Recent blog entries for Wazm

It's been two years since I've posted.

I have a lovely job in South Florida doing crazy things with firewalls and security technology. It's not exactly computer visualization, or compiler development, but it is fun.

Well, I'm a journeyer now. Not sure how that happened. Most of my diary posts have gone over to livejournal.

It's two semesters later, and now I am doing an independent project with a professor involving distributed processing with SOAP and XML-RPC.

Current projects: Othello with a strategic heuristic, and possibly a tcp-ip reimplementation of spellcast.

My mistake, the imaginary computer is actually 24-bit with 8 registers. ICK. I have the fortunate pleasure of being spoiled by MIPS R3000 assembly. Everything else seems a bit icky, especially an imaginary "academic" CISC computer.

I learned Java last week.

Currently reading The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System.

In the midsts of writing a client/server "whiteboard" program that uses SDL. Have the client/server part working so far. Still learning the SDL part.

Started classes yesterday. One class, Introduction to System Software, uses an 8-bit imaginary computer. The emulator was written by Leland L. Beck. Sadly, it's in Pascal. Ick.

The emulator for this imaginary computer is called SIC. (Amusing pun..) Frankly, I don't like using the University system when a project is due, and it's far too slow during these instances. A search for SIC yielded a rewrite of it in C, along with what appears to be a fairly nice X interface.

So I attempt to build it, and it dies. Apparantly it's using a good number of proprietary Sun libraries, produced by a program called devGuide. Another search yields some dated libraries that *might* work with Linux, and *could* work with FreeBSD, but sadly I'll probably have to port it myself.

There's something about computer scientists and icky code.

system(strcat(remove, foo));

remove is a global character array, the initial compile failed because it conflicted with an external function in stdio.h. Let's not talk about why strcat() and system() are dumb to use either. (Further note, it's mildly humorous this program is setuid'd root on the University system.)

I remember the message nets that BBSs once had. Dreamnet, WWIVnet, Fidonet. Through the years 1993-1995, I posted thousands of messages to such networks. I miss them. I could never really get into USENET however.

Recently, I've ran into interesting webboard sites. MrBill's site is a prime example. The software that it's operating it is free, and is powered by PHP. A simple premise--what if one could link webboards together. Implementation wise, this could probably be accomplished through a simple client/server architecture, or even email. (Which is how the nets of yester-yore were handled.)

I have always found mailing-lists cumbersome. Without a good procmail setup and an intelligent mail reader, it's very one dimensional, and hard to keep up with. A webboard net offers the same functionality in a two dimensional form.

I'm also starting to truely appreciate Zsh.

Ruby is neat language.

Grr, tap-to-click on this touchpad has to go...

Eagerly anticipating this next semester--filled with actual courses--computer communication, and system software.

Currently considering writing an IRC interface to a MySQL database, as having a stable calc-like bot seems to be a major problem for a channel that I currently frequent. I'm also the proud owner of a brand new Sony VAIO, and there appears to be a test driver in FreeBSD 5.0-current that needs work.