An homage to the famous 1970s arcade game Space Invaders, seen on an office door at the University of Karlsruhe:
If you twist my arm...
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.
Programming Language Variety
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 :)
Graduation Date
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.
Firefox Scooter
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.
Google to increase GMail Storage?
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.
Karlsruhe rules
A week of work, and the world already turns out to be entirely a village: Dan Mosedale, lead developer on the Lightning Project (= Mozilla Calendar as a Thunderbird extension) spent a year at the University of Karlsruhe studying Informatik (computer science) in the early 1990s.
About a decade later, I started studying there, and I still am.
Looks like -- to use the words of one of my favorite professors in Germany -- Karlsruhe rules :)
Google Maps Updated
This was blogged at least a million times today and it was dugg, too. Google updated their photos in Google Maps and Earth all over the world.
This includes high-res pictures of many metropolitan areas. But it was a real pleasure to see that my university city in Germany now comes with the highest possible resolution Google maps has.
Look at the whole downtown area or at an overview of the university campus. That's amazing!
The pictures, by the way, seem to be from early 2005 judging from the fact that the new 24-hour library which was opened a few months ago is still heavily being built on in the picture.
(via Karlsruhe Stadtblog)