Martin Geisler Online

The weather has been kind of dull here in Switzerland lately with light rain most of the time. I hope the summer weather which we had a month ago will come back soon…

But rainy weather isn’t all bad, it’s perfect for sitting indoors and reading. And I just happen to be a big fan of reading, so that actually suits me quite nicely.

Right now I don’t have time to read, though. I have to get on my way to the train station so that I can be in Zürich on time for the lecture on OOSC.

I’ve finally received my books. Actually they arrived yesterday, but I didn’t get back from ETH before 18:30, and at that time the post office had closed.

It’s nice finally to have some stuff to read for my courses. In the Object-Oriented Software Construction course we will be using the Eiffel programming language for our project — I have to read up on that!

For the System Security course I bought the book Exploiting Software which explains how the bad guys attack your systems. I can already feel how the paranoia coming!

I still haven’t received the books I ordered at Amazon the other day. I hope they will be here on Monday so that I can begin reading for the System Security course. Not that I needed to do much reading for the first exercise that was given — it was a simple repetition of the basic concepts in cryptography.

Yesterday, at the exercise class for the course on Security and Fault-tolerance in Distributed Systems, Christian Cachin booted his laptop to show us some graphs explaining how the sophistication of onlin attacks have gone up, while the level of knowledge necessary to execute these attacks have dropped.

His laptop was running Debian and I noticed that the image of the Debian Swirl in his version of GDM has a little white border around it. And this is exciting for me because I made that border! :-) Or at least I filled wishlist bug #201303 against the gdm package, which the maintainer then accepted. It’s very cool to see something like this — even though it’s a purely cosmetic thing.

Last week I attended a number of diffeernt courses, some of them were really interesting, some of them not so. Since there were no exercise classes last week I had some more time than usual, so I litterally jumped into different lectures as I found out about them at the course catalog.

During so I discovered some new interesting lectures that I will be following: Security and Fault-tolerance in Distributed Systems in which we’ll take a more detailed look at the difficulities in keeping large distributed systems online. In the course on Language-Based Security we will look at stuff like proof-carying code and static security analysis. It’s going to be interesting to see how this stuff actually works — so far I’ve only heard about it as some sort of theoretical result, but it seems that it can actually be implemented. The last new course is also about security, specifically about E-Privacy: Privacy in the Electronic Society. The first lecture I attended was a bit dull, dealing only with the laws and regulations in this field (standards and recommentations for privacy policies on websites) but the lecturer promissed me that it would become more “hard-core” later on.

I’ll update my calendar later when I get time — it’s quite boring to make (X)HTML tables by hand when you’ve tried making them using the PhpWiki syntax or something similar.