Well, I'm waiting for a client to give the go-ahead to order a bunch of boxes for their in-office network... and in the meantime I'm reading up on stuff...

I wish that I was in university right now... I'm trying to pick up signalling (for networks and telecom and stuff) from some books, but I dont have the background to get all of it... One of the biggest questions that I have, is how do you fit more than one signal onto one wire - if you have more than one signal, how does the reciever sperate them out, since all the receiver sees is voltage going up and down. hmm.

Not much else going on.

Lately I've been looking at PAM, and I wish that unix programs would log error CODES not text. Writing stuff to parse out textual messages meant for human consumption is a pain in the ass. We need error codes, arguements, and THEN a textual message. Otherwise, PAM is cool. I had my box authenticating against a Windows 2000 domain controller at school just for fun, and I'm working on implementing more pain in the ass causing security policies with it :)

I was also looking at pptp. So far, most explanations havnt been too clear. My current understanding of it thus far, is that you make a tcp connection to a pptp server, and then encapsulate your packets in ppp, then gre, and then stick them into the tcp connection. For example, say you have a tcp segment, in an ip datagram, and want to send it out over the pptp tunnel; it'd look like this:

(ip (tcp (gre (ppp (ip (tcp (data)))))))

Correct me if I'm wrong, please. :)

On a more unrelated note... I was listening to the 'sunday night jazz show' which was on the local university radio station last week, and called in and won a cd, and was entered into a contest to win tickets to see Holly Cole in my home city, Stratford. And hey, I won! I don't think that I've ever won a contest before. And, infact, I won more than just tickets, I got a bunch of CDs of hers, and I get to meet her; and that's weird because I'm not really even a fan. hehe. I mean, I like her, but, not THAT much :) I'll probably just say hi, and that I don't have anything to say :)

Mazeone: The best way to build pages using templates, while still giving you a lot of flexability (that I've been able to come up with so far) is using an object oriented template.

for example...
class pageTemplate() {
function useTemplate($path)
This function loads a template

function registerKey($key, $value)
This function sets an array $array[$key] = $value

function renderPage()
This basically does an echo $this-returnPage();
exit;

function returnPage()
This function replaces all instances of each
key in the array with their respective values
and returns the composite

function renderError($errorCode)
Builds an error reporting page and prints the
$errorCode

So, it's pretty simple really. You can even use this to build menus from menu templates, and then plug that content into your page template.

The examples are in pseudo php btw. :) If you want further examples, you can email me (johnston@megaepic.com)

By the way, sorry for the non-indenting. I'm not sure how to tab stuff in on here. Ideas?

I wrote an article directed towards end users about network security - just a first draft so far. If anyone wants to read it, it's at http://www.megaepic.com:8086/~johnston/article.html. If anyone has suggestions/comments, feel free to email me at johnston@megaepic.com. Of course, I don't know where to publish such an article; anywhere where the target audience of my article and the site are the same would be good, but, where is such a place that would publish it? Oh well.

Tonite I'm rewriting some more of that exam program. Getting there. I get distracted a lot. I go thru phases of academic (reading), artistic (web design) and problem solving interests. In between, I get distracted lots, and progress is slow. Hopefully, I'll settle down soon :)

I have a leopard gecko. It's tank is beside me here... it really stares at people... especially my girlfriend - badass lizard. One night, as a joke, she put a cd case infront of the lizard so that it couldnt see her. A minute later she looked over, and the lizard was peering over the top of the case. It's also picky; it wont poop unless it's pooping area (it always poops in the same place) is free of old poop.

Oh, I also certified myself as apprentice, because I feel that I could learn a fair bit from discussions if I could participate in them, and this place seems like a place that I'll be spending time in more.

School again.

I'm playing with making a gtkrc theme. I'm wanting one like blueheart, but pixmap themes are too slow (refreshing). So, I'm writing a flat one. Too bad gtk doesnt do gradients in themes. Darker themes are easier on my eyes.

One thing that I discovered about windows 2000 over the past day, is that the mechanism that saves profiles to disk on logout does it irrispective of file permissions. You can set the files to immutable, but it'll still do it. I'd like to try it over a network connection. There's a program running as SUPER super user, that users pass data to. Silly. I wonder if you could use it to save/change other files on the disk? Really though, why didnt they just make it run as the user who is logged in? They're the only people that would need any write access. I tested this by setting all profile files to immutable (no write or modify) to all users, however, the system would still write it. Dumb.

Anyway, off for now.