Well, as you all know, I'm a Computer Science major, which invariably leads to the "Why are you here?" when I tell my fellow exchange students here at Sciences Po, a political science school in Paris.

I've been enjoying the life of a humanities major and wrote pages upon pages for class. However, I seem that having a technology relapse this weekend.

First, Firefox 4 was released and while I'm a bit late to try it, I have to say that I can see marked improvement in terms of user interface. To tell the truth, in the recent browser wars, I've almost written off Firefox. Chrome made a big splash, has been updating often, and has made significant inroads in terms of a userbase. Opera, my perennial favorite, is actually being mentioned in the reviews and comparisons, though it still irks me that many people misattribute many of the innovations that Opera has brought, like tabs and speed dial.

In fact, there was a time that I disliked the Mozilla Firefox interface enough to tell a Mozilla recruited that my browser of choice was Opera, not Firefox. Nonetheless, I'm glad to see that the design team has been more user-centric. Now, I'm sure it was a group effort, but a round of applause for Aza Raskin, ex-Head of User Experience at Mozilla. I've had the fortune to have talked with him briefly during the interview process, still read his blog, and have to say that I see a lot of his influence on the new changes, even in the small details. For instance, the "undo" buttons that appear when you remove an addon or the Mozilla Labs trials that made it in to the final release.

While I'm not ready to set Firefox to my default browser, I no longer feel uncomfortable with it open and I'll continue to play around with it.

Second, Project Euler. It's a collection of math problems that you solve with code. I signed up a year ago and been doing them off and on. I've brute forced a couple of the easy ones, knew some of the tricks for others having done math team, and I'm now a Level 2. It was however able to keep me up late into the night and I'm now out of problems that are reasonable to solve naively. I'll probably come back in a couple months and try for another level. (This badge thing is very motivating. I have a better understanding for people who get caught up in Farmville, WOW, or Medal of Honor.)

Lastly, I'm not sure how many of you played with Logo as a kid, but it's built into the Python standard library. It started as a way to teach kids programming and it actually had this big robotic turtle that would move and draw on command before becoming a computer program. I have fond memories with this. :D