Sound Juicer "J'd Up To The Boom" 2.13.4 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Bug fixes:

• Rebuild the pipeline after every track to fix a crash in GStreamer
• Unlock the drive door before ejecting
• Add GTK category to the desktop file
• Update bacon-message-connection

Translators: Adam Weinberger (en_CA), Ales Nyakhaychyk (be), Ankit Patel (gu), Clytie Siddall (vi), Evandro Fernandes Giovanini (pt_BR), Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es), Funda Wang (zh_CN), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Ignacio Casal Quinteiro (gl), Ilkka Tuohela (fi), Jean-Michel Ardantz (fr), Kjartan Maraas (nb, no), Lasse Bang Mikkelsen (da), Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (th), Tino Meinen (nl). NP: Gorillaz, Gorillaz

College is not the launching pad for a job. It's the launching pad for the rest of your life. High school is a mini-jail with strict standards that everyone must live up to. College is when you get to make your own choices. This is the sentiment behind this article. I agree with it on principle, but not completely on content. Computer Science in the past 7 years has gone through an evil transition - almost all of the Colleges out there shifted to a Technical style curriculum because that was what was in demand. While TAing the introductory classes here at the U of M, the most common complaint was that they weren't learning things which will be useful in the future. The classes are taught in Scheme, for reasons that I completely agree with - the students would rather have them taught in Java, because that would be useful in the market when they leave college. What were they missing? The knowledge that programming concepts are what make good programmers, not language skills. Students want cookie cutter code which solves the problems that they are given. That is why people are lambasting the teaching of Java: people aren't learning hard thinking concepts. In my opinion, college is not supposed to teach you the skills you need for your job - instead, you are there to learn your specific learning style. This will allow you to learn anything you need for your job. Most jobs which exist in the Real World™ aren't looking for people from a specific major, they're looking for experience. I also share the views that you don't need to get perfect grades - the effort required to get an A over a B+ or a B is not worth it for the slight bump in your GPA, and you will have much more fun in college. Meeting friends in college is just as important as your actual classes. The Real World ™ calls this "networking". Choosing your major in order to get a job is also such a crap shoot otherwise - you're betting that in 4 years, the market will need the skills that you learn in a major.

This time tomorrow I'll be on a plane heading to Israel in a circuitous route for a much needed vacation in Israel. It appears that the weather in Israel had turned from sunny and hot into a real winter so that we won't feel too bad comparing the weather of Israel and Ireland. The Haaretz forecast says there will actually be rain, of which I had enough here. We will escape the empty Maynooth of Christmas for the split personality (Rehovot/Carmiel) of Hanukka with the families, for some much needed stuffing with home-made Sufganiyot and other not-necessarily-related-to-Hanukka foods. A union with a newly purchased Canon 350D is also much expected :-)
This will replace a Canon Elan7 film camera of which pictures that the local development shop manages to screw the image scanning and creates washed-out colours.