Kermit@CS

Who voted for this guy anyway?

A moment before the new academic school year starts, heres my wish-list, some of these may already be done - if so kudos to the relevant parties:

1. Campus-Wide WiFi - Wifi coverage is already present in the libraries and in the Ross building, but Wifi access in the lecture halls and on the lawns is sorely lacking. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could look up relevant research on the web during a lecture or check our mail from the grass outside Shprintzak?
2. Standard Compliant Websites - UNIX and Mac users can’t sign up for courses or even browse the shnaton (!! - search function doesn’t work) this year due to poor standard compliance in some parts of the University’s web-presence which only works in Internet Explorer. In a perfect world, the University would require that all web pages be standard compliant and work at least in Firefox. The real pity is that it appears this would be very easy to fix - as from a quick look at the code for these sites, most of the problems seem to stem from use of the document.all property.
3. Install Firefox, Thunderbird and an updated version of Acrobat in Ross - last year at least, the default web browser on the Ross computers was an antiquated version of Mozilla. It would be nice if someone went about installing a modern version of Firefox and thunderbird. The recent builds are much faster, more compatible, and definitely more stable than the older versions of Mozilla.
4. RSS on course websites - It would be nice if instead of checking email lists, nntp news groups and course websites we could simply use our RSS readers to subscribe to each courses website and automatically be notified of new announcements/exercises. This could be easilly achieved with minimal effort using Wordpress or one of a myriad of other blogging tools. Of course it would require the TAs to become familiar with the relevant software, but that seems a small price to pay for the improved functionality.

Well for reasons of brevity, thats my list. Overall I’m very happy at HUJI, to date the experience has been much better than I thought university would be. The CS secretaries have also proved to be super, and where of great help whenever I needed anything.

Wishing everyone a very successful and enjoyable new year.

After a much needed break things are starting to wind back up…

Well I say “starting” since the Algorithms course page for this year isn’t up, although computer graphics seems to be in better shape - it still lacks a few images.

Also, has anyone else got this SMS from the Algorithms course?

ALGORITHMS
LECTURE(67504)
CHANGE TO
MONDAY AT 18:00
INSTEAD OF
SUNDAY IN
SEMESTER ALEF**
    (HUJI)

Anyone have any idea what they mean [I’m assuming they mean that the lecture on Sunday from 12:00-13:00 has moved to Monday 18:00-19:00]? and why its in all caps?

I’m off to try to knock as many things as I can off my todo list for the summer, see you all on Sunday…

In parting, some tidbits:

• Filesystem using TinyURL
• Why you should spend all that spare money on a DSLR