Older blog entries for trage (starting at number 3)

29 Jan 2003 (updated 18 Aug 2006 at 18:11 UTC) »

Test, test, and always test your code!

28 Jan 2003 (updated 16 Nov 2007 at 15:46 UTC) »

There's a few projects that I would like to work on this week. I'd like to get an updated version of SeminarSite out before next month. A lot of people have made certain requests and I'd like to implement all of them and release the product. People can download the CVS version if they wish, I suppose.

Here at the School of Computer Science, we have a neat little system called the 'Depot'. The Depot comprises of various mounted drives on a multitude of servers and architectures. Each directory in the Depot is a symbolic link pointing to compilied binares on an unmounted disk. When a user requests this particular directory, the drive is automounted and the binaries for the specific architecture is retireved. The depot automatically mounts the appropriate software package in acordance to the architecture of the machine. This saves lots of time for the lazy system administrator. We don't have to install non-standard packages of software on every workstation and we can make updates from a single host.

The documentation for the depot system is in a state of disarray. I have been assigned to the task of sorting it out last year, but it has fallen downhill since then. I made a generic information file to be customized and inserted in each directory. A nightly script mounts each directory and retrieves the information and consolidates it into a single file. (I probably should use XML someday.) A couple PHP scripts interprets this data into easily navigatable web pages. I call it "DepotDoc".

Oh well, off to work I go!

24 Jan 2003 (updated 28 Jan 2003 at 15:20 UTC) »

No Hawaiian shirts today - it's the coldest day in Miami this year at thirty-seven (37) degrees. Because I'm from New England, I'm loving every minute of it while I watch my peers shiver.

One of my projects at work was to install and setup the Snort Intrusion Detection System. I wrote a whitepaper on it a few months ago. I also set up the amazing PHP project ACID to translate the information. My current project is to research and implement Bro into our network. Bro is a similar NIDS like Snort, but it's more powerful due to it's regular expression engine.

This is my first entry for Advogato. Recently, I finished a rather challenging data structures assignment which implemented circular doubly linked lists in Java. After a few hours, I've realized that the scope of my variables were incorrect, and everything worked.

My current open source projects listed below.

SeminarSite
SeminarSite is a packaged web site for seminar and/or training programs. It features an administration panel where users can add speakers, and create, schedule, and announce seminars.
FireSet
FireSet features a collection of tools to aid the network or security administrator in generating firewall rules for IPTables, IPChains, and Cisco IOS. It also includes support for ASCII text and HTML output for firewall explanations in English.
sJab
sJab is a Perl-based command-line Jabber instant message client. Currently, it can send messages to users and conferences. This script may be useful for system, network, and security administrators who wish to be instantly notified via Jabber of alerts from systems and security monitoring programs.

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!