Just to give you a piece of unwanted knowledge, I just passed my last exam ever! It was about parallel programming, by the way.

Now it’s really only my masters thesis that stands between me and graduation. Yay!

Something tells me, this sign I came across in a German store has one “e” too much:

Or maybe I just missed the latest trend and in fact, slime is the new black.

Unbelievable: This coming week is my last week of classes, ever. It will be followed by an 8-week period of exams (with 1-2 weeks in between every two exams).

Then, provided I pass them all (which I like to hope), I will have done all requirements but my master’s thesis in order to graduate from college with a degree in Information Engineering and Management.

I can’t believe I am almost done studying — it still feels like I’ve only started attending university just recently. Time flies, I guess.

Today I sent a support request to the computer pool admins at my university’s CS school, so they upgrade Firefox to version 2 any time soon. The Fedora Core instances on these boxes are still on Fx 1.5.12.

I mean, it’s only been out for a year and Firefox 1.5’s lifetime has ended for half a year now, so that sounds like it’s about time for an update.

Interestingly though, the Fedora Project seems to keep version 1.5 until they can switch to 3.0 (therefore completely skipping Firefox 2). And unless I am mistaken, the pool computers still run FC 6. So my request may not be successful after all. But unless Fedora backports security patches to the 1.5 branch (which may arguably be more work than just switching to Firefox 2?) I strongly oppose keeping unsupported software versions for any significant time. Especially in a university setting with hundreds of users happily surfing the web on a daily basis. And especially for a web browser, which by definition constantly gets its hands dirty with possibly harmful code.

Let’s see what they say — I sure hope it’ll be more useful than your average “just boot into Windows, then”…

Update: Just about half a second after I blogged this, the pool people answered that Fedora still backports patches into Firefox 1.5, and soon (that is, once Fedora drops support for version 6), the pool computers will get an upgrade to FC 8, which will also contain Firefox 2 then.

Excellent.

Part of a conversation I overheard in the dining hall today, apparently between two maybe third-semester computer scientists:

These information engineers are the worst! I have met them in my CS 2 class! They ask the weirdest questions and they don’t even know basic mathematics!

Despite the insult, this amused me. Silly boy, believing anyone here hasn’t been tortured with “basic mathematics” for a significant amount of time

An homage to the famous 1970s arcade game Space Invaders, seen on an office door at the University of Karlsruhe:

With my discount card for young people from the French train system, sometimes buying train tickets leads to strange results: This time, because second class tickets were almost sold out (and I was unable to get anything more than a 25% rebate), first class tickets actually turned out to be cheaper:

So I will soon be able to give the first class seats in the latest-generation French TGV trains a shot. If you twist my arm, I guess I can resort to this kind of traveling

This will of course only happen if they figure out their little major strike problem soon over there. We’ll see.