libcoffee.net: Category University

Thesis code completed

zanglang@gmail.com (Jerry) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 03:44:22 +1000

... Or so I hope?! Squashed a ton of bugs, stabilized API being used haphazardly between the RrdTool and Simulation sinks, sort of prettified Weathermap a bit more. Now I’m just left with churning out the rest of the thesis and getting it onto the NICTA testbed…

aesir:~/Projects/meshmon$ svn commit
svn commit:
Sending        html/index.html
Adding         html/overlib.js
Sending        html/weathermap.html
Sending        icons/Safemesh1.png
Sending        src/aodv.py
Sending        src/config.py
Sending        src/gatherers/rrdsink.py
Sending        src/gatherers/simulatesink.py
Sending        src/meshmon.py
Sending        src/nodes.py
Sending        src/plugins/RrdTool.py
Sending        src/plugins/Simulation.py
Sending        src/rendering/rrd.py
Sending        src/rendering/weathermap.py
Sending        src/threads.py
Sending        src/topology.py
Sending        src/webserver.py
Adding         src/wifi.py
Sending        weathermap/Weathermap.class.php
Sending        weathermap/weathermap
Sending        weathermap.conf.template
Transmitting file data .....................
Committed revision 61.

Backlog September '07

zanglang@gmail.com (Jerry) — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 23:16:21 +1000

Long time no blog. :P

Just did my COMS4507 Advanced Security seminar today, titled “OpenID 2.0: A Platform for User-Centric Identity Management”, which can be downloaded here on Google Docs.

It was intended to be a critique of this paper, but in the end I’ve placed more focus on introducing OpenID in general and then shifting into a critical discussion on digital identity management issues on the Web… sometime between 1am and 7am while I was hacking away on the slides trying to get it done last minute. Yes, I know, bad habit. :P All in all, turned out decent. Went overtime by 11 minutes (Marius thought it was still okay), and I think I may have explained too little on the actual authentication process. Still needs work on untangling tongues while talking. Marius thought it was a 80-90% , for sure. Woot. :)

Spending much more time (than I should) on my Nokia N800 tablet, which I decided to finally splunk down the moolah for last month (A$660 exclusive of shipping, over eBay.com.au from Hong Kong), and which awesomeness cannot be simply defined by words alone. :) I really should have written a deep down and personal review of the tablet when I first got it, but my lack of blogging habits got to me first. Perhaps sometime, soon, soon. Anyway, the hackability of this slim little device is really promising. Maemo still has its rough edges, and unlike Ubuntu, still has a huge number of usages that are quite literally begging to be implemented… but the project really suffers from a lack of an active developer community like common Linux distributions. A sneak peak into the upcoming Intel Midinux just has me idea factories churnin’... When hasn’t anyone thought of implementing gestures on Maemo yet??!

Meanwhile, still trying to get a bit more of the Telepathy stack onto Maemo, and I’m hoping to perhaps work on a port of Empathy, Tapioca or Colligo. Turns out the Glib library ported fine with minimal changes, but still having problems cross-compiling telepathy-salut / Bonjour on Scratchbox. I should pop on #maemo and ask the experts about it sometime.

The 3 loves of my (current) life – My mom is going to be disappointed that this sample does not yet include a live human of the female gender. :P

Kexin is having his interview on Friday, and it turned out his interviewed would be no one else but Nigel Tao?! What an insanely small (open-source) world we live in! :P After exchanging much exclamation marks, we decided the best plan is just to focus on his enthusiasm on GNOME, and if possible, his very short one-day experience on Deskbar... Possible? The odds are rapidly growing. G’luck, anyway. :)

Tutoring is going well, and I’ve decided that actually being appointed for both courses which I’ve applied in the first place is quite definitely the best accidental choice I’ve made in my university years. Am currently thinking of continuing to tutor for another semester after my graduation, just so I can see the CSSE3005 guys pull through. May I dare wish for another Tutor Award again this time?

Anyway, mid-semester break coming up soon. Will be working on thesis full-time, with Advanced Security project on sidelines (‘wireless penetration testing toolkit’ on Maemo). Much work to be done. Sigh, the life of a soon-to-graduate honours student.

Three Things I Learned about Software in University

zanglang@gmail.com (Jerry) — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 00:56:00 +1000

Spotted this on Reddit (many insightful and funny comments I’d relate to), so I thought I’ll hop in and make up a list. :) Not officially graduated yet, and don’t have enough experience in work or hobby programming to make up a “While not in college” list, so here’s my take on just the three things I learned about software in university:

On programming: Code flows out better at the time period between 3am and 7am in the morning. Bugs are solved better at the time period between 8am and 12am in the morning (after a good nap and caffeine beverage).
On code quality: Time and effort spent notwithstanding, there is always A Bug in the code. There are no exceptions, period. (Or more commonly put, “Bugs are a fact of life.”)
On peers: As a twist on the old joke – there are 10 types of people in the IT faculty. Those who “get it”, and those who don’t. And never will, or simply do not care enough to do so. Way over-quoted, but really very bluntly mirrors the kind of people you meet.

Deadlines

zanglang@gmail.com (Jerry) — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 01:03:22 +1000

MSN nick last weekend: “Jerry – ye olde arts of procrastination”, mostly doing nada, some guilty thesis research.
Monday: “Jerry – Haunted by deadlines // coding”, pounded on keyboard for Distributed Systems Elvin programming assignment.
Tuesday: “Jerry – Haunted by deadlines // reading”, started flipping through Spatial Database notes and speed-reading through first few chapters of library books.
Wednesday: “Jerry – Haunted by deadlines // researching”, furiously skimming through book and lecture PDFs, writing on LyX.
Thursday: “Jerry – Haunted by deadlines // 3am sprint!”, 3am: just chat with Fieran for ~2 hours, paper due in 12 hours, type dammit type! 3.30am: Sod it, I’m going to sleep. 9am: Woke up, wolfed down sandwich, 200mg caffeine, finished up last question, submission, woot!
Friday: Commented code a bit, due date is delayed so less rush, woot!

On the other hand, still on the Todos-hovering-malevolently-around-the-corner list:

Web programming for thesis
Start preparing on thesis seminar
Clean up submission for Elvin code
J2EE code for next Wednesday’s tutoring session
Start C coding for Advanced Networking assignment
More experiments on sleep-hacking (More on this soon. :))
Start cleaning up and publishing the ol’ Tomboy proposal, and aiming for GNOME 2.20!

Also, just watched Death Note 26 and 27. Holy crap, this story arc is going to be on a completely different level isn’t it?! Decided to go to AniDB page and change my old vote from 9 (the “Pretty Awesome” vote) to 10 (the “Frickin’ love it!!11” vote).

P.S – Just rolled my own Drivel 2.0.3 to work around the lighttpd + Expect HTTP header bug. Tried upgrading to lighttpd 1.5 (took some time to figure out how Debian packaging works) and running for the past few weeks, but for some reason PHP+fastcgi doesn’t send the MIME types properly = Firefox refuses to load Drupal test site CSS = ugly, and no Drupal testing. Now everything should be hunky dory. :)