I think bad time management cost me the grade. I should have done some work towards the project and/or the report for a School of European Languages module over Easter, but was lazy and didn’t. Then a couple of weeks later I had deadlines for both on the same day; I chose to work on the dissertation (which was obviously more important as it’s worth 20 credits vs. half the mark for a 10 credit module), but if I’d picked the report, the mark wouldn’t have been capped at 40% and the weighted average would have been over 68%. Then a couple more percentage points on another module (most likely TPL, Software Lab, or German General Language III) would have got another 10 credits at >70%, which would have got me a first on the preponderance principle (within 2% of a classification boundary, if you have at least 120 credits above the boundary you get the higher classification).

it’ll cost 25p per minute to call from a Virgin home phone, plus 10p to connect.

I immediately thought, “What on earth? Surely they don’t expect customers to stick around with such extortionate call charges.” Then I noticed the context, and realised that it possibly should have read:

it’ll cost 25p per minute to call it from a Virgin home phone, plus 10p to connect.

The actual wording was fine, but the way I started parsing it made me interpret it in completely the wrong way. “It” in the actual wording means “our broadband helpline number”; but initially I parsed it as the dummy subject of an impersonal sentence, so I thought it was saying all calls from a Virgin home phone would have those charges. The altered wording adds an “it” referring to this helpline as the object of the embedded verb phrase, making my interpretation the only sensible one.

In the real world, I did two interesting things today. First, I went to the CS office to pick up my degree results: I was awarded a 2:1. I then went to talk to Dr Berger about applying for an MRes; this I have now finally done, as well as an EST bursary which would require going to Munich for a few months (no downsides there!). I mentioned the result, and he said it was disappointing, because the overall score was about 67%, only a couple of points off a first. Annoyingly, I won’t know for certain what pulled me down for some time because I was only told the overall classification, not marks for each module. Even the average I only know informally, because Uli told me. But the bad marks are apparently on the German side, so as a CS student I’m better than I look on paper.

I just wrote the following snippet of code for my dissertation:

intNatI :: Int :~= Nat
intNatI = Iso {
            to   = fromInteger . toInteger,
            from = fromInteger . toInteger }

The components to and from have totally different types (to is Int -> Nat, from is Nat -> Int). Yay for type inference! :)

Now there do exist some talented linguists who can figure out approximately what they’re writing. That’s what the Rosetta Stone was about, except in this analogy there’s no Demotic or Greek alongside, only the hieroglyphs and a scribe to tell you what they mean in English. Unfortunately, after they send the scribes away, the linguists can never be sure that they’ve got it right, especially since Microsoft can change the language as they like simply by changing the curriculum. As soon as new scribes start writing in this new language, the old scribes will stop being able to interpret some messages you receive because they don’t know about the changes in the language.

So to be sure the message gets through, you have to hire a scribe. When Microsoft changes their curriculum, you’ll eventually have to hire a new scribe, who will probably also demand a new house to live in. If you send me an important document in Egyptian, you assume I’m willing to do all that. You’re propping up a powerful monopoly (the scribes can after all twist your message or send a copy to Microsoft without you knowing), and assume that I’m willing to do the same.

If instead we communicate in English, which everyone knows, then neither of us has to hire a scribe. Even if you don’t know English, there are lots of scribes available from many schools, so you don’t have to put up with a scribe from one particular school if you don’t like him.

(Background: I just booked a place on Swansea uni’s postgraduate open day, and got a Word document in return, which has the timetable in it (at least that’s what the sender said). I replied asking for a plain text or PDF document, and a shorter version of the above by way of explanation. The initial booking email also had my signature in it which says to avoid sending me Word documents – unfortunately it seems like the recipient completely ignored it.)

My final year project initial document is due in tomorrow, and I've finally got round to doing it.

...

Okay, I've done some of it. A front page, an abstract, an introduction with a slew of references to papers I haven't read, a skeleton structure and table of contents, and a bibliography. All in the loveliness that is LaTeX which thankfully makes these things effortless.

I might manage to get a draft done tomorrow. Then again, I might not. In either case I'll be asking Dr Berger for advice since I certainly need some help to get things into the right form!

Makes me wish I'd picked a project that I knew something about before my first meeting with my supervisor :) (Though I have some comfort from Sean in that I'm not the only one who doesn't quite understand the obscure, advanced, abstract mathematics my supervisor is spewing at me in meetings.)

