Older blog entries for fuzzynerd (starting at number 11)

I am now employed full-time for Project Links. The scary thing is, I ended up with my former-boss's job. I am now the Technical Manager. After spending over two years on the project, I feel that we're finally getting to the point where we are really making progress.

When I started working here, the site was over 30,000 files, and was completely unmanageable. These days, we're down to about 12,000, and everything is fairly manageable. We're publishing some really fancy XHTML+MathML documents. They're a work of art.

We're also playing with DSpace. The plan is to run a DSpace server as an "RPI Publication Database". I will end up in charge of running that server, too. Fun-fun!

I just started the "Mimsy Image Management System" project. I will be collaborating with several RPI students, and one RPI professor, on trying to get this code into a reasonable state by the end of the semester. It's going to be a fun ride.

I've been using FreeBSDToGo a lot, lately--Several professors want to use it in class. I have the plans for a major release in my head...I just need to find the time to follow through on the computer. :)

ntftp will be on the back-burner, until next semester, I think....but I haven't forgotten about that, either. I absolutely detest starting projects without finishing them.

20 Mar 2002 (updated 11 Sep 2002 at 14:35 UTC) »

I'm tired of my computer-graphics-oriented friends telling me how much better Photoshop is than The Gimp. I'm going to try to do something about it. A friend of mine and I want to work on some improvements to The Gimp, including interface enhancements and feature additions. The plan is to do this as a summer "Undergraduate Research Project" at RPI. We will be making a proposal to a professor, in about an hour. If it goes through, we could actually get paid for working on free software! Wish us luck!

Update: The project was approved! We'll be getting course credit, instead of money, which seems fair enough. Not only will we be working on making changes to The Gimp, we'll also be demonstrating the effectiveness of these changes, from an HCI perspective. Professor Danchak seems pretty cool, too.

Update: This particular project was put on the back-burner, due to some more interesting projects that have surfaced. Only so many hours in the day. :(

7 Mar 2002 (updated 7 Mar 2002 at 04:53 UTC) »
FreeBSD To GO

I'm creating a piece of software that greatly simplifies the process of creating bootable FreeBSD CDROMs. This is an extension of some work I did last semester for the math department. This time I'm getting independent study credit, from the Computer Science department. The goal is to have a generalized system of Makefiles that, when handed a special data file, will generate a customized bootable CD. Progress is good, thus far. I have a magic datafile that creates a bootable webserver. Check out FreeBSD To Go!

Multicast TFTP

I've started a sourceforge project, called nTFTP. The code I've already written will appear shortly, and will probably be rewritten in C++ for fun. The code will be released under the GPL. Check out nTFTP!

Ponderous thoughts:

I'm debating about trying to achieve the Advogato certification of Journeyer. I'm spending way too much time working on Free Software(TM).

It's about 2 in the morning, on a random day of my winter break. I haven't been sleeping much. Too many cool ideas I want to work on. I'm tired, distracted, and busy--I'm not going to proofread this entry as carefully as I should--but it's long past time to make an advogato entry.

My projects:

Multicast TFTP

I worked on an independent study, this semester, with Dave Hollinger, my Network Programming teacher from a few semesters ago. I decided to work on a multicast TFTP client and server, since I have a use for one in the Links Lab, on campus. Copying a 3gig hard drive image to multiple computers by unicast is slow, even at 100mb/s.

I did my best to follow the RFCs. I had some fun with it. I wrote 1300 lines of code. It even partially worked, when I was done with the semester. I still need to add more code for the multicast support, but lots of other stuff works just fine, such as unicast transfers, option negotiation, blocksize option support, retransmits, and inactivity timeouts.

I plan on releasing the code under a BSD license, when it's a bit cleaner. It's not quite ready, yet...and I keep having this horrible itch to rewrite it from scratch, perhaps in C++. :(

FreeBSD

I wrote a message to the FreeBSD -stable mailing list about a USB Compact Flash Card Reader that I purchased, recently. It's a Simpletech reader, using a DataFab chip, with a USB product ID of 0xb000. It "almost" works with FreeBSD's usb mass-storage device support (umass). It apparently "almost" works with Linux, too, according to the Linux DataFab driver writer's page.

I went through various efforts to get the device working, but to no avail. I was able to use this as a learning experience, however. I successfully added an entry to the FreeBSD's USB device table, and I believe I successfully added an entry to the SCSI 'quirks' table, too. I learned a whole bunch about SCSI, USB, and umass. It just wasn't enough to make my flash reader work, when I was done.

