Me too! As of today, I have a Master of Computer Science. Not that I haven't been one for a long time, but now I finally have one! (My usual modesty will continue tomorrow ...)

Loïc and I are now officially part of the small (I assume) group of students who can enjoy their last weekend before their thesis deadline instead of sweating blood over the fact that Word has decided to secretly remove a few unimportant passages and rearrange a couple of figures.

Today we hijacked one of the Logitech printers for a few hours, used a medium-sized Sequoia's worth of paper, and sent everything off to EPFL.

We also had our final presentations for the people at Logitech and I must say, it went surprisingly smoothly. The recipe: Prepare the slides about twenty hours in advance, skip any test runs, and sleep about five hours. It probably helps to have written and proof-read 98 pages on the topic shortly before.

So what's up for the remaining few days? Wrapping up, sleeping, cleaning out the apartment, more sleeping. And after next week it's traveling through California and a trip to the Big Apple. (Yes, I'm allergic to apples but this one is just big enough.) More details soon.

I'll try to post my thesis somewhere in the next days. For starters here's the title: Building a Webcam Infrastructure for GNU/Linux. Now, if you don't know what a webcam or Linux is, then I'm not sure, this is the right blog for you to read. ;-)

I have some sad news about my roommate, Thomas. It is now 11.07pm on a Saturday night and guess where he is. At the office. Wait, it gets sadder! Guess what he's doing? SHS.

In case you don't know SHS, it's EPFL's pathetic little let's-teach-our-students-something-else-than-engineering program that is merely another attempt of our administration to clean their conscience after the apparently failed and retired STS program. (No, I'm not bitter, just remembering some of the most boring hours of my life that--unfortunately--overshadow the few interesting STS classes I had.)

Anyway, for a guy to be doing SHS at such a time, he has to be pretty messed up. Maybe he'll explain himself on his blog? ;-)

So, what am I doing on a Saturday night then? Well, I'm writing my thesis. Not right now, I just had dinner and I'm doing a little digestion pause (a.k.a. the I've-had-enough-and-I'd-rather-do-something-else pause).

In a little more than a month I'll be done with my thesis. I seriously hope I won't have lost the ability to do something fun on a Saturday night without feeling bad about it by then.

I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that this post has the potential to be hilarious. The bad news is that you probably need to understand French for it to be (and it helps if you've studied at EPFL, but in that case there's a good chance you've picked up enough to find this funny--I know I have.) For those you don't I've still tried to make it as understandable as possible. Here we go ...

Most students in Computer Science and Communication Systems know the CRS website, the Course Review System. It's a sort of student community website where students can submit reviews for courses they have taken. Very useful when it comes to picking your classes at the start of a term.

There's a number of courses that every student should steer clear of, be it because they can totally ruin a person's fascination in the topic or because they're just a waste of time. One of these courses became a proud member of both these groups, which promptly resulted in bad reviews. Here are two of them:

(For the non-Frenchies out there: He says that it had been one of the worst classes in his four years at EPFL. The professor was unable to express herself, there was no methodology, only very vague concepts without comprehensible examples. The project was a lot of work without learning effect whatsoever and nobody ever knew what to do because all tasks were so vaguely specified. He thinks that the level of this course is way too low for such a school and advises people to spend their time doing more interesting courses.)

Having taken the same course I can only confirm what he says, and the fact that everybody around us thought pretty much the same thing proves that this is not just a review to spite the teacher (as it sometimes happens).

So far, so good. Here's another one by a different student, let's call him Mr. H:

(Once more a rough translation: "This course sucks! Absolutely catastrophic. You don't learn anything in this course and the subject is void. The professor doesn't know how to express herself (which pretty much takes the cake given the topic of the course) and she doesn't know what she wants. A few additional remarks: The professor is always right and if she doesn't like your idea, you're screwed. The grades are a function of the best group of the class and the criteria don't correspond to what was previously announced. The professor has bad taste; in her eyes a nice user interface is gray in gray consisting of many tiring steps and no novel ideas. You really start to question how she got to teach that course in the first place. Read what Luzian wrote above, he's completely right. I could have spent my time taking much more interesting classes insead.")

Again, nothing particulary wrong with that (although I didn't technically mind the part about the best group being used to measure the others given that I was part of that group and our project killed ;-). So when does it start to get funny, you ask? We're getting there shortly!

Here's an e-mail that the CRS webmaster received a few weeks ago (know that the reviews above both date from spring 2004):

Bonjour,

J'ai retrouvé avec plaisir le site CRS. J'y ai retrouvé plusieurs de mes anciennes contributions. Une m'a gênée pour plusieurs raisons, notamment car elle ne correspond plus du tout car le cours a évolué. Y a-t-il moyen de supprimer mon ancien commentaire? J'en re-écris volontiers un par la suite. Le commentaire porte sur le cours "ABC" cours d'informatique 3ième année avec Prof. X. Le review date du 2004-06-14 au nom de Mr. H. Pourriez-vous le supprimer?

Merci d'avance.

Mr. H

(Okay, that was the last French part! "I was happy to come across the CRS website where I found some of my old contributions. One of them bugged me for many reasons, notably because it doesn't correspond to today's course anymore, which has evolved ever since. Is there a way to delete my old comment? I'll be happy to write another one. Thank you. Mr. H")

I guess that's a fair request, opinions change but then again students deserve to know what other people have thought of a course in the past. We know that courses can improve (although they rarely do) and take this into account when going through old reviews.

