Norge II academic

This blog is discontinued for the moment since I am maintaining my Master Thesis Blog.

This semester was rather full of surprises. While planning to take like 5 to 6 lectures (not all directly IT-related), I got a job at Opera Software. So I am just hanging on to get the 3 mandatory ones right.

These include:
a) INF5090: kewl geeky lecture about hot topics in distributed systems. Been taking interactive lecture notes with Kyrre Begnum, our great PhD student and IDS/Firewall foreleser. SubEthaEdit is a great program ...
b) Liteature survey: basically an introduction into scientific writing. Great, just takes too much time for my taste (for the risk of sounding arrogant, but working on my English writing skills is not exactly what I feel I need). But the methodology we get taught is good.
c) Network Infrastructure - lab. This would be the best hands-on and half-research-style activity ever - with a small or biiiig if: your partner should at least be up to the task. Why me???? Why do I always get the ... flakes? History repeating ... laster semester in firewalling, this time in lab ... or is it me??

Anyway. Full program, but all in all interesting stuff. I guess I will not continue towards a PhD right after the MSc ... feel like spreading my wings and soaring videre ...

two weeks to go for the first exam ... c++. last mandatory exercise due on tuesday.

catching up with the ids & fw exercises, just 3 to go. should finish them asap.

last but not least: i should finally start reading the kompendium 51, basis for the algo and efficiency course!!!

well at least I do know now what happens if one fails the mid-term - we got one week to correct our mistakes, and re-submit. interestingly, allmost all master-students failed, where the bachelor students passed. one possible interpretation is the academic background. looks like uio offers better pre-courses that other institutions (most master students did not get their bachelor from uio).

but after a little intensified study the understanding is much better, so i expect to pass this time ha ha.

We got the results from the FW & IDS lecture midterm/obligatory exercise. Remember Murphy? So I got punished for "working together" my results with my palooka-partner!! Ha ha big joke he did not contribute with anything useful!!! I do mentally understand the decision, but it's kinda hard to loose the chance of getting an A because of this! Well. Swallow hard and go on.

So in tha past 3 weeks we had some mid-terms. The gutt-feeling is OK, but I am curious how it went. It is just as pass/fail thing, even though I don't know what happens if someone fails.

We are proceeding in all lectures according to plan, and the exams will be almost over in about a month. My exam dates:

December 3rd: C++
December 8th: Algorithms and Efficiency
December 9th: Intrusion Detection & Firewall

And on December 9th I take the flight back to Switzerland ... for a well-deserved ski vacation ;)

The known Swiss newspaper NZZ publishes once a year a special magazine on students/academic life. This year's edition has an article with the above mentioned topic - a 20-question-catalog that was asked academic people. Will you know all answers? Congratulations if you do!
:: http://www-x.nzz.ch/folio/curr/articles/test.html

You know of these days - everything just goes wrong. Yesterday was such a day for me - it was almost humorous, tought, because of so many coincidences at once.

First, I needed to deliver a C++ program. It compiled fine, on my machine (OS X) and a linux server, but exited unexpectedly with a segmentation fault. I was searching for the problem until 4am - no idea. Upon delivering the program, the professor looked into it for 1.5hrs, but was unable to find the problem either. At the end, just moving one line of code from the constructor to a new init() method solved the problem. We will debug and see if this is actually a gcc-bug.

Second, I also needed to hand in a security script for a virtual network lab. I understood this to be group work, but my partner in this subject is a total palooka. So I was fighting alone - and planned to go home and test my script from there. But ...

Third, I was notified that our electricity got turned off!! Meaning (since I had to leave at 9pm), it was rather hard continuing to test! So I basically had to deliver an untested, but at least syntactically correct script.

Now, Murphy's law really had me!! Interesting background info: it is said that Edward A. Murphy was interviewed by Lawrence J. Peter arround the time he came up with the Peter principle!

The nice part: next morning (today, Thursday), we got electricity back at 9am!

the inf4200 lecture really is a hard one - i guess it's the most theoretical lecture i have ever attended. yesterday at the exercise-session, we (partially?) solved 2 problems in 2 hrs ... and the attending studentes were not all sure if we really understood what we were doing. right now we try to transform problems form Turing-Machine-Notation into Satisfiabiliy clauses, with 3SAT and 3DM coming up on the horizon ...

we have to take 30 ECTS credits per semester, and one course has to be at uio.

due to my previous academic education, i am exempted from courses LV121A (computer security) and MS005A (networking: technologies and principles). i take INF4200 (algorithms and efficiency), MS004A (intrusion detection and firewall security) and LV121A (C++ programming).