Rosio Pavoris a blog

It’s probably unlikely that I’m going to finish another book in the five and a half hours left in 2009, so I’m going to post this while we’re waiting for snacks.

I don’t have any bad habits, so my only New Year’s resolution tends to be to read fifty books in a year. Last year I didn’t quite make it, but apparently I more than made up for it this year. I finished eighty-eight:

The Ancestor’s Tale Richard Dawkins
Snow Crash Neal Stephenson
An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe Leon Trotsky
The Origin of Species Charles Darwin
The Fabric of the Cosmos Brian Greene
Anansi Boys Neil Gaiman
I Am a Strange Loop Douglas Hofstadter
Why I Am Not a Christian Bertrand Russell
Gödel, Escher, Bach Douglas Hofstadter
JPod Douglas Coupland
Your Inner Fish Neil Shubin
Deep Simplicity John Gribbin
On Natural Selection Charles Darwin
Mathematics for the Imagination Peter M. Higgins
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume 1 Karl Popper
Atheist Manifesto Michel Onfray
The Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie
Yiddish Policemen’s Union Michael Chabon
The Extended Phenotype Richard Dawkins
The Chronicles of Narnia Clive “Staples” Lewis
Freakonomics Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
How to Solve It George Pólya
Failed States Noam Chomsky
Hegemony or Survival Noam Chomsky
Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft H. P. Lovecraft
What We Say Goes Noam Chomsky
Wealth of Nations Adam Smith
Consciousness Explained Daniel Dennett
Life’s Grandeur Stephen Jay Gould
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper John Allen Paulos
The Myths We Live By Mary Midgley
The Tiger That Isn’t Michael Blastland, Andrew Dilnot
The Essential Turing B. Jack Copeland
The Mismeasure of Man Stephen Jay Gould
Faust (Frühe Fassung) Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Paradise Lost, and Other Poems John Milton
Physics of the Impossible Michio Kaku
Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond
The Trouble With Physics Lee Smolin
The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood
De la Terre à la Lune Jules Verne
The Drunkard’s Walk Leonard Mlodinow
Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck
Stephen Fry in America Stephen Fry
The Road Cormac McCarthy
Voyage au Centre de la Terre Jules Verne
De Weduwe Becker Maurice Roelants
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Susanna Clarke
You Shall Know Our Velocity Dave Eggers
Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Computer Networks Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
The Fountainhead Ayn Rand
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
The Greatest Show on Earth Richard Dawkins
Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen
Dubliners James Joyce
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Hunter S. Thompson
Het Achterhuis Anne Frank
God Created the Integers Stephen Hawking
Shalimar the Clown Salman Rushdie
Nation Terry Pratchett
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Seth Grahame-Smith, Jane Austen
A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole
The Penelopiad Margaret Atwood
Dracula: the Un-dead Dacre Stoker, Ian Holt
House of Leaves Mark Z. Danielewski
The Universe John Gribbin
The Zombie Survival Guide Max Brooks
Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Mark Haddon
Curious Pursuits Margaret Atwood
Speak, Memory Vladimir Nabokov
We Have Always Lived in the Castle Shirley Jackson
Winnie-the-Pooh A. A. Milne
The Night Watch Sergei Lukyanenko
The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing Richard Dawkins
Unknown Quantity John Derbyshire
A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens
The Yellow Wallpaper, and Selected Writings Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Day Watch Sergei Lukyanenko
The Twilight Watch Sergei Lukyanenko
The Last Watch Sergei Lukyanenko
Lord of the Flies William Golding

So I guess I only need 46 next year to maintain my average.
Reviews for a significant number of those can be found on the Facebook (or here, which is the same place). I’d use LibraryThing, but you need a paid account to have more than two hundred books on it, and I don’t trust them enough to give them credit card information.
If someone wants to send me money for it, though, you know my Paypal address.

Highlights:
Best fiction: probably Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, though Margaret Atwood is a good writer.
Worst fiction: Rand, obviously. CS Lewis is a close second. Even Neal Stephenson isn’t that shit.
Best non-fiction: Nothing earth-shattering this year. I guess John Allen Paulos’s A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper was pretty good.
Worst non-fiction: Mary Midgley’s Myths We Live By. I’m not sure it even deserves to be called non-fiction. Runner-up goes to Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man.

