This whole diary thing is getting addicting. A post
a day, on any topic I want, woohoo! ;-)
Life
Last night I had my first real taste of pain from the
martial arts (Tukong Moosul) class I'm taking here in
Austin. Got bruises on my hand and arm, and I got my
left leg crunched really good right under the knee. Hurts
to walk a bit, I think I won't be going to Tukong this
evening after work.
Code
Today at work I'm going to be investigating how to
incorporate Clyde Hoover's npasswd
into Ganymede. I need to
incorporate strong password quality
checking, password aging, and password history into
Ganymede for the lab's use. npasswd
is a C program that I'm going to have to interface into
Ganymede's Java code, which will be a bit of a pain and
will lead, I'm sure, to a significant delay whenever anyone
changes his password.
I would much rather work on things
that would be of general utility for Ganymede so as to
get 1.0 out the door for everyone's sake. Any work I
do to customize Ganymede for the lab's peculiar requirements
is work that doesn't get me closer to getting Ganymede
'finished'. Ganymede is already complex enough that I
wonder how I'm going to find the time to document it
all well enough that others can really jump in and
use/maintain it. We have another programmer coming on
board, though, one with a lot of Java experience, so
I imagine that I'll be able to make more rapid progress
soon.
On the positive side, there is a team in the laboratory
that is looking at adopting Ganymede as a configuration
management
system for a network of satelite monitoring stations. Every
new adopter of Ganymede helps test its robustness and
flexibility of design, so I'm quite excited about this.