This is the first time that OS source code didn't scare the hell out of me, as soon as I looked at it. It's also the first time I've modified OS code, and the result actually compiled, and did something sensible. It's corny...but it feels like a big step for me.

Project Links:

XML is wonderful. I'm the system administrator for Project Links. I'm also a programmer for them. And I'm also the release/build engineer. I make it all work. My boss gives me a lot of freedom, and I make the most of it.

Project Links has a big website. The project has existed for many years, and has accumulated a fair amount of cruft. At the beginning of last summer, for example, the web site consisted of 30,000 files, huge amounts of hand-written HTML, filled with bad-links, inconsistencies, and missing files.

For the 18 months I've worked there, I have tried to clean things up. At this point, I think we even have all our soure code, again! (The previous sysadmin lost many files, due to an incorrect backup procedure). I played some nasty tricks with a java decompiler, to fix this. The site has been trimmed down to 20,000 files, just by deleting junk. The site will even fit on a CD-ROM! I moved the project to CVS, a while ago, so developers would stop overwriting eachother's changes. I setup a reliable backup solution, so we won't lose files any more.

My next goal--I want to move Links to XML. Currently, the "modules" are hand-written HTML, with lots of templates and javascript crap. I would like to use XML and XSL to write a language that can be used to express the content of the modules in a purely presentation-free format. Ideally, the people writing the educational content would be able to write in this new language directly, instead of asking HTML programmers to design pages fitting their requests. At site "build time", a set of templates would be applied to the module XML data, and the website would be formed.

There are numerous nifty side effects of this, such as the ability to use a non-HTML presentation language. We could write an XML->LaTeX translation, and print a Project Links teacher's guide, without ever changing the module data. If I succeed in the move to XML, the website will shrink down by many thousands of files. It might even be manageable again. I would love to be able to validate the module content, and use the XML data to do searches for missing files (broken links), as well as orphaned files.

The idea of having content separate from presentation is such a simple and obvious idea, that I wonder why it is so often ignored. With XML and XSL, we can let HTML become a purely presentation-based language. Perhaps it will stop sucking, then.

So, I'm stuck in Troy while Jon Chen and Louis Gerbard are at BSDCon in California. Not fair at all. From what I've heard, Jon now has commit access. Louis is still working on it. Jon's Cardbus code is coming along nicely, and Louis is working on SoftUpdates for Darwin. It's cool knowing these people personally...but I'm going to have to work my ass off if I expect to ever catch up with them.

Louis brought up the idea of having RPI-ACM's SIG-BSD try to start up a BSD equivalent to Linux's "kernel traffic" archive. He claims that LinuxCare is willing to sponsor it. Not a bad idea, but I don't know who would be willing to sit and read mailing lists for that amount of time. Garrett might.... Funny thing is, with the group of people we have, this sounds like far too simple a task.

Last ACM meeting, a graduate student gave a presentation on his thesis topic: performance analysis in parallel systems. The meeting went really well. Everyone seemed to be paying attention, despite the fact that the majority of the presentation was probably well beyond the comprehension of most of the audience. "Dr." Jeff Nesheiwat kicks ass.

I've been busy, as usual. Last night, I got together with some friends for a SIG-BSD meeting. I was impressed-- this group seems to have the right people in it to make some big accomplishments. We decided to start work on two short-term projects: The first is to help Jon Chen finish his Cardbus code for FreeBSD. The second is to put together a FreeBSD 'bootable business card', similar to the LinuxCare 'bootable business card'. I opted for the Cardbus code, since I've been looking for an excuse to do some system programming.

I ordered a few books. Any day now, I should receive "Unix Network Programming", volumes 1 and 2, "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment", and "Lex and Yacc". My bookshelf is already warped from the weight of my O'reilly collection. It's pretty funny.

Off to accomplish things!

One month ago, when I contacted CIS about getting unix on laptops at RPI, my goal was to have some version of unix available and functional for the freshman laptops on laptop-distribution-day. This goal was achieved Sunday, at the largest RPI-ACM event in recent history. We had great membership turnout, and we estimate that between 30 and 50 students came by for installs. We were not able to get an accurate count, due to the level of (controlled) chaos during the event. I was able to get rid of the FreeBSD T- shirts, and many of the CDs. Fliers were handed out, and I think people have an idea who the RPI-ACM is. Pictures from the install-fest can be found here on the RPI-ACM servers. I'm the guy in the black 'foo' shirt.

