Searching for “Karlsruhe” on Amazon.com, I found a few sellers that reprint old photochrom (sic) photographs from the collection of the Library of Congress. Among them, these three beautiful old photos of my university city Karlsruhe (Baden), dated somewhere around the turn of the last century:

First, the “General View of Karlsruhe” as seen from the residence castle, facing south.

This one, “Lake in Public Garden” shows the Stadtgartensee, which is now inside the Karlsruhe Zoo.

At last, the Vierordtbad — a public, in-door pool, that’s been built in the 1870s. Completely renovated in the early aughts, it has now as “young” a look as ever. (Side note: The picture title is, incorrectly, “Vierortsbad” = “four city bath”, but it was actually called after a gentleman named “Vierordt” who donated some 40 % of the original building costs back in the day).

Very nice photos! But, while this makes the city look “old”, Karlsruhe is actually quite the kid, compared to other German cities. It was not founded until 1715, when the Margrave of Baden-Durlach decided to build a new residence — and a nice little city to go with it.

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.