got a tour through the OSL facilities on friday, I had the opportunity to take a sneak peek at the world’s most important server (okay I’m exagerating…). Actually it isn’t too fancy to look at at all, no blinking lights, no LCD display (as most of the other servers have it), no, just a tiny black box mounted to its rack of choice.

However, if you want to see some photos of the “historic event”, go ahead.