Only one person came by with a Thinkpad 600e. My customized install for this system failed miserably, but I have reason to believe that the problem was simply an isolated hardware-related incident. Most students were Freshmen, and brought their Thinkpad T20 models. We had a customized FreeBSD install on hand, thanks to Dave Cross, Jon Chen, and Louis Gerbarg. Jon and Dave finished the FreeBSD driver for the ethernet card in the T20, and put together a custom FreeBSD install, thus saving our event. Louis put together a server with two quad-ethernet cards to perform network installs for the T20s. Everything worked relatively well, in spite of the chaos.

Being the chairman of the RPI-ACM makes me feel like I'm becoming a manager and a politician. It makes my skin crawl. I want to be a programmer.... I don't want to leave the technical details to other people.... My biggest fear is that I'll do a good job of this, people will realize it, and I'll never actually get the hands-on work that I want. I hate to feel like all I can do is have other people do the technical work for me.... On the other hand, I really care about this club. I think I can make a positive impact as chairman, and there's no possible way that I can do all the work myself. I still cringe when people joke about me being good at this leadership thing, though....

I got a new Thinkpad T20 today. I wasn't supposed to get it for some time yet, but I managed to talk to the right people in CIS to arrange it. The justification for getting the machine early is that it will end up in the right hands to test the ethernet drivers for Linux and FreeBSD, and thus save CIS some trouble. I feel slimy for pulling favors like this, but I think it will help speed things up. I wonder how much of my motivation was the fact that I want the T20 to play with on my own.... I guess it really doesn't matter, as long as I do my best to make things happen.

Haven't slept much lately. Need to get back to some schoolwork, among other things.

I hate beaurocracy. I tried to make progress on the laptop today. This involved getting the original software reloaded on the laptop, so I could test installation methods. I really got the run-around. No one seems to know how to reimage this thing, since it's so new. The only person who appears to have the original image is in a meeting. Now I'm sitting in a computer lab, hoping for an e-mail. Oh, well. Maybe I'll still finish something of worth tonight.

I decided to stay at work for an extra four hours tonight. While no one was around I performed the hard drive upgrade to the Links Lab file server. My plan was to setup a new hard drive with the same partitions as the old one, and just dd the partitions from one drive to the other. This proved to be a little more difficult than it should have been.

Apparently 'df' does not report a partition's actual number of blocks. I created a partition based on the size of the old partition in blocks, according to df. The partition I was copying ended up being many blocks larger than the value reported by df. My guess is that this is how extra space gets reserved for the superuser. It makes sense now, but it didn't this afternoon. I ended up typing "dd if=/dev/ad0s1f of=/dev/null" just to get a block count.

When I finished this whole endeavor, and the IBM deskstar was purring like a kitten, I recounted my experience to -bsd on 'lily', an RPI-centric chat program. I was quickly told that "You should have used 'dump'", followed by "This is all in the handbook". I read about dump in the FreeBSD handbook and found it less than enlightening. I've pored over the 'dump' man page, too. The references to the 'Towers of Hanoi' algorithm seem to be completely unnecessary, but maybe that's just me. One of these days I'll try to make some additions to the handbook. It suffers from a few important omissions.

CIS contacted me about the laptop and the progress on a Linux driver. I told them that I'd check with Louis, who is currently attempting to shoehorn Jon's FreeBSD driver patches into Linux. If he succeeds, we have about one week to put together a distribution of software for the freshmen. If he fails, at least I can take a week off before school starts.

I asked CIS to setup a Redhat mirror, and some ftp space for me to upload my updates and custom packages. Hopefully it won't take the CIS beaurocracy more than a week to set this up.... We'll see.

<random> One of these days, if I ever find some spare time, I want to setup a telnet BBS. I miss being a sysop. I miss 'LORD' and 'Tradewars'. They just don't make games like that anymore...probably for good reason. :) I liked the 'community' that you could develop on a good BBS. Some of the forum sites do a fair job of creating virtual communities, but generally the number of people involved makes such sites impersonal, and inaccessible. I want a nice small system with a few hundred active users, at most. I wonder if anyone would use it, if I set it up? </random>

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