As a final note, I'm writing this from the SUCS room at half past midnight because due to the usual bureaucratic incompetence of large businesses, the ISP my live-in landlady has picked didn't send us our ADSL modem until yesterday (which of course nobody was in/awake to collect from the postman, so we had to wait another 24 hours to go and get it, assuming that is really what it is). If an internet connection existed at home now, I would be using it instead. (Because my bed is much more comfortable than the worn out desk chairs here :)

Good grief, it’s been far too long since I last blogged.

I got myself a computer a week or two ago, an Asus A6K laptop. So I finally have a computer to call my own which I can use here, wohoo. Not bad either, Turion 64 and GeForce Go 6200, not quite top spec (especially the RAM, only 512 MB) but an order of magnitude better (and more portable!) than my desktop PC at home which (particularly with its 19” CRT monitor) is too huge to take on the plane. I managed to install Ubuntu on it (courtesy of this hall’s other resident geek Yaakov, from Connecticut) dual booting with XP Home (which was bundled). The first thing I tried to do with it was install Operation Flashpoint… but to my horror I found I’d left CD 1 in my desktop’s CD drive. Argh! Oh well, at least I have Neverwinter Nights to fall back on.

Apart from that, I’ve been playing around with IPv6. 6to4 tunnelling works perfectly from Ubuntu (although I have yet to figure out how to get the setup to persist across reboots). Under Windows a 6to4 tunnel is set up automagically when you install the IPv6 protocol via the usual networking GUI. However it seems there is a stupid bug in the Windows IPv6 stack that means it only routes to 6to4 addresses (2002::/16), so you can’t access the native IPv6 internet (including the famous test site kame.net). I tried fiddling about with the command line network config tools (i.e. netsh) to change the default route to send all 2000::/3 (i.e. global scope) traffic through the tunnel, but that didn’t work. It seems this stack is just inherently broken. Sigh. No wonder nobody uses IPv6 yet, the vast majority of the computer using public is completely unable to access pure IPv6 hosts.

The other thing I was missing until recently was music. I had attempted to burn all my music in Ogg Vorbis format to CD-R, but for some unknown reason my CD drive objected to this. Besides which I haven’t had any way of playing music until I got this laptop. Well, the latter problem is fixed (see above), and I also fixed the former problem a couple of days ago by buying a pile of CDs at one of the local shopping centres. Here they are, in the order they happen to be on my desk:

• Runter mit den Spendierhosen, Unsichtbarer! by Die Ärzte. For the meaning of the title see my translation of a biography of the band. Something like a softish hard rock, say Green Day or POTUS. (Edit 22/09/2006: When I wrote this it was rather a long time since I had heard either; Die Ärzte aren’t really like them at all. Check them out on last.fm.)
• Sehnsucht by Rammstein. I’m sure lots of you know this album already so I don’t really need to explain it, except to say that I don’t have anything remotely like it in my collection. In particular the above album couldn’t be more different.
• The Very Best of Bach. Self explanatory – a collection of bits from various Bach works. Naxos and therefore cheap.
• Beethoven’s Symphonie Nr. 9 and Mozart’s Requiem. Again these probably need no introduction.
• Finlandia, Karelia Suite, Op. II and Lemminkäinen Suite, Op. 22 by Jean Sibelius. I was inspired to buy this in particular because I heard some of it at a Finn’s birthday party.
• Showbiz by Muse. Mostly because it was so cheap (€6.99, not to be sniffed at) and because I like Muse anyway. On first listening doesn’t seem to be as impressive as either of their other albums to date.

Well at least I’m satisfied musically for the time being, unfortunately I have a few Refarate (report, usually verbal), Klausuren (written exam) and Prüfungen (oral exam) coming up. Most after the Christmas break fortunately, but I need to make sure I’m signed up for them. (It turns out the Germans’ reputation for bureaucracy is due to them being crap at it – there is no central office that keeps track of which courses which students are signed up to.) Anyway, my plane home is booked for Saturday so that’s when I’ll be getting home. Annoyingly late but I had no idea if I was able to come earlier when booking, so Christmas Eve it is. I have a bit of shopping left to do and also some research at the library (which the lazy buggers closed at 2pm today due to the holidays).

<pre>try {
    work();
} catch (SleepDeficiencyException e) {
    sleep();
} finally {
    go_home();
}</pre>

It seems my lecturer for today has been taken ill or something, so the two seminars I had today (Phonetik & Phonologie and Grammatik, both lectures about “DaF” (Deutsch als Fremdsprache)) have been cancelled. Yay.

