Friday, September 30, 2005

unhappy campers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstudents and panic-proof test

Today my colleagues published the results of the final exams in algorithms. The most interesting part of publishing exam results is watching the "secret" student discussion panels where some of them typically start to claim that they must have been obviously treated in an unfair manner. Some of them are even quite sure that teaching assistants at a university are typically bestial monsters with only one goal in their life: shooting down as many students as possible. And I thought that _I_ might be paranoid in former days...

If you are a student and read this: I promise you that no dead student bodies were found yet in the backyard of the computer science building here in Mannheim thus it is very likely that you will survive as well even if you ask questions to the teaching assistants about a topic you did not understand in the course. It is definitely more helpful in that case to ask questions than to hide seemingly dead in the course room. If you think that you have understood a topic try to explain it to a friend. If you don't manage to make him understand the topic you most likely did not understand it yourself and you will most likely fail in the final exams.

Some people say that it is almost impossible to upset me. So the manufacturer of my uplink router decided to help me escape from this dilemma by providing a new firmware release with a bunch of shiny new features. Typically when you upload a new firmware to the router you start the management tool, point it to the new firmare image, and wait for about 30 seconds, then it restarts and reestablishes connection to the internet. This time it was different: I started the management tool and pointed it to the new firmware image. The management tool told me that it will load the new firmware now. It claimed that during the firmware update the INFO led will flash continuously (it did) and that the router will reboot afterwards (it did as well) and that I can relogin then. Actually after rebooting the Power led started to flash continuously. I said to myself: "Ah, it is rebooting now!". the Power led continued to flash for some more minutes. I changed my mind to: "Is it still rebooting?" It still continued flashing for some more minutes what made me again to change my mind to: "Uhm... I mean... what the heck is going on here?!?" I tried to login to the mangement tool as it was promised by the tool to be possible after the upgrade had been completed and actually it did work. The management tool told me that the router is now restarting his efforts to establish the internet uplink. Some seconds later he told me again that it is restarting the very same efforts. Some more seconds later again. And again. And again... I watched the log for some minutes in discomfort and thought: "Uhm..." Finally I reconsidered what is often helpful to "fix" software bugs: Restart it! After I did so with the router it continued to flash the Power led for some more minutes but finally surrendered from his resistance and actually established the uplink connection. I'm very grateful to the manufacturer of my uplink router for implementing thrilling upgrade adventures into their firmware just to bring some extra excitement to my life.

Thursday, September 29, 2005

SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha1 release

Today SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha1 was released which basically meant I had to play QA a lot. First they did not ship delta images for the ISO images. Obviously I immediately complained. (Complaining is one of my favorite hobbies.) Next thing I noticed was that there is no inst-source tree. But this time I was wrong because they did just hide it in a different directory. So I had to do a deeper inspection to find the next problem and finally succeeded by finding that the inst-source-java tree did not contain Java which is not necessarily a bug but at least quite... uhm... unusual. After complaining again they decided to fix it. To conclude my QA exercises I again complained that public drpmsync is not yet up and running.

Currently I am upgrading my system to the new release. If you don't hear me complaining the next days, something went _really_ terribly wrong...

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

stressed people, fun with debugging, and vaccination against influence

Seems that I have completely recovered from my marathon now. At today's exercise my pulse was again back to normal.

Some other people seem never to recover. You know those always stressed people that tell you everytime when you meet them that they are completely stressed and have absolutely no time for almost anything. My personal thesis is that they could gain much of free time if they omitted always complaining about having no time. One of these stressed guys told me some months ago that he liked to have his identity certified by me to get a cryptographic certificate. After I told him that he just has to come along with his national identity card he wondered whether he could manage to do so. He didn't. Yesterday he requested again to be certified and assured that he will come along today. Seems he again didn't manage it. --- Poor stressed guy...

At our department they worked again at the integration of a log library to our database system to have more fun in debugging the code. I have seen the bunch of macros in the header files of that log library. I'm sure there will be "fun" with debugging after integration of that library but I'm not quite sure whether this is the same type of fun they expected to have...

To support debugging of my personal medical conditions the media in Germany currently propose to do vaccination against influence. As some others counter that this is only recommended for children, old people, and individuals with a specific risk I decided to ask at my doctor's practice whether they recommended this for me. The answer I got was: "We have enough vaccine available." --- Well actually that was not exactly an answer to my question but as they have enough available I decided to get some tomorrow to prevent the critical situation that they have to throw it away unused...

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

hacking with Google Maps and subscribing for new spam

Today I hacked the data recorded by my GPS receiver at the marathon in Karlsruhe into Google Maps code. The result is visible at http://pi3.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/~schiele/maps/karlsruhe.html. Actually I had to throw away 75% of the recorded points because otherwise the Google Maps JavaScript code makes my Firefox explode.

I have done the same for some of my training courses earlier at http://pi3.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/~schiele/maps/lauf.html. Note that the headlines are clickable on that page. But don't reload the page to often because at least with my Firefox it seems that the JavaScript interpreter is somehow leaking memory resulting in a really sloooooow browser after some time.

Christian created some new mailing lists for the openSUSE project today. Naturally I immediately subscribed because I like being spammed by list servers. ;-)

Monday, September 26, 2005

lift "out of order"

Now finally they marked the lift as being "out of order" for security reasons after my neighbour crashed to the emergency stop limit on the top floor with full speed.

After all I can understand now why people always claim that using the staircase instead of the lift keeps you healthy...

BitTorrent, exams, and stuff like that

After doing my regular running exercise in the morning I went to my office. Nothing special there but one colleague already sitting there providing some pastries to give others a hint about his birthday which happened to occur during the weekend.

Today's toy project was to establish a BitTorrent tracker to make the current Natix release availlable via BitTorrent. Not that the one-digit number of downloads really requires this but nowadays you just need to have a BitTorrent image, don't you?

My colleagues had some different "toy project". They are marking the algorithm exams. From time to time you can hear a mixture of laughter and cries of pain from their office. I'm quite familiar with that situation. Actually I haved marked a huge amount of exams in recent years as well and thus I am aware of the cruelty of some answers.

After having survived the marathon in Karlsruhe I consider to register for the marathon in Mannheim in May but actually I should recheck expected temperature for that time because I don't like running 42 kilometers when there are more than 15 degrees Celsius.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Yet another Blog?

People may ask why everybody starts a blog nowadays. Well, if you find an answer to this question tell me!

I always was of the opinion that a blog is something really boring and that I actually will never need one. But since I found that it becomes more and more a common practice to do public rants on blogs the idea became interesting for me. I always wondered at whom I should cry if I see people complaining about merging problems when trying to checkin code they edited four months ago into the revision controll system and when reading the resulting C++ code.

So be prepared...