Ehsan Nourbakhsh’s Blog

Isn’t it annoying that you know no matter how you try, finally you are going to be a graduate from a 74^th ranking university in US? Not even in the first 50! Why did they announce it so proudly?

UPDATE: Well, it seems another ranking thinks better about UTD. It is again announced here. This method of ranking is more based on publication count and academic participation. Computer Sciences program of University of Texas at Dallas is ranked 3^rd in Texas and 29^th in the United States.

Moral of the story: measurement and ranking is never complete, and so not reliable. But since it gives you one single number to consider, it is easier to use. So, many people do rely on the rankings with a confidence much more than the way they should.

UPDATE2, six months later: Just a quick note: UTD has no school pride. The only type of sport it has is CHESS and DEBATE!! [a suggested fight song] There is no social life going on in the university housing. The bookstore does not even have enough stuff (like wallets) with UTD logo on them. We don’t have a football team, although even Rice with 5,000 students has one. You don’t see students in the campus, no one walks. Everyone is either in their car or in class or lab. The student union is small for the 14,000 students school has. So most people lunch out. The food courts all close very early, so at night or in weekends you *should* dine out. Without a car, life is not possible. The school is in the suburb, and is literary in the middle of nowhere. Compare to SMU which is in the middle of Dallas. UTD is not known in the DF/W area, you tell people you study in UT Dallas and they get surprised that UT has a branch in here. Isn’t all of these depressing?

In return for all this nerd and unkind atmosphere, I really expected the school to have a higher ranking. So such low ranking is really disappointing.

•  The UTD Mercury: Seeking a solution to the UTDoldrums

Just to quickly say: at this very moment FireFox 2.0.0.2 sucks!

It dies when a page has too many elements, like Wikipedia pages. Also, it does not like more than 1 or 2 YouTube videos in one page. It simply crashes, even in safe mode with no plug-in running. Sometimes it does not crash, but it sort of “stalls” while loading a tab, and you cannot click a link or change tabs with mouse. Honestly I am using Internet Explorer more and more each day. It works fine on all those pages and in same conditions.

Update: I did the following:

• un-installed Firefox
• removed any folder remaining from it
• restarted my laptop and
• then installed Firefox again

The first page I visited: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number and guess what? It crashed! It used to crash on the same page before too. Internet Explorer works fine in that page, and I am using IE for all my surfing now.

Update2: Pooya just directed me to the right IRC [ irc.mozilla.org #firefox], where we figured out what was the problem: a font! Yes, one font named Xerxes [see it here]  could not render CTRL+L character correctly. So, I removed the font and all the pain was gone. I posted it here as a comment to a bug report in 2006. Thanks Pooya!