Finals are almost here, and good god am I ready to get them over.

But things are going well overall.   I seem to have adequately convinced my professors that I’m not completely retarded/lazy.   I have an idea for a thesis topic that my advisor says is promising.   And I have a bit of a friend base / social life.   What more could I ask for?

Btw, I don’t think I’ve posted this yet.   I’m working for the HLT lab at UTD, under Dr. Moldovan.   This semester I am taking:

• CS 6364 – Artificial Intelligence
• CS 6320 – Natural Language Processing
• CS 6375 – Machine Learning

UPDATE: Finals are over, and I have a 4.0! (now onto the quals…)
UPDATE 2: Qualifiers are over now, but we don’t get results until after break…
UPDATE 3: I passed both my quals!

From a guy on /., of all places.

It’s not about communist hippies in Birkenstocks saying everything should be free.   Every web application I build needs a database, an application server and a web server.   On top of that it needs libraries that do a lot of things common to other projects.   It makes no sense for us to take on the burden of developing these from scratch.   It is in our best interest to collaborate with others to build stable, portable solutions that can be deployed en mass without exorbitant licensing fees.

– d3ik