My dad died.

Edit: Obituary in all major newspappers in Vlaams-Brabant today. And also in Het Belang van Limburg.

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(Spoilers.)

And then he fell down some stairs. He was at a hospital in Brussels when it happened (psychiatric hospital, strictly, but close enough), replacing smoke detectors (he’s a fire safety person), so they reached him pretty quickly. That was yesterday. He’s currently at said hospital, under induced hypothermia (and stable), until later today.

He’d been having heart problems for a while, and after his boss had to drive him back home after he collapsed on a company trip recently, he had a stent inserted into his heart and was on a ton of medication, but obviously he still smokes and he has very irregular sleeping patterns.
I don’t know what his prognosis is, but in general these things don’t tend to go well (though the fact that he survived this far means he’s already doing better than most people).

This left his car unattended in Elsene overnight, though, so obviously someone felt the need to smash the back passenger window. So right now, aforementioned boss is driving my mom and my sister to Brussels in her PT Cruiser to retrieve my dad’s personal possessions and the car, and I’m watching the dogs. Tonight, they’re taking the train back to visit him, because visiting hours are weird and at least he’d probably be awake then.
My grandfather, who’s a bit high-maintenance at the moment for various reasons, is being looked after by my aunt and uncle, who came over from Limburg for moral support.

Last night was also the hottest night in six years, and the whole week has been hot enough that I haven’t really slept at all, so fun times.
More on the story as it develops. I’d put this on Facebook, because that’s where everyone who might care about this is, but my mom’s there too, and she doesn’t need to see this again. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t read my blog.

Update: He was still asleep when they visited yesterday, though they’d stopped the hypothermia treatment. Now they’re beginning to reduce the medication used to keep him unconscious. No real news otherwise, though the prognosis is cautiously good. It’s now Friday morning, and it happened Wednesday afternoon.
My grandfather, who’s in the hospital for being old (nothing life-threatening), will be able to move straight from the hospital to the home where my grandmother is also staying, so that’s nice.

Too many curious people are calling. I’ve answered more phones today than in the rest of my life combined.

Update: Apparently after they cut off the medicine used to keep him asleep yesterday, he got “agitated” and they put him back on it. Now they’ve cut it again, and he should be waking up “within days or weeks”. Hospital drugs don’t fuck around.

Update: Saturday now. He’s still not awake. My uncle (who’s a radiologist) is on his way from Andorra, and an MRI has been scheduled for Monday.

Update: Sunday. My uncle arrived, and already talked to the hospital’s doctor over the phone and is optimistic. My other uncle and my mom are picking him up and driving him to the hospital itself. Apparently they’re going to try to get my dad moved to Gasthuisberg, in Leuven. His doctor there (the one who placed the stent) said the stent probably collapsed (“sheer bad luck”), but he’s in Sicily at the moment, so he can’t be sure.
Haskell is humping my aunt’s leg.

Update: They’re back. He’s breathing on his own and everything, and he reacted to my mom’s voice (but not my uncle’s), so my uncle is making her visit him every day from now on. The stent is fine, it was probably an infarction, and the move to Gasthuisberg isn’t happening for the moment. And apparently it takes five to seven days on average for a person to wake up, so when the nurse said “yes” when my mom asked if it was a bad sign that he wasn’t awake yet, she was wrong. Probably a language issue.
Basically everyone’s optimistic.

Update, Friday Aug 28: I went to visit him for the first time today, and he seems to be doing well. He’s been “awake” since Wednesday, and he was really responsive today. He seemed to recognise us, and when my mom asked him to squeeze my hand when I was holding his he did. He’s still very drugged up, but I think that if it wasn’t for the feeding tube they cut his throat for, he would have been able to at least say our names, if not hold up his end of the conversation.
Brussels is a filthy, filthy town.

Update, Monday Aug 31: He’s being moved to Leuven tomorrow.

