Søren Hansen

It appears that a great many people have no idea how to brew a pot of coffee, so here's a quick howto:

1. Pour an amount of water slightly larger than the amount of coffee you want into the coffee machine
2. The coffee machine has some sort of measurement for the amount of water you've put into it.
3. Take reading from the previous step and divide it by two. That's the amount of tea spoons of coffee you need to put into the filter.

The magic part is the size of a "tea spoon of coffee". It is defined as: the highest amount of coffee you can possibly balance on tea spoon. As you become a more experienced coffee drinker, you'll want stronger coffee and the better you'll be at balancing coffee on a tea spoon. I've been drinking coffee for about twenty years and I like my coffee Real Strong™ and I can balance obscene amounts of coffee on one tea spoon. I just might post an action shot of it within the next couple of days.

I've decided to attend the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Paris, France. Unfortunately, it takes place right in the middle of all of my exams, so I'm going to have to try and charm the secretary into moving the offending exams so I won't have to go home in the middle of the summit.

Ah.. And I have just found the first shortcoming of my new category-aware gnome-blog. I can only select ONE category while both the XML-RPC interface which Serendipity uses (MetaWebLog) and Serendipity itself supports more than one category per article. Bummer.

Update: In case you're wondering how I then got more than one category set for this article, I just did it from the plain old web interface.

...since my last post. My math exam went without a hitch. I drew "complex numbers" which ironically is a really simple subject. :-) We've started the 2nd semester and have formed a new group consisting of half of my old group and a few new ones. We're analysing the famous 15-puzzle (those tiny 4x4 puzzles with an empty square where you have to slide the tiles around until they are in the right order) and also Rubik's cube. It's good fun and very interesting. If you're interested the project home page is at http://c224.warma.dk/ (in Danish).

I've just finished project exam, which was my first "real" exam at university. By "real" I mean a graded exam (i.e. not just passed/not passed), and I must say it went quite well. I got a 10 which I suppose corresponds to an A- or something. The next exam is math the day after tomorrow. I'm a bit nervous, but one of our neighbour groups have their exam tomorrow, so we're hoping they can give us a heads up on what and how much to expect.

So, finally back home after a couple of VERY stressful weeks we had to form groups for the P1 project at university. The project suggestions for CS students were all something about web programming or something like that. Not very interesting and not very scientific if you ask me.. The suggestions for the math students, however, were quite interesting. They had "number theory and encryption", "coupling theory" (I think) and "Computer algebra", all of which I consider to be text book examples of computer science projects. So I decided to ditch the other CS students and either write about RSA encryption which I've done before so that'd be quite easy, I think, or something about coupling theory which I know next to nothing about.. In the end I went with the coupling theory thing, so I suppose I'm going to have a tough semester ahead of me. Tough but interesting and educational.

Today, we handed in our very first project report at university. And almost a full day ahead of time.. W00t! It's not a real project report, though, but only like half of it. The objective was to write a good analysis of the problem and propose a solution for it, so no actual coding or anything like that. :-( We've got an exam next wednesday which I'm pretty confident will be ok, but let's see. :-D

I was getting fed up with having to manually switch between my home WiFi configuration and the one at university, so I installed waproamd. The essid at university is "AAU", so I created a file in /etc/waproamd/scripts called "essid:AAU":

#!/bin/sh

ifup $IFACE=uni

In my /etc/network/interfaces I have this:

iface uni inet dhcp
     wireless-essid AAU
     wireless-key off
     up /usr/sbin/vpnc-connect tnb1
     down /usr/sbin/vpnc-disconnect

So whenever waproamd discovers a wireless network with essid "AAU" it connects to it, and I don't have to do a thing.

All I have left to do now is some sort of automagic proxy configuration...

Our first project at university is called the P0 project. The P0 project is only half a project. Normally a projects contains an analysis of the problem, a number of proposed solutions, maybe an implementation of one of the solutions, and a conclusion. The P0 project is pretty much just the problem analysis. Our project is about the administrative and organisational problems involved when writing a project like this. Like figuring out what everyone else is doing so that you don't do stuff that's already being done, logging stuff we talk about on IRC, sharing links to info about the subjects, etc.. Let's see how it goes.