BrainDiarrhea

Well, long time no see. The lack of postings is due to my work-related stress: the thesis is just about finished but requires lots of work, the project needs some tweaking too, and my civil service demanded my attention as well. However, since I am feeling kind of sick and tired, and do not want to work I found the time to write an entry … Enjoy!

I made some changes to the blog, as you may have noticed. I am running WordPress 2.0.3 now, since I like to keep my software up-to-date. But you probably did not notice that. Another invisible change was the update to the Tiger Administration plug-in. I used to have it when I ran WordPress 1.5 and below. However, the update to WordPress 2.0 together with Firefox 1.5 proved to be too much for the plug-in and it made the administration of the blog unusable. I was waiting for an update to the plug-in for a long time and finally it came. Of course, during the update to WordPress 2.0.3 I installed the new version of this great plug-in as well – at first I thought: “Great, they finally got it to work in Firefox too,” only to be proven wrong now, two days later, during the writing of this post. It is still not as bad as the last time, but it is far from perfect and that disappoints me. The last change to the blog is of course the most noticeable – I switched themes again, this time to a very straight-forward theme with almost no navigation elements. I apologize for the hampered access to the older posts, but I guess that’s the price I have to pay for this great theme …

My diploma thesis is almost done. It clocks now in at 55 pages and is missing only a single section, a third use case which I still have not implemented. I need to do that next, so I can finally finish the writing of that damn thing. My goal would be 60 pages, and then I can rest assured that I have done a good job. The thesis shaped up pretty nicely with lots of support from Jake who proof-read my chapters (up until chapter 4 of 6, he is still working on those). His input was very valuable and I feel good about the thesis.

The implementation needs a little more tweaking, like the XML parser and stuff like that, which I intend to finish this week. June 19 is the date we have to turn in our first draft of the thesis and I should make it in time with the implementation changes and the use case. Unfortunately, Jake and my thesis advisor probably will not be able to proof-read the chapters they have left before that date, so I will need to “skip” the first draft (turn it in without their proposed changes) and then correct the thesis before the final turn-in at the 26th of June. But then I should be really done.

Following the 26th I’ll have two weeks to prepare for my diploma exams, which will take place between the 10th and the 14th of July. I am about to have my exam areas specified, so that shall be interesting. My primary exam is in Computer Games and hopefully should not be too hard. My secondary exam is in Animation and that could get a little rough. We will see – I’ll keep you updated.