I’ve never had much use for source control, but after that one thread broke /prog/scrape I realised it might be useful to have somewhere centralised to put the source code and recent diffs, instead of just having a possibly-up-to-date file hidden here somewhere and having people download that whenever their shit breaks without really knowing if I fixed it yet.
Github was an obvious choice, not least because bandwagons are awesome, but then I lost interest and forgot about it until now.

Incidentally, when you create a new repository on Github, it automatically generates a URL for you to push to, of the form git@github.com:​username/​projectname.git. The project name can’t have any characters outside [a-zA-Z0-9-], though, so when it does they’re replaced with dashes.
Whoever wrote that piece of code, though, forgot that project names apparently also can’t start with a dash, so when you try to push to it, it just gives you an unhelpful error message:

Invalid repository url. Make sure you include the .git, e.g. git@github.com:defunkt/ambition.git

And then it breaks the connection, which is particularly nice when your first experience with git involves pushing a project named -prog-scrape.
Anyway, easy enough to fix. I do like that it uses ssh, so I don’t have to type my password every time. I’ll probably be creating additional repos for my many, many other projects that people find useful.

tl;dr: http://github.com/Cairnarvon/progscrape/tree/master

We seem to be starting a collection.

gnuplot is nice when you’re trying to do something it was designed to do, but kind of painful when you aren’t. Anyway, I made some graphs out of visitor data collected since July last year (all of this is just my blog, not rotahall.org as a whole).
The X axis is always time, with the far left being July 2008 and the far right being March 2009 as of today. The Y axis is the percentage of people using a given thing, so that the whole length adds up to 100%. The white area is always unknown and/or others.

The first is the operating systems used.
The white is “unknown”. In reality it’s mostly phone browsers and spiders, but fuck it, I want an ethernet-enabled typewriter. Red is all of the BSDs combined. There seems to be exactly one person using FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.
The number of Windows users is higher than expected. I blame idiots googling for pictures of axolotls.

The second is the distribution of Windows versions within the Windows users group. I expected more people to use XP than Vista, but it’s nice to see Vista isn’t even growing much anymore. There are a few people still using Windows 98 (that’s the red outline right above 2000) and 95. I’m pretty sure the one guy using Windows 3.1 is spoofing it, though.
I didn’t make one of these for the Linux users, because most of them end up being “other distro”. There are suprisingly few Ubanto users, though.

Next is browsers. I’m not sure what “Mozilla” is in this context, and I really don’t know what Netscape is doing there. Terras thinks people from 1996 are reading my blog, so: hi! Sell your stock in 2000, and don’t vote for Bush!

Finally, IE versions used by the IE users. This is abysmal. I’ve stopped showing content to IEs older than 7, so with luck they’ll go away. Again, though, I blame random googlers, not regular readers.
The bit of blue at the bottom is IE 8. I’m surprised how early they started coming, since the beta was only released earlier this month. Spoofed user agents, probably.

Anyway, just in case anyone’s interested. Making these was fun, but too much effort to turn it into a regular thing.

My keyboard is broken. It’s hard to reform þe ſpelling of þe Eŋliʃ laŋguage wiþout a workiŋ Alt Gr kī.

(It’s even harder to write code in a C-like language, because AZERTY is retarded.)

So I didn’t quite reach my goal of finishing fifty books this year like I did last year (or my personal record of 200, in 2004). I blame the dearth of good books I haven’t read yet in the various bookstores I frequent, and the fact that I started taking my laptop to school instead of books, now that the wireless internets finally work throughout the building.
I still finished sixteen:

• Irreligion John Allen Paulos
• Math Hysteria Ian Stewart
• Introduction to Cryptography and Network Security Behrouz A. Forouzan
• Barking Tom Holt
• The Goldilocks Enigma Paul Davies
• I Am Legend Richard Matheson
• God Is Not Great Christopher Hitchens
• Making Money Terry Pratchett
• Animal Farm George Orwell
• God Explained in a Taxi Ride Paul Arden
• Jippus et Jannica Annie M.G. Schmidt
• The Red Queen Matt Ridley
• Flatland Edwin Abbott Abbott
• Collapse Jared Diamond
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick
• Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities Ian Stewart

Most of those were either relatively unremarkable or utter crap. And no, Snow Crash isn’t on that list, because it was too shit to finish.

