Martin Geisler Online

I’m have finally brought my computer back online again — so now the title of this website is true once again :-) The first thing to do was to update my Debian installation with about 400 MiB of updates. I’m tracking the soon-to-be-stable “testing” distribution of Debian, which means that I receive bug fixes pretty quickly after they are found and committed to the “unstable” distribution. But it also means that a lot of updates pile up when my computer isn’t online.

I’m online through a Netopia ADSL router, which we could buy from Bluewin for 200 CHF. That included the PCMCIA card for Stéphanie’s computer as well, so I think the price is reasonable. The only minus is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any way of making the card run under Debian — I’ve searched a lot and tried all the tricks I know but nothing worked. So I guess Stéphanie will be limited to Windows for now.

Today was my first day at ETH, and the two lectures I attended were quite good. The first was on Convex Optimization. I’ve previously taken at course dealing with optimization in general, so I was not totally lost when we quickly went through the Simplex method and the weak and strong duality theorems. But I must admit that it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at this kind of stuff…

The second lectures was on a completely different subject: Parallel and Distributed Databases. In the course at DAIMI about programming in the large we were introduced to the relational model for databases. In this course we will look at how queries performed against this model can be parallelized so that they can still be answered quickly. Here we’re talking about queries made against databases with gigabytes or terabytes of data, which is spread over many disks attached to different computers. I think this course will be very interesting!

In this first week there wont be any exercises, but in the coming weeks there will be… It will be interesting to see how they are compared to what I’m used to from DAIMI.

Stéphanie and I will spend the Easter holidays in Wallis. The last time I was in Wallis was in October, I think, so it’s good to be back.

The view of the Alps from Stéphanie’s parents house is just magnificent — especially for me since we don’t have any mountains at all in Denmark. In fact, the highest point in Denmark, a hill of about 180 metres, is well below the lowest point in Switzerland, which is about 330 metres as far as I know. That kind of puts things into perspective :-)

Today was the last day of the intensive German course I’ve been attending. I’ve written about the course before, and while discussing the course today with the other students it was clear, that I wasn’t the only one who expected something else than what was presented.

But now it doesn’t make so much of a difference what I think of the course — it’s over and next week the real fun begins: my study at the ETH. I’m really looking forward to the courses, both to learn their content, but also to see how things are done at the university down here.

I’ve been told that life is hard at the ETH, so I can only hope that life was hard too at DAIMI. I guess time will tell, and when it does, I’ll pass it along!

The workshop on Swiissdytsch that I’m attending has arranged a small trip to Basel, where our teacher Astrid will guide us through the city.

The impression I got from the two hour walk through the town is that Basel is a more quiet city than Zürich. Perhaps something like Berne, where I’ve spend a couple of weeks last year. Even though Berne is the capital of Switzerland, it’s still a nice and cozy town. Zürich is much fast-paced I think.

The night ended with a visit to the Bar Rouge, a fancy bar at the top of the Basel Messeturm. As the name implies, then everything in this bar is red, but what makes this bar special is the toilet: the wall is made of glass so that one has a fantastic view over the city while one does… whatever one normally does at a toilet. Quite interesting concept :-)