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.

Exactly 75 years ago today, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor by the President of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg. This was the start of the Nazi regime and marked the beginning of what would become the darkest chapter in German history.

The very same day, Hitler’s SA goons (nicknamed the “brown shirts”) started bullying people in the streets and held torchlight processions. In an article in the local paper today, it is mentioned that none of these processions happened in Ettlingen, the fairly little city I live in (which consisted of hardly 10,000 citizens at the time), and in the few remaining elections, the catholic “Zentrum” party still got the majority in the city, in spite of the overwhelming propaganda started by the Nazis. However, that this is a sign of “inner resistance” can be doubted: The same year, 1933, the city awarded Hitler honorary citizenship for his “immortal achievements” for Germany — something that hardly speaks for neutrality, let alone resistance.

A nice quote (yet, due to his slightly vulgar Berlin dialect, hardly ever officially mentioned) comes from Max Liebermann, a German painter of the time, who was allegedly watching the Nazi procession in Berlin from his apartment, when he said (my translation):

You know, I can hardly eat as much as I’d like to vomit.

In one month now, on February 27th, it will be the 75 anniversary of the Reichstag fire, an arson attack to the German parliament that the Nazis took as an excuse for their infamous Reichstag Fire Decree, abolishing central constitutional rights in order to suppress any opposition to the regime.

At the time, a Dutch bricklayer was allegedly arrested inside the Reichstag claiming he had set the fire. He was sentenced to death and killed in early 1934. However, he was likely a scapegoat and who actually set the Reichstag on fire remains unclear still today. Only two weeks ago, the death sentence against him was finally officially thrown out by a German judge, on the basis of the violation of “breaches of basic conceptions of justice”. At the time of the fire, arsonists could not be sentenced to death in the Weimar Republic; only an emergency decree released after the fact and applied retroactively led to his eventual execution.

As you can see, Germany still hasn’t worked through all the remainders of nazism and is still today in the process of “cleaning up” the injustice left by the regime.

Librivox.org, a public domain audiobook project, has a copy of Mark Twain’s fabulous essay “The Aweful German Language” in which he pleasurably depicts the pitfalls and oddities of the German language. The summary reads:

If you’ve ever studied German (and maybe even if you haven’t), you’re likely to find this short essay to be hilarious. Published as Appendix D from Twain’s 1880 book A Tramp Abroad, this comedic gem outlines the pitfalls one will encounter when trying to wrap one’s mind around the torturous German cases, adjective endings, noun genders, and verb placement.
(Summary by Kara)

Incidentally, the audiobook is read by a German, which adds to its hilarity. (And I hereby admit to probably having a similar accent, so yeah…)

By the way: Don’t take the poor Mark Twain too literally. German really isn’t that bad!

Link to the audiobook (the page also has a link to add it to iTunes with one click).

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.

Funny: According to German news magazine tagesschau.de, the CNN weather forecast still draws a thick border between the former German Democratic Republic and West Germany:

Of course, we really can’t expect them to update their maps within 17 years after a major political event.

The screenshot is an actual screenshot from today, but meanwhile, CNN has acknowledged the “recent” developments in world history and removed the obsolete border. Luckily, you can’t zoom in any further — otherwise we’d likely find the Berlin Wall intact and well-guarded .

After German phone carrier T-Mobile has recently started selling the unlocked iPhone for the ridiculous price of 999 Euros, now also Orange in France published their price for the unlocked version of the Apple cellphone: 749 Euros. Luckily for Germans, the EU is a customs union, so they can pretty easily order it in France and have it shipped to Germany — even the higher shipping won’t make up for the 250 Euro difference.

I also hope that the court which ordered T-Mobile to sell the phone unlocked (still a temporary injuction, IIRC) will follow up and make them sell it for a realistic price eventually. Right now, my guess is that the hefty price tag can not be considered effectively complying with the court order. Yet, even with the current price, some competitors start taking advantage of the situation: T-Mobile competitor Debitel (well, sort-of-competitors, they are resellers for carriers such as, you guessed it, T-Mobile) started handing out a 600 Euro signup rebate for people buying the iPhone over at T-Mobile and subsequently getting a contract at Debitel. Interesting.

On other news, German grocery store chains are still selling the (aging but still pretty good) Motorola RAZR for little more than 100 Euros, unlocked and without a contract.

(Image CC by-nc-nd licensed by Graft Flo on flickr).

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