TyskJohan’s random thoughts

My dad got a new 21-inch iMac (a very cool machine, and you just have to love Photo Booth–plus I spent almost an hour watching movie trailers with Front Row).

This also gave me a chance to try out syncing with .Mac (or dotMac). And I wasn’t thrilled (though it was better than nothing, and it didn’t break stuff beyond repair).

Here’s a quick review of various app’s behaviour with .Mac syncing.

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Today I took a CBT (that’s the Commission’s acronym for computer-based test) to become a contract agent for the EU Commission. I think I did OK, but I wish I was quicker at math.

The test was made up of 3 sections: one called ‘verbal reasoning’ which meant a short text and a set of statements where I had to pick the correct one. The difficulty is to keep any previous knowledge about the subject of the text out of your thinking.

The math section is made up of excercises of what is called “Dreisatz” in German.

The last section, EU knowledge, ranged from trivial to hard (but not impossible). Apparently, I’m not allowed to tell you more.

Update

I got an email the other day from a hungarian lady asking me wheter you are allowed to use a sheet of paper during the Computer-Based Testing and the numerical reasoning in particular.

In my case, there was no paper, but a little piece of whiteboard (like an A5 sheet of paper) and an eraseable marker. Not quite as good as paper but better that nothing.

Also, I told her that I found the CBT harder than the paper-based test, because some of the reasoning tasks where so long that I had to scroll up and down a lot. As a result, I didn’t even manage to work on all the tasks, which I did manage in the paper-based test a few months later.

I got to Hamburg yesterday night. I like Hamburg.

People say I speak German with a Scandinavian melody.

I tried the multilingual plugin today, but it didn’t work out too well. First, I would have to manually convert the language of all existing posts, and then the plugin ate the post titles in the RSS feed. Also, I wonder if I would still have been able to edit posts in MarsEdit.

I might give the other contestant, polyglot, a whirl also.

Update

It seems polyglot is more of what I was looking for. I want the main interface in English at all times, and just the ability to make (parts of) posts in other languages. And I will let this be decided by the readers browser preferences. If you prefer German over English, the fist sentence in the Hamburg post should appear in German.

Following the bug I’ve complained about here, I’ve hacked function mw_editPost() in xmlrpc.php: I’ve removed 'post_category' from the line that begins with $newpost = compact(). (See the link to the bug report to see why this works.)

Currently playing in iTunes: Heart by Pet Shop Boys

The European network for student newspapers, SPINE - Student press in Europe, has launched a new web site. Actually, it’s sort of a blog where the member papers post the main stories from their respective papers.

Very cool. And this is even more cool: there’s an RSS feed for the stories. Now if they’d put some more effort into the members’ page (profiles of the members, and why not RSS aggregation) and more of the members would supply their headlines, that’d be wonderful!

(Via Lundagård)

Replikering av kontrollerade experiment inom empiriska studier av programvaruteknik—en undersökning

Programvaruteknik (software engineering) i den betydelsen det används i detta examensarbete är studiet av metoder, processer och tekniker som används för att producera program, dvs. mjukvara för datasystem.

Inom detta fält finns ett viktigt fält av empiriska studier inom programvaruproduktion: studier där man observerar programmerare när de tillämpar sådana metoder, processer och tekniker och resultaten därav.

I mitt examensarbete har jag tittat på den vanligaste formen av sådana empiriska studier: kontrollerade experiment. Andra former av studier är bland annat fallstudier (case studies) och undersökningar (surveys).

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La hausse des frais d’inscription de l’université Genoble 2 de 200 € à 900 € est attaqué en tribunal par le recteur d’academie et l’UNEF.

900 € par semestre, ce n’est pas rien…

Lire plus dans Le Monde

Update

Il semble que l’UNEF l’a emporté.

Sydsvenskan Snällposten har en interessant artikelserie de kallar för kunskapsglappet, där de skriver om den påstådda nivåsänkningen i högskolan och urholkningen av resurserna. Mången gamla sanningar, men också en del nya synpunkter.

Och på något sätt kan jag aldrig undgå att fråga mig själv hur mina egna kunskaper egentligen ligger an…

Update

Även SFS har släppt en rapport på samma tema idag.