Martin Geisler Online

I had my last exam today — I got the grade 11 again. The exam was in DAIMI:dDistSik and I had to talk about “LAN systems and LAN technology”. I liked the question for I’ve been playing a lot with LANs in the last five years. I talked about the topologies of LANs (buslans, starshaped, ringshaped LANs) about the media used and about the MAC protocols used, that is the media access control protocols that determine how the media is shared between the hosts connected to it. It all went rather well.

When I had talked for about 15 minutes they started to ask me questions, they wanted to talk about an entirely different thing (it’s almost always a good sign when they want to change the subject radically) namely transactions. My lecturer asked me if normal two-phase locking (as opposed to strict two-phase locking) would be enough if we were given the guarantee that all transactions would be commited by the clients, that is that there could be no aborts. It was a rather specific and tricky question in my opinion — I knew about transactions, locking and was able to talk about that, but I couldn’t come up with a rigoursly argument for or against the use of two-phase locking… I guess that’s why they gave me 11 and not 13.

Anyway… this was my last exam, so I’ll be relaxing for a couple of months now. I’m really looking forward to it :-) I’ll buy a new computer sometime soon now and I also have to play with [PHP Shell][] (I’ve figured out how to implement a commandline history using JavaScript) and my new SPAM filter POPFile which is a learning filter instead of my old filter TMDA. I’ve been using POPFile for a couple of days now and it works very well, it learns incredibly fast.

Happy holidays to everybody (my apologies to those who still have a couple of weeks left… :-)

I’ve just had my second exam this semester, I got the grade 11 for my presentation of decidable problems and reductions in DAIMI:dModLog. So this stops my run of 13’s… too bad, but I knew that it was just a matter of time.

Now there’s just the final exam in DAIMI:dDistSik left — I’ve got a week to prepare 16 questions so if I can do three each day then I’ll be fine. That’s it for now, later…

I’m still looking around for a new quiet system to replace my old system. Today I found the SID FutureClient® which is a complete, modern PC built without any fans at all!

The PC is build around a special liquid cooling system which means that it can use a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 without requiring a fan. The power supply is able to deliver 170 W with an efficiency of over 85%. This means that it will loose 30 W of power as heat to the air when drawing 200 W. The rest is converted from AC to DC and then later turned into heat in the CPU, the harddrives, the RAM etc.

The case is built from aluminium and looks very stylish. It’s so strong that I will be able to put my big Philips 201P10 21″ monitor on top of it.

All very nice… the catch is the price tag: about 2,000 €. That’s a lot of money for a new computer, especially when you don’t get bleeding-edge performance. But then again, such a PC isn’t aimed at people who require the latest hardware to play the latest games, it’s rather aimed at people who are willing to pay that extra to get a completely silent PC.

I guess that if I saw one of these in real life running GNU/Linux, then I would buy it right away — for now I’ll look around a little more. I’ve had my old machine since September 2000, so a month more or less doesn’t make a huge difference. It also seems that I keep finding new interesting quiet products, it’s certainly nice to get an idea of the available options before you go and pay more than 1,500 € for a new machine.

I had my first exam yesterday and it went absolutely fantastic for I got the grade 13. It was an oral exam in Real Analysis, I got a question where I had to talk about the Lebesgue integral of a bounded measurable function over a set of finite measure.

That was a pretty good question, I started by defining the Lebesgue integral of a simple function, and then proceeded by proving that the supremum of integrals of simple functions phi; dominated by a given function f equals the infimum of integrals of dominating simple functions psi; if and only if the function f is measurable. After that we talked about other things until my lecturer and the censor were satisfied and I left the room. They then discussed the grade for what seamed like a very long time… finally Jørgen Vesterstrøm came out and told me the good news.

To put things into proper context, I have to mention that I’m not the only one who got 13 at this exam. Mikkel Krøigård also made it all the way to the top, and so did at least five other, I’ve heard about a total of seven 13’s at this exam alone. But this is because of the way things work at these exams: if you make a performance that’s 98% correct, then they’ll give you 13. And with the exams in mathematics it’s actually possible to do this reliably because we get the list of questions before the exam. It’s also easier to judge people at these exams because the material we present is so objective — there’s no arguing in math, it’s either correct or wrong.

So now I’ll have to get started with the next exam which lies a little more than a week ahead. See you then!