I gets presents! All of them came from ThinkGeek, because apparently nobody else ships to Belgium in less than three months.
I got an Einstein action figure, Tetris magnets (weakest magnets I’ve ever seen, though they’ll hold up a single piece of paper adequately), an RFID-blocking wallet thing, two of these (brain cell (which isn’t technically a microbe) and sleeping sickness), and these, which look really good on my copy of Origin but smell like death.

I was also supposed to get Real World Haskell, but apparently Barnes & Noble sucks and it hasn’t arrived “yet”. This only goes to confirm my suspicion that Haskell isn’t a real programming language, but rather a very elaborate running joke. You nearly had me with GHC, guys.

Anyway, I updated progscrape to address two nitpicking complaints and one marginally more serious one (though that post is mine), as well as fix the fact that it didn’t extract e-mails at all (despite claiming to).
The thread-parsing code could still do with a desucking, but I’m not going to do it.

The new code is here (diff), and since running that on your old database will cause all kinds of interesting errors, a new database is here (15.0 MB, 59.9 MB uncompressed). I could have written a script to just siphon data from the old database into the new one, but instead I rebuilt it from scratch so I could time how long it took:

real	123m19.681s
user	4m45.306s
sys	0m22.145s

That’s for 6,826 threads and 173,390 posts.

The main advantage is that it’s now possible to do things like

select * from posts where thread = 1228980536 and id = 50;

which used to require

select * from posts where thrid = 1228980536 order by time limit 1 offset 49;

which is considerably less secksy.

Ceterum censeo Rasmus Lerdorf is to be beaten to death with a hardcover copy of SICP.

But at least it’s over now. Exams start January 8th, Dynamic Websites project is due December 31st. I’ve done all my Christmas shopping, and the first family Christmas party isn’t until some time around New Year. I’m just not going to leave my bed for a week, I think.

In unrelated news, apparently the people recommending Snow Crash were trolling.
That may be too generous an assumption, but the alternative (that someone would actually like this book) is a bit too hard to believe. It reads like Jargon File fan fiction co-authored by Cory Doctorow and Shii.

The protagonist is a weeaboo half-Asian nigra Hacker™ (the last one, naturally) who wears a black leather kimono and carries around two Japanese Nipponese swords, being the best swordsman in Second Life the Metaverse (he doesn’t get credit for “predicting” Second Life; this was written after the invention of the Internet and right in the middle of the first 3D gaming hype). His sidekick is that classic cyberpunk archetype, the 15-year-old technoslut who takes off her clothes in her very first character development scene. The storyline is basically masturbatory techomysticism catering to 15-year-old wannabe Hackers™.
It’s one of those books where the author tries to disguise the fact that he has the vocabulary of a third-grader by making up half the words, and where “deliberate” shit writing is supposed to mean that he has a self-deprecating sense of humor. I’m sure the over-the-top stupidity is just parody, or something.

I really want to like cyberpunk. The concept is great in theory, and it tends to make for pretty visuals. If this and William Gibson are the best it can do, though, maybe it’s time for the genre to die.

As you may remember, my grandfather died a few months ago, and one of the many, many things we inherited was a vast collection of pictures spanning well over a century (the oldest ones are 130 years old). I promised I’d scan some of them and post them, but that never happened, mostly because my uncles made off with them.
They’re back now, though, and I’ve scanned a few of the ones that weren’t glued down. That doesn’t, unfortunately, include the very oldest ones, but it still goes back quite a way.

Click pictures for bigger, though some bigger ones are missing because I fucked up while resizing. I’ll fix it later tomorrow eventually.
I’ve resized and cropped, but made no effort to fix the colors. This is the state these pictures are in.

One of the older ones to start off. Presumably these people are related to me.
I think the guy with the beard on the left is Baron de Buisseret, my grandmother’s grandfather. I’m not sure what his first name is, but he had a bunch of kids, including a daughter named Marie-Louise, who married some guy named Stouffs and gave birth to my grandmother. So unfortunately, no noble title for me.¹

Read the rest of this entry »

950 € for something barely bite-sized. Apparently purebreds are expensive.