There are, however, a few detail that Mr. H did not mention in his e-mail: Since 2004 quite a few things have happened. He has become a PhD student at EPFL in the lab of a certain Professor X and he was an assistant in that particular course during the last semester. How quickly times can change!

Opinions change but history doesn't. All the little traces we leave out there in the Internet don't disappear and anytime, usually when we need it the least, they can come back and bite us in the ass. Often much to the amusment of others.

Ok, so my work machine is running some lengthy tests practically forcing me to read my e-mail. :-)

Anyway, here's what I got:

To: martin.rubli at epfl dot ch
From: Denis Peyrot <sourcing at qwam dot com>
Subject: Projet Professionnel

Bonjour Monsieur Rubli,

Je suis le directeur de Qwam System une société de conseil spécialisée dans le développement et l'intégration de systèmes d'information. Nous recherchons de jeunes ingénieurs talentueux et enthousiastes pour renforcer nos équipes et nous apprécions particulièrement les diplômés de l'EPFL.

Nos atouts :
- Des clients et des projets d'envergure internationale,
- Une vraie proximité avec nos collaborateurs,
- Des conditions de travail et de salaire très attractives.

Nous travaillons en particulier pour le centre de recherche et développement d'Amadeus SA, sur le site Sophia Antipolis (sud-est de la France) . Nos consultants participent aux phases de spécification, conception, réalisation et validation de solutions novatrices dans un environnement technologique stimulant. Ces missions nécessitent une bonne capacité à communiquer, un esprit d'équipe et la pratique de l'Anglais professionnel.
Le package salarial est compris entre 35 et 45 K Euro en fonction des compétences et de l'expérience.
Les futurs diplômés 2006 sont les bienvenus.
Je suis à votre entière disposition si vous souhaitez mieux connaître ces projets.

Si cette offre retient votre attention, je vous invite dés à présent à me contacter et/ou me faire parvenir votre CV pour que nous étudiions ensemble ces opportunités.

Très cordialement.

--------------------------------------------
Denis Peyrot
Directeur d'Agence

Mobile: +33 615.910.410
QWAM System

Siege/Chatou: Tel: +33 130.096.888 - Fax: +33 130.096.889
Agence/Nice: Tel: +33 493.726.969 - Fax: +33 493.726.970

www.qwamsystem.fr - www.qwam.com

Apart from the fact that the offer sucks (who goes to Southern France for 40 Kelvin Euro?!) and there is probably very little "professional English" down there, I don't like the fact that EPFL is just giving out our e-mail addresses for such purposes without asking first.

So of the EPFL guys out there, who else got this e-mail?

These are just two of the reasons why Logitech is a fun place to work:

I guess that Carl is one of the bigger people working at Logitech:

(In case you can't decipher the bottom line of the second picture, it reads: "PS: will be eaten by Carl in facilities dpt!")

The fact that I'm still just embedding simple pictures in my blog probably gives you a hint on how far I'm along with my gallery module ... Well, I'm making progress, the integral parts of the engine are alive and I see a few hours clearing up in the next days.

In the meantime, you can still enjoy my temporary gallery, which I hope to enrich with some more pictures of San Francisco this weekend. I'm planning on meeting an old friend from EPFL, David Hürlimann, who's doing an internship at the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory over in Palo Alto. He moved to France a while back to do his Master at the Eurecom. I must remember to ask him about the student demonstrations and whether anything's left of the institute. :-)

Does anyone else get the impression that the number of Google text ads grows at the same exponential rates as spam did a couple of years ago? These days, I seem to come across them wherever I go; news sites, developer information, even mailing list archives.

For a while, banner ads were predominant in the World Wide Web. They had a considerable annoyance factor, especially the animated ones, but the big advantage was that they were easy to filter for the eye. Everything colorful and about five times wider than high was guaranteed not to contain any useful information.

Text ads are different. They started off by appearing in side bars and other less prominent places. When their number increased, they slowly made their way into places that was once reserved for the actual content. Contrary to banners, they smootly blend into the text that you're actually scanning for information and are therefore much harder to just ignore.

The human brain is very efficient in identifying the stupid Viagra spam that fills our mailboxes on a daily basis. What is much harder to ignore is the tons of useless "real" mail traffic that reaches you. Let me give you an example:

At my university the mailing lists to reach all students of a department or even the entire EPFL student body are officially moderated. In practice, however, they are as open as a door frame with a curtain instead of a door. Surveys from students doing projects, unnecessary CCs, newsletters from organizations you've never heard of and don't care about, or I-lost-my-USB-key-in-the-computer-room notices (there's a lost and found office, for cryin' out loud!). About a year ago, there even was even a medium-sized scandal when somebody sent a link to a Tubgirl website from someone else's account--in disguise of a survey.

On busy days the volume of all the mailing lists a student is subscribed to (there's no opt-in or opt-out, we just are) can easily reach 20 messages. Since most important communications are made through e-mail, playing trigger-happy with the delete button can get you into a lot of trouble. That's the sort of spam that's annoying and costs time.

Google ads are like that. Mostly useless information where you expect real information. So are Google Ads the spam of the web? Or are they perhaps worse? Happy googling, everybody!