So what am I doing to pass the time? Well, when 13:30 rolls around I will stick my foot in Frau Gschnaidner’s door and get her to sign the forms that I will send back to Swansea so I can finally get my grant. After that I will carry on with what I was doing yesterday afternoon which is converting Milliways to using wchar_t internally using iconv(3) to convert from the local charset. Sounds dull but it’s something to do, and does all the people using the bbs account a favour, who since I hacked in half-arsed support for UTF-8 have been unable to see any messages containing any non-ASCII characters.

Apart from the above mentioned seminars I have picked one lecture on Roman history (very ancient, something like 250 BC) and the equivalents of three of the four courses I missed last year (networks, databases and Java, but not computability theory). I’ve not yet enrolled for them though, since (despite the Germans’ reputation for orderliness) there is no central enrolment system. Well, apparently there is one for WI (Wirtschaftsinformatik) but I haven’t figured out how to use it yet.

Annoyingly I caught a cold on the weekend, which fortunately recovered well enough for me to go to the lecture at 8:30 yesterday. Ugh. I had a lab for that module at the same time this morning but I couldn’t be bothered to go to it. Largely because I couldn’t find the room last time I tried to find it, and anyway it’s probably not on yet after just two lectures (the first one I missed because I was using an out of date lecture plan).

Finally got round to enrolling at the uni today, which means I have now got a username and password for the uni’s computers. Hence this blog entry. I’ve also posted two more, for last Tuesday and Wednesday, with the appropriate timestamps. I can’t be bothered to do more right now so I’ll finish it tomorrow.

The only other thing I did today was attend another orientation lecture, this time about how to pick courses. It seems the system here is rather ad hoc – instead of enrolling for all your courses in the same place at the same time you have to enrol on each one separately. I’m hoping to do something different with my year than the usual slog of CS and German, but until Swansea’s German dept tells me, I have no idea if that is allowed.

I must get round to buying a mobile, if for no other reason than that my bank wants a phone number for doing foreign transfers (currently my German bank account has nothing in it). I’ve also seen a rather nice laptop in the shopping centre, but it’s a tad expensive so I’ll have to wait for my Socrates grant before I can get it.

Turned out that the central part of the campus is on a concrete plateau, which you get to by some stairs – rather like the University of Essex, but less accessible, there being no lifts (and one set of stairs being cordoned off as unsafe). I was still knackered from dragging the suitcase (and having a heavy rucksack as well, though by this point I had offloaded my A4-sized German dictionary into the suitcase to spare my shoulders). I went into the AAA room and gladly took a cup of tea (apparently not as rare as I’d feared, though it seems to be sold in very small quantities, with the teabags in individual packets like with herbal tea). I got my keys, and had explained to me what I had to do in the next two weeks, with the help of a ‘welcome pack’ (not actually called that, but that’s what it would be called in a British university). Among the welcome pack were maps of the university and the city (the former being comprehensible to me only because I now knew that much of it is not at ground level), and a (more or less) London Underground-style map of the bus system. I still failed to understand it but at least I had a chance to find my way “home”.

Before going to my new room I got a Mensa-Card, which is superficially like the Flexible Dining Card in Swansea in that you can (read: must) pay for food in the refectory (Mensa) with it; opened a bank account, which is apparently necessary for paying rent as they don’t accept cheques; and (rather late, having found it hard to find the lecture hall where it was taking place) attended the first information lecture, which was just general information about (again) what needs to be done in the first weeks and how to do it, and what pitfalls to avoid.

I picked my suitcase up again from the AAA (having managed to leave it there instead of lugging it about everywhere), and somehow figured out which buses to take to get to me hall (which had been highlighted on the map so many hours earlier). It was probably here that I finally undertstood how the buses work – very like the London Underground in fact, as you just buy a ticket for a journey regardless of how long it is as long as it’s inside the zone you bought it for and doesn’t last longer than 90 mins. Later I figured out that you can buy a ticket in advance (e.g. from a vending machine) and use it by stamping it on one of the little machins on the bus, which gives it a timestamp.

On each floor of my hall (rather annoyingly my room is on the 3rd floor, so I took several minutes to get up) are two or three living rooms, with their adjoining kitchen and 2 bathrooms, plus the common room for the whole hall. Off my living room (at least when I arrived) are Lidija (Slovenian), Rafael (Brazilian), Kasia (Polish), and a German girl and another bloke whose names I forget. There’s also another Slovenian called Lea in the next group of rooms.

Being knackered again I went to bed pretty early, just unpacking, chatting with the other people, and having one of the instant rice packets I brought from home, before going to bed.

Posted retrospectively on Monday 10 October 2005