September 2002

Grey Davis is the governor of California, and some people accuse him of corruption. They made a spoof website 'E-Gray' that looks remarkable like E-Bay. E-Bay announced that they will go to court about it (article from News.com).

Went to pick up Daniel from the train. He told us that he would arrive at 9:30 but as always he was late (see also Jerry's comment). Both Richard and Jerry were there. It has been a while since I saw all of them but tonight we'll play games in Jerry's place.

Daniel arrived at 9:45, we had coffee in the Burger King. I had an appointment at 11:00 with my teacher at the CWI. Unfortunately I missed the first bus because the busstop is at a new place. In the bus on the way I met Marjolein. We had an ultra-short chat :)

The teacher, Wan Fokkink, gave me an introduction to the course and we made some practical arrangments. An important aspect of the course is writing specifications and verifying them using µCRL. It's a process algebra that support abstract data types. It's a quite interesting field, and I'm looking forward to study it.

Just heard that my friend Daniel - who lives in Hungary - is coming back tomorrow for a few weeks! He'll be arriving tomorrow at 9:30.

Friday till midnight, Saturday till 1:00 o'clock, Sunday morning again... we played a LOT of games. We were in Middenmeer this weekend. Unfortunately I didn't win even once... Sasha and Jaap were the winners.

Today we went to the birthday of uncle Peter.

W'll play Steden & Ridders tonight; not like we have any choice ;) Teacher of the course Formele Methoden wrote me and said it would be fine if I want to do the course myself, starting Monday. Very nice!

The examen committee sent me an e-mail, with their reaction on the request to start my internship.

The committee wrote than they'll allow me to start my internship now, provided the courses I didn't do aren't necessary for my internship. From the e-mail:

"U vraagt een docent als afstudeerdocent, en met hem overleg ik eerst of uw openstaande
vakken een belemmering zijn voor uw stage. Zo nee, dan mag u beginnen. Belemmert een openstaand vak in de ogen van uw afstudeerdocent wel uw stage, dan moet eerst dat openstaande
vak gedaan worden."

"You should ask a teacher to be your internship supervisor. With him I'll discuss if your open courses are a barrier to start your internship. If they're not, you can start. Otherwise, if your supervisor think that a course is necessary for your internship, you'll have to take that course first."

That means that I can go to the VU Monday, and find a teacher. However, for the internship I would like to do there is a very useful course: Formal Methods. This is a course of the kind of languages Chess wants to experiment with on the SHAM. It would be really cool if there is a way I can do this course first, before starting my actual internship. It would cost me two, three weeks full-time I guess, but then I would be completely prepared. So I think I'll ask the teachers of this course of such an arrangement would be possible. This afternoon I'll talk about this with a few people here.

A fellow-student who is also doing an internship at Chess showed me how to set up a SSH tunnel to the VU proxy. This allows me to access the digital libraries of many organisations (the VU IP addresses are recognized there) to look for papers; extremely useful. I'm basically reading again all day, and waiting for the official confirmation of the examen committee. As soon as that gets in I'll go to the VU and look for a coach for my internship. I'm happy that I can read a lot these days, it's an interesting subject and there is a lot to learn.

Ettie was here for dinner yesterday and Sasha made musaka, very nice. Later we went for a walk... I really love this city.

Hope you're enjoying the speed of the server. I've always known that memory is the most important factor of the performance of a webserver, and this is an excellent example.

The server now has 48MB instead of 16MB! It's a lot quicker now, the difference is huge...

My father will bring my old collection of computer parts tomorrow morning. There's another Pentium system between it... it would really be nice if I could use the memory chips of that one. Even 4 MB more would already make a difference.
If it would be possible to put even more, we might even get some decent speed for the server! Wow :)

Ettie finished her internship a little while ago, and here internship report is ready. On this page you can read more about it and download a .PDF file. A very interesting read!