Martin Geisler Online

I had my first exam (in dADS) last Monday. It was a written test that lasted four hours. It wasn’t exactly an easy exam, there was four major questions each with three or four subquestions. I answered all the subquestions except one. Now we’ll just have to wait for the result.

The next exam is also a written test, this time in Probability Theory. It’s a week away now, so I have plenty of time to get prepared. I’m also pretty confident with this exam because we have done a lot of training with the questions from previous exams. It’s the same four questions each year — the numbers are just a bit different :-)

It’s time for the exams — I’ll be working at problems in dADS for four hours this Monday… So things will probably be somewhat quiet here at gimpster.com the next month or so. Bye for now!

It seems that the Windows community is suffering from yet another virus-attack. I’ve received 53 — no make that 54 — mails from all over the world with an attachment of type audio/x-wav and various subjects.

I believe that this is the W32/Klez.h@mm virus that is to blame, so please get yourself some good antivirus software (and keep it updated) if you’re using Windows or any other operating system for that matter — you can also get antivirus software for Linux these days. It’s just that the vast majority of viruses target Windows based machines because there are so many more machines to infect by doing so instead of going after Linux or Macs.

It’s also much harder for a virus to infect a machine like mine because I don’t use a mailreader that will execute each and every script it sees… It does happen from time to time that I receive a HTML-email. Gnus will then invokes the W3 webbrowser in Emacs to display the mail. This browser doesn’t support any of the scripting languages used by viruses — it just displays the page. It’s this kind of simplicity that keeps systems secure — I’ve never heard that all those scripting capabilities were used for something useful, instead we hear again and again that a virus has been allowed to executed malicious code on the client machine. So if you’ve never used those scripting capabilities, then please turn them off — if you can…

I’ve received a couple of mails with reports about the price on Coke. It seams that although I only paid about $1 for 1.5 liter, then you can get it cheaper in the US — about $1 for 2 litre :-) It really makes you wonder what this stuff really costs to produce? Not much I guess…

I’ve only consumed three bottles so far, which is a bit below the limit of half a liter per day if you’re interested :-) But I’m having my first exam in just 13 days, so I’ll need more caffeine at that time :-)

I discovered yesterday, that the extended addresses I’m using with TMDA had stopped working. I guess that NETsite must have changed the configuration on the mailserver. So I had to deactivate TMDA until I found a solution to the problem — I wrote them an email and they suggested that I made [email protected] the catch-all address for the domain.

So, that solved the problem, but I was still unprotected a couple of hours The result: four spam mails in by inbox! I’m glad that TMDA is on guard once again.