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.

I just noticed that during the last few weeks, through the projects I am working on and classes I am attending now, the number of programming languages I am handling on a daily basis has increased to six:

• PHP and JavaScript, for AMO and similar
• Perl, for Bouncer
• Python, for Kubla CMS
• C for my Systems Architecture and Parallel Programming classes
• Visual Basic for an older in-house software project I am maintaining

(Let’s not mention the occasional line of Assembler that programming assignments tend to require )

I am excited: More variety spices this all up a little. Though sometimes the drawbacks in the respective languages become all too obvious when only days before you have done the same thing in another language with 2 lines of code and today you need 20 to do it elsewhere. But I guess the motto of the mutt email client does apply to programming languages too:

All programming languages suck — some just suck less

Inspired by a post Justin Scott made a while ago, let’s summarize how much more it’ll take me to graduate from college: To my surprise, I realized a few months ago that I am actually pretty close — I only have a handful more classes left, but see for yourself:

• Operating Systems Design (4h)
• Multicore and Cluster Computing (2h)
• Data Warehousing and Data Mining (3h)
• Human-Computer Interaction (3h)
• Organizational Theory (3h)
• Seminar: Economic Anomalies and Paradoxes

(The hours mean hours per week, all through the semester, and do not include recitations or tutorials).

After that, I will have to write a 6-months masters thesis, and after that, I will graduate with a masters degree in Information Engineering and Management.

All this adds up to about a year which — if you ask me — is pretty awesome.

If I was to buy a scooter, it would be this one — And no, Mozilla is not expanding into the scooter business

This is a picture I took a long long time ago in Karlsruhe and just now stumbled across again.

Rumor has it, GMail’s storage may some day soon be cranked up to 10 gigabyte.

That’d be sweet, for sure.

While I am really not (yet) in danger of hitting the limit (at the time of writing it’s 2887 Megabytes), I still find myself deleting pictures etc. that I get by email if they are “too big” ever so often. Maybe I am too conservative there, but I still consider mails > 1 MB to be “big” and I tend to delete them if and when I can. It’d be nice if I had a reason to get more 21st-century-ish about it

I need to admit though, that GMail and most of its competitors are already beating accounts like my university email by far. I finally stopped using that one when I ran into its ridiculous 50 megabyte limit twice a month.

(via valleywag)

Update: It’s Google’s “Shared Storage” Program that made people’s GMail storage amount increase. Sadly, they increased the impressive one dollar price for 6 Gigabytes to 20 dollars just shortly after the program was started.