But yes, we finally went out and bought a new dog. It’s a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, not a cocker, but because it’s purebred and the names of this litter have to start with H, it will still be officially registered as being called Haskell.
Though my mom intends to call him Baziel, apparently.

Born August 10th, so we won’t actually be getting him until mid-October.

                                 ,
                             ____|____
                          .-`         `.
                       .-`              `.
                    .-`                 .`
    '-._         .-`             _______`
        `.__     `-_________---`` ,-.`-,         AVEZ-VOUS LU
            `''-------'          ( p )  `._       VOTRE SIPI
                                  `-'      \     AUJOURD'HUI?
                                     `\   ,-\
                                  .    ```  \
                                   \---..,--'
       ................._           --...--,
                         `-.._         _.-'
                              `'-----''

I’ve probably been complaining about how ridiculous it is that I even have a French exam too much lately, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

I’ve also been posting too much about programming lately, but most of the sciencey things I’ve been dealing with lately have been about the evolution of sex and sexual selection, and too much of that requires too much background, or doesn’t have straightforward answers that can be summed up in two or three sentences, so a blog isn’t a terribly good medium for discussing it.
I’ll see if I can think of something interesting, though, but it’ll have to wait until after tomorrow (French is my last exam) either way.

Also, today is an anniversary, but it’d surprise me if anyone remembered which one.

You wouldn’t believe how glad I am never to have to touch COBOL ever again.
To give you some idea of the cancerousness of the language, this is part of what I wrote on my exam today, as pieced together from my notes:

Read the rest of this entry »

I know programmers can expect to maintain at least one cancerously designed codebase in their careers (especially Java programmers), but it seems to me a class trying to get across the principles of black-box abstraction and encapsulation is a relatively horrible place to prepare people for that.
I guess I could see the point if it was used to discuss exactly what was wrong with it and how to avoid making those kinds of empty-headed mistakes, but apparently the teacher (and I use that word in the broadest possible sense) is under the impression it’s actually good code.
In other words: my Java exam was painful.

Also, people who feel threatened by students knowing a fuck of a lot more about their chosen field than they do shouldn’t ask broad theory questions on their exams.
Though those were really the only questions that weren’t a total pain to answer. Even though one of them was about design patterns.

(The fact that he insists on “syntactically correct” UML diagrams without apparently having a clue what they are didn’t help.)

Alternative title: democracy is wasted on the ignorant.

Today I learned that if you don’t really like a candidate, you have no choice but to endorse his opponent, even if his political views are diametrically opposed to yours. Even if he’s a hypocritical bigot with anger management issues. Even if he would take away the rights your ancestors fought and died for. Even if he would kill your family and friends given half a chance. Even if he would invade Poland.
If you don’t really like the other guy (regardless, of course, of that guy’s political positions), you have to endorse him.

I also learned that the US is the most powerful and influential country in the world, whose policies, both foreign and domestic, impact the lives of billions of people, but its presidential elections don’t concern people who don’t live within its borders.
If you’re wondering why even many people who haven’t spent most of their life living under the rule of tyrants instated by the US or being terrorised by American or American-funded occupiers don’t much like the US, I think you might find one or two hints here.

(Speaking of which, I paid our hosting bill today, which, because our server is in Michigan, was in dollars. After conversion, it came to 75 €. Last year, it was 88 €. While that’s a nice side-effect of the comical incompetence of the self-proclaimed “fiscal conservatives” when it comes to running an economy, US recessions tend to cross the ocean as well, which isn’t good for my investments.
While the US is working very hard to dismantle its influence on the global stage, everything that goes on there still quite directly affects me, and given the circumstances much of it affects me more directly than it does many American citizens. So quit telling me US politics are none of my business just because you don’t know enough about them to defend your own ill-considered positions, hypothetical Republican/Libertarian reader.)

Last week my room was repainted (which involved taking down about a million pictures, filling four times as many thumbtack holes, and getting rid of the wallpaper), which is nice. Because it had to be done before the furniture we inherited from my grandfather arrived, it’s kind of rushed, but overall it’s much cleaner. One side of the room is light grey (like the ceiling), and the other is “taupe” (#50404D, actually purple taupe).
It also covered the fungus problem quite neatly (which is one of the reasons we painted rather than wallpapering again; because of the fungus my ceiling had to be repainted about twice a year so far, but you can’t replace wallpaper that easily), and apparently the cause of it has finally been established (a clogged drainpipe causing rainwater to drain into my walls), and it’s being fixed in September.

Then the aforementioned furniture arrived, of which I got some.¹ I should really take another picture of that second one; bright flash doesn’t do it justice, and everything looks tacky if you fill it with DVDs.²
Both of those are considerably older than I am and easily the most expensive things I own, so I question the wisdom of putting them here before fixing the drainpipe, but at least now I can get rid of that hellish chair without feeling guilty.
There’s also tens of thousands of monies worth of new furniture downstairs, which looks incredibly out of place. We finally got to the point where nearly all of our furniture matched and was kind of modernish, and now we have tons of antiques cocking things up again. Maybe it’ll be better once the rest of the art actually gets here.

All of this has meant I haven’t been able to get any real work done, but at least things should quiet down now. My sister is in France right now, so it’s quiet enough to get some rest now. I hope to be rested by the time everyone leaves for Malta in August, anyway. Pity the neighbors persist in their existence.

Yesterday I realised I pay our esteemed host $23.40 a year for AWStats, but it’s only configured for the www. subdomain, so I went ahead and wrote a config file and set up a cron job to get it to work for my own subdomain. Manually, because cPanel is still a piece of shit.
So is AWStats, for the most part, but I wanted it because unlike Webalizer, it keeps track of OSes, and it has prettier graphs.

Preliminary results:

Of the 31.2% of my readers that use Linux, 74% use Debian or Ubuntu, with the remaining 26% using “GNU Linux (Unknown or unspecified distribution)”.
All of the Mac OS users use Mac OS X, unsurprisingly, but it doesn’t specify specific versions.
53.9% Windows users is disappointing, but at least XP users still outnumber Vista users about three to one. And one guy is still using Windows 98.
I desperately want to believe the 9.8% people using “Unknown” are on Plan 9, but looking at the user agent strings, most of them seem to be people on mobile phones and PSPs, and a handful of bots not properly recognised as such.³
This is only about a day’s worth of logs, though, so I’m sure it’ll change.

(The BSD dude is on FreeBSD, by the way.)

In completely unrelated news, I redid the blogroll in the sidebar, and I’m looking for opinions. →
If you can’t see it, you’ll have to go to the main page, because it’s invisible for individual post pages.
With the increasing tendency towards text-heavy posts I figured some more pictures would be nice. It did mean cutting fourteen links, but most of those were either dead (either in the actually-gone sense or the not-updating-anymore sense, though the latter is still true for most of the ones that survived) or mainstream enough that they don’t need me linking to them. If you were one of them and want to be linked again, post moar and send me high-contrast pictures of yourself.

Anyway, /prog/ is back, so fuck this blogging thing.

¹ More pictures. I enjoy writing desks even though they’re carrion feeders.

² I’m getting a separate DVD rack, I think. Since that closet replaces one closet and one set of shelves, I have some room for more furniture anyway.

³ As far as browsers go, Firefox is unsurprisingly the most popular, with exactly 60% of my visitors using it. 25.4% use IE, despite the helpful advice these people get at the top of the page. 55.9% of IE users use IE7, so I guess that’s alright. This does, however, mean that 11% of you are using both Windows and IE6, which is very, very sad.

I got my grades yesterday, so now the year is finally officially over as well. Due to MASSIVE INCOMPETENCE I hadn’t received my grades for last semester yet, so I just found out those as well.
All of it is roughly as expected, with a few exceptions.

Due to shuffling with classes at first and regular indifference later on, I never ended up going to Taalbeheersing (“language control”; basically Dutch grammar and spelling), and 6 out of the 20 points were supposed to be from tests during the semester. I didn’t expect to pass, but I went to the exam anyway because I had nothing better to do.
My final grade was 13/20.

I knew my Technieken voor Datamodelering (Techniques for Data Modelling; SQL plus some theory about ERMs) grade would be high, since I’m reasonably good at SQL (or, compared to most other people in my class, absurdly good) and I actually put some effort into the assignment thing, but my final grade was 19/20, which is probably the highest grade I’ve gotten on anything since 6th grade.
This was also a first-year class (though it was called Systeemanalyse (Systems Analysis) last year, and had a lot more irrelevant wank and no SQL), so it’s particularly funny.

Then there was Netwerken, which was last semester. I went to all the classes and the labs (and even handed in most of my lab reports), and the exam went great, and much of this stuff is things I really enjoy doing (this was also the class with the cryptography things), so I expected to get maybe 16/20, if not more. Turns out I got 11/20.
It’s more than enough to pass and it’s not like I’m shooting for a magna cum laude or anything, but it’s still absurdly and incomprehensibly low.

I didn’t pass my COBOL class. That’s not unexpected (or unintentional), I just thought it bore mentioning.

Interestingly, though, I also didn’t pass my Java class last semester. I got 6/20.
This semester, despite not putting in more effort or actually being any better at Java, I got 15/20, which is the top of my class.
They’re different teachers, obviously, and the one I had this semester was much better, both as a teacher and as a dude to have a conversation with, but it’s still pretty entertaining.

I don’t mind taking another exam to make up for it; it’s trivial to do, and before the exam last semester started he told us the make-up one in early September would include actually writing code on a computer before-hand as opposed to just writing it on paper using his brain-damaged wrapper classes he wrote around part of AWT and Swing because he doesn’t understand how they actually work¹.
So I had a look at those questions, since they’ve been online since December, and honestly, they just remind me of why I hated that class. For example (translated from Dutch):

A person has a name, an address (street, number, city) and a phone number. Write a class Agenda that allows you to quickly find the address of a person given their name or phone number. There are thousands of people. In your solution you obviously won’t use arrays, Vectors, or ArrayLists.

Now, we obviously aren’t expected to write our own data structure (that would be too educational much like a real college advanced), and we also can’t use a database, so basically this exercise comes down to guessing which class from the Java standard library he has in mind and then writing ten lines of code using it.
Since this is Java and this guy embodies the clueless enterprise stereotype (IIRC the only languages he sort of knows are Java and C#, and he sucks at Java), there isn’t even a real way to guess what he considers to be a reasonable use of resources (specifically, memory) or time (is five seconds long? I’d say obviously yes, but you never know).

I’m guessing he’s expecting two TreeMaps with different Comparators, but there’s no way to be sure, and it sure as fuck isn’t something I (or anyone else) would consider to be a reasonable solution to this problem.

(To compare, the guy we had this semester gave us some general principles to use every week and let us make up our own problem entirely, on the condition that our solution was a good one for it. This one just makes up crap toy problems and ham-fistedly tries to force library classes and “design patterns” where they don’t belong. And naturally, he requires UML diagrams (syntactically correct, though AFAICT he uses his own private little dialect which isn’t documented anywhere) for everything.)

Tim Minchin interlude.

And now for something completely different.

Wooh vacation.
My parents are going to my grandfather’s sea-side apartment one last time before my uncle buys it to simplify the inheritance (estimated value 525,000 € for just that one apartment, which I’d guess is about twice as much as he originally intended to pay; he already got a ridiculously good deal on the house in Tienen, though), and I think they’re taking my sister with them, so I should have a week or two of peace and quiet (and pantslessness) at least.

My mom also wants to buy a dog before one of us goes out to buy a cat, which should be interesting. I voted for a cocker spaniel (English or American, either one; it’s interesting how much their differences resemble the differences between European and American badgers, if you squint and are drunk), my dad wants a labrador (Spike was half-labrador), and my mom wants a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. Even if it doesn’t end up being a cocker spaniel, I’ll still make an effort to have it named Haskell, though.
It’ll probably be another month before we get it either way. I’d promise pictures, but I keep promising pictures of things and then not delivering. I apologise.

¹ There are a lot of legitimate criticisms of AWT and Swing, and I’ve yelled most of them at this semester’s teacher at one point or another, but “it’s too hard for students in their third semester of Java to understand” isn’t one of them.