There’s an issue surrounding recent (2.6.8 and newer) Linux kernels and CD burning. This Gentoo forum thread summarizes the technicalities. Basically, up until 2.6.7, everybody with read rights to a device was allowed to send control messages to it, and thus (for example) overwrite an …

If you are trying to set up your personal site using Drupal, these insights might come in handy. At least, those were the points that cost me the most time to figure out.

• As far as web writing markup goes, do not use Textile, do use Markdown. Not only does …

I hope you had good holidays and that 2005 will turn out just the way you wanted it to. If there is one thing that I am hoping for the most, then it is that I do get into a good US graduate school for my PhD in the fall …

For the past few days, I’ve been doing what I suppose most kids who are at least a slight bit tech-savvy have to do when they get home for the holidays: Fix their parents’ high-tech stuff. The day before yesterday, I finished pushing my parents over to Linux, with …

Today I took Josie to the airport to go home. As I’m writing this, I’m on my way to my parents’ house in Überlingen. For more than one reason, today wasn’t my favorite day this week.

Let’s start at the beginning: the last few days were …

So, the site is finally out on the real Internet. Thanks to Josie for co-funding this server. This means that we’re now open 24 hours a day, fast and not behind a flaky DSL line. And the people rejoiced. :D

While researching the specializations of the faculty at UMD, I stumbled upon a link to the Cornell Digital Math Library, which I find really neat. They have scanned old volumes in mathematics that have gone out of copyright, and made them freely accessible to anyone. No username/password mess. Along …

Another day totally dominated by activities related to applying to grad school. Like trying to get my recommenders to send their letters the right way. Finding out that, in fact, UMD does not support online recommendation. Filling out stupid ETS score report forms using Scribus just to fax them off …