Adventures with Computers
Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category.
I’ve been moving stuff from my old website at gimpster.com here to mgeisler.net. All the pages and posts from the old WordPress installation has been moved, as have the stuff available under /images, /downloads, and /danish.
In a little while I’ll change gimpster.com so that it redirects people to mgeisler.net automatically. I’ll probably use a page asking people to update their links first, and then later start sending out 301 Moved Permanently headers.
Today I tried to print some of the slides and papers that I need to read for the courses at the ETH. Compared to the printing at DAIMI I find printing here at the ETH very slow.
The rule seems to be that you submit your print job to the printer via the VPP system (a nifty abbriviation standing for both “Versatile Printers and Plotters” and “Verteilte Printer und Plotter”) and then you wait… and wait… and then perhaps half an hour later you will be able to pickup the result of your waiting: your document printed on slightly gray recycled paper.
I don’t really mind the paper that much — we don’t pay for it, so it’s okay that it’s not pure white — but the amount of time one has to wait is a bit too much. Maybe it’s just because of bad memory, but when I think back to how it was at DAIMI, then I believe things went faster there.
Another slightly annoying thing about this VPP system is, that I haven’t yet figured out how to print from the Linux and Solaris systems they have installed here at the ETH. At DAIMI it was as easy as lpr -P stibitz-115 file.ps but as far as I’ve understood the VPP system then it isn’t that easy. But at least I can print from Windows in the mean time…
Oh! — my two print jobs have finished: 22 minutes for the first and 27 minuttes